ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There were several early readers of this book who provided invaluable, though often daunting, criticisms and guidance. Chief among them was my wife, Evelyn Crovo-Hall, whose suggestions were crucial in correcting some early wrong turns. At every stage Les Standiford, my colleague and friend, gave sage and practical advice about the focus of this book, helping to rescue it from academic stuffiness. I must give special thanks to John Unsworth, dean and professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, who kindly posted his extensive website describing his bestseller class at the University of Virginia. This site proved to be an invaluable tool for my own teaching and research over the years. Chuck Elkins, professor emeritus at Florida International University, read an early draft of the manuscript and provided critical and incisive suggestions that greatly improved the final product. David Gonzalez, who wrote the plot summaries at the end of this book, was also a helpful sounding board as the book was taking shape. Without the inspired editing and excellent judgment of Millicent Bennett and Kate Medina, I would never have found the real book hiding inside the early drafts.
And I must thank that long-ago librarian who got me hooked on books and steered me to a larger, more interesting world than I would have known otherwise. Librarians like her exist today, as well as many valiant English teachers, who against great odds are still guiding readers, young and old, to books they would otherwise not discover—making countless lives richer in the process and instilling a lifelong passion for reading in generations to come.
TOASTING A FEW OF MY STUDENTS
At the time Barbara Parker entered one of my bestseller classes, she was writing romance paperback originals. After that semester, she changed direction and turned her attention to legal thrillers. Her novels, such as Suspicion of Deceit, eventually became New York Times bestsellers.
To my surprise, she kept attending seminars and classes that I was teaching in bestsellers. Though by then she was something of a star, her enthusiasm for the material was undiminished. For Barbara, there was always something to learn from these commercially successful novels. Discoveries that delighted her and fueled her own work for years.
Barbara Parker passed away in 2009, at the age of sixty-two. At the time of her death, she had published twelve mystery novels. One of her books was a finalist for the Edgar Award and was subsequently made into a CBS television movie of the week entitled Sisters and Other Strangers.
Dennis Lehane was writing literary short fiction when he arrived in graduate school, though his knowledge of popular culture, both films and commercial novels, ran deep. I remember arguing with him in the bestseller class about a novel we were studying by Dean Koontz. Dennis believed the plot was too familiar, and he ticked off several other novels that had employed a similar structure. I didn’t argue on behalf of Koontz’s originality but made the case that narrative structures could be similar and still the stories could be vastly different, just as the underlying structure of the skull doesn’t limit a wide variety of facial appearances. The point Dennis was making demonstrated his ability to see the larger form and shape of a story, a skill that most of his fellow grad students lacked. Lehane’s success as a novelist (Mystic River, Shutter Island, The Given Day, all New York Times bestsellers) is due in some measure to this talent for seeing the global structure of his stories so clearly, which frees him to manage its many moving parts with great dexterity.
Dennis was in the same class with Barbara Parker and a couple of other students who have gone on to publish successful novels. When I asked him what, if anything, he recalled from the class, this was his answer:
What I most remember from the class was the concept of bestsellers imparting new or specialized information and/or distilling complex theories into more user-friendly forms, as Crichton did with chaos theory in Jurassic Park. It’s something I still see at play, most often in good television, where we are brought into the specifics of a world that we didn’t know as much about as we thought we did—N.Y. advertising in Mad Men or the crank trade in Breaking Bad, for example.
Lynn Kiele Bonasia took the same graduate class in bestsellers as Dennis and Barbara, but in a different semester. She was an aspiring novelist who hadn’t yet broken into print. Since then she has gone on to publish two novels, Summer Shift (2010) and Some Assembly Required (2008), both published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. The booklist of bestsellers that Lynn studied was different from Dennis Lehane’s or Barbara Parker’s, but the same elements in bestsellers emerged. What she remembers about the class touches on the last ingredient I listed here, the catalyzing power of the writer’s emotional commitment to the materials:
It was really fascinating to take a look at a very diverse group of bestselling novels such as The Exorcist, From Here to Eternity, The Virginian, and Valley of the Dolls—books that many would feel have little in common—and be able to isolate characteristics that they all shared: a secret code to successful fiction. To this day, I find myself measuring bestselling books against these components.
The challenge becomes how to use this information, because I believe a good novel has to grow organically and can’t be based in contrivance. You can’t just throw the ingredients into the pot; you need to literally inhabit the soup for a while. Every now and then, when we write, we step away from our work and assess what we’ve got. Perhaps this is the time to reflect on what Jim’s book teaches us. It was a surprise to me how many of these elements my first novel contained, perhaps unintentionally, or because I had learned these components and subliminally wove them in.
Sandra Rodriguez Barron was a student in the bestseller course while she was working on her first novel. That book eventually was titled The Heiress of Water and was published by HarperCollins. Her second novel, Stay with Me, was published in 2010, also by HarperCollins.
Interestingly, Sandra was already employing one of the twelve recurring features in that first novel, but the class helped her see that depending on this feature too heavily might actually be counterproductive.
This course gave me the confidence to lean more deeply into the emotional aspect of story writing. When I started writing fiction, my comfort zone involved weaving in a lot of facts about nature, science, and medicine. (I think the graduate workshop environment triggered this.) But taking the course made me realize that although facts can provide a fascinating intellectual backbone to a plot, readers want to see these elements used to heighten emotion.
After all, they can go research any subject themselves. What readers want the writer to do is to breathe life into it; take it to a new level. If the writer’s ego and desire to sound “smart” creeps into the writing, it drains it. The books with the broadest appeal are the ones that can strike a balance between making the reader think and feel.
Christine Kling also was starting her first novel when she took one of my early classes in the bestseller. That first manuscript turned into the novel Surface Tension, a fine thriller published by Ballantine and followed by numerous excellent suspense novels, including Cross Current and Wreckers’ Key.
Like many of my students over the years, Christine felt guilty about the kinds of books she secretly loved. Part of the importance of the class for her was to liberate her from this uneasiness and give her permission to write the books she truly wanted to write.
Throughout my days as an undergraduate English major and then in the MFA program, I kept quiet about the books I really loved—the guilty-pleasure books by Stephen King, John D. MacDonald, Hammond Innes, and the like. They were books to be gobbled up, not savored. I recognized that the books I loved transported me to other worlds in ways that good literature often did not. In the “good reads,” the proscenium of the physical book disappeared and “I” ceased to exist. Losing myself in the story like that was pure incomprehensible magic to me. Your class, then, was like going to a magic show where the magician shows you how he does the tricks, and surprisingly, it doesn’t ruin the magic—quite the contrary,
because you come to appreciate the magician’s skill at creating his illusions. You started me down this long road of trying to figure out what makes a story you can lose yourself in—to understand that story is where the magic is, and it is not merely a sum of its literary parts.
APPENDIX
Plot Summaries
To refresh the memories of those who haven’t reread these novels lately, and to inform those who haven’t yet gotten around to them, here are plot summaries of each. The summaries were written by a graduate student of mine, David Gonzalez. David is in his early thirties, born and raised in Miami, and though he’s a passionate reader and a highly accomplished fiction writer, believe it or not, he had not read any of the novels on this list prior to taking on the job of summarizing these books.
In that way, David was like most of the students who took this course from me over the years. Like many of my former students, David Gonzalez has been immersed in the works of Ray Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, Junot Díaz, Charles Baxter, and Herman Melville. Quite an eclectic mix.
What limited exposure David had to these popular bestsellers came through their film versions. So I was pleased, though not surprised, that he greatly enjoyed reading these hits of the past. His favorite was Gone with the Wind, and his least favorite was Peyton Place, which he found rambling and poorly plotted, its narrator (Allison MacKenzie) “aimlessly floating around town.” He also found the sappy and egocentric voice of Robert Kincaid, the narrator of The Bridges of Madison County, hard to take seriously.
David says that when he originally read Valley of the Dolls, he was “turned off by the daytime soaps vibe to it.” But months later, upon reflection, his opinion changed: “I’m glad that I read it. I can appreciate it for the standard it set, albeit a relatively trashy one.”
I’ve tried not to tamper too much with David’s voice in these plot summaries to give a feel for the views of one fervent reader of Generation X.
GONE WITH THE WIND, Margaret Mitchell, 1936
Scarlett O’Hara is young, brash, seductive, and stubborn. Not exactly the usual traits synonymous with young debutantes of the pre–Civil War South. But she can’t help it. She takes too much after her father, Gerald O’Hara, a hard-drinking Irish immigrant with the proverbial heart of gold, who wiggled his way into society using the power of money and a gritty determination.
The novel begins when Scarlett learns that Ashley Wilkes will propose to Melanie Hamilton at a party at the Wilkeses’ family plantation. When Scarlett professes her love to him, Ashley admits that he does care for her but that “like must marry like,” and he likes Melanie. After Ashley leaves, Rhett Butler, a handsome and devilish rogue, admits to overhearing the entire conversation. Scarlett is doubly humiliated and, in a fit of anger and jealousy, accepts the marriage proposal of Charles Hamilton, the shy, awkward, somewhat pitiable brother of Melanie.
Only weeks after their marriage, Charles suffers an ignoble death in a sick tent on the Civil War battlefield, and Scarlett is forced to “grieve” publicly over the loss of a husband she’s secretly glad to be free of. In an attempt to assuage Scarlett’s melancholy, her mother, Ellen, decides to ship her off to Atlanta, where Scarlett finds work at a hospital, caring for the wounded. It’s not quite Scarlett’s ideal job, since most of the available men are either missing limbs or dying.
At a charity ball for the hospital Scarlett again encounters Rhett, and the two quickly become Atlanta’s most popular bit of gossip.
News arrives that Ashley has been captured. At the same time, Melanie is desperately ill with her pregnancy, and every day the sounds of battle inch closer, until finally cannonballs start landing in Atlanta’s streets. Scarlett assists at the birth of Melanie’s child, then leads a group of family, friends, and slaves on a dangerous escape back to Tara, the O’Haras’ plantation. When she arrives, she finds her home has been ransacked, her mother has passed away, both her sisters are sick, and her father is going nuts.
This is it. Scarlett’s had it. Never again will she allow her family to suffer or to starve. The person she used to be, shallow, self-involved, is gone, and left in her place is a single-minded woman full of determination who will stop at nothing to safeguard her future. Even murder. Scarlett doesn’t even hesitate when she shoots and kills a Yankee who has invaded their home.
When the war ends, Ashley returns to Tara, but after he and Scarlett share a passionate encounter, he tells her that he cannot, in good conscience, stay at Tara with his wife and child, under the thumb of Scarlett’s charity. But Scarlett needs manpower and, more important, money, if she is to keep Tara from the grubby carpetbaggers who have gained power and raised the taxes on her property. She begs Ashley to stay, and she leaves to talk to the only man with money at a time like this: Rhett Butler. Unfortunately, he is where all the good rogues wound up after the war, in a Yankee prison.
Rhett learns of her scheme and promises to leave all the money in his will for her after he is hanged. Scarlett wishes the Yankees would hurry up, then.
In a fit of panic over the fate of Tara, Scarlett convinces Frank Kennedy, a former Confederate, to marry her. When Frank falls ill, Scarlett takes over his business and becomes a ruthless entrepreneur, so desperate to make money that she even consorts with the Yankees and carpetbaggers in town, an act deemed unforgivable in the eyes of the Old Southern society.
Scarlett’s reckless independence leads to her being attacked one day by some squatters living in the woods. Avenging her honor, Ashley and her husband, Frank, raid the camp of squatters. Ashley is severely injured, and Frank is killed. For the first time, we see Scarlett suffer a flutter of grief and remorse. If only she hadn’t been so stubborn and willful, Frank, her meal ticket, would still be alive.
No sooner is Frank buried than Rhett (now freed from prison) proposes marriage. If the members of the Old Southern society were in a tizzy when Rhett and Scarlett danced at a charity event, their marriage so soon after Frank’s death is downright revolting. Neither of them cares much for their reputation, but when Scarlett gives birth to Bonnie Blue Butler, Rhett sets about repairing their family image, if only for his daughter’s sake.
Much to everyone’s surprise, Rhett becomes a different man now that he’s a father. But when Bonnie Blue dies, all that made Rhett a decent man dies with her.
Everything Scarlett has treasured is gone. Rhett has become an angry drunk. Her children are terrified of her. Her parents have passed away, and the people of the Old South shun her. Melanie, the only friend who loved her unconditionally, is dead, and Ashley, who was always a little frail and dreamy, is a shell of his former self. At the close of the novel, after Rhett tells Scarlett he doesn’t give a damn about her anymore, our heroine, in denial to the bitter end, begins to scheme for a way to lure Rhett back.
PEYTON PLACE, Grace Metalious, 1956
When Samuel Peyton, a freed slave, returned from Europe a very rich man and engaged to a white woman, he quickly realized that he would not be welcomed by society. In a fit of anger and hurt, he imported a medieval castle, rebuilt it brick by brick, shut its doors, and lived the remainder of his life locked within those walls—an inauspicious beginning for the town that eventually would bear his name.
When it comes to Peyton Place, a fictional New England community in the 1930s, few things are as highly valued as image, status, and reputation. And practically everyone in Peyton Place carries with them some secret, some dark, sordid mishap in their past, that they try to hide at all costs.
Take Constance MacKenzie. Her daughter, Allison, was conceived in a love affair with a married man, and although this man passed away when Allison was three years old, Constance lives in fear that the truth about her daughter’s illegitimate birth will one day be discovered.
Constance is a beautiful woman, but her guilt and remorse have kept her from remarrying; she prefers the role of the hardworking and sympathetic widow. As a result, Constance is cold, stern, and single-minded in he
r withdrawal from romance and its repercussions. Allison, on the other hand, is sensitive and thoughtful, full of aspirations, and doesn’t see the world through her mother’s grim eyes. At least not yet, anyway.
Allison’s closest friend is Selena Cross, a sensuous young girl from the “tar-paper shacks” who lives with her mother and her stepfather. Allison has no idea of the skeletons that lurk inside the closets of Peyton Place, until one day when she peers through the window into the Crosses’ kitchen and sees Selena’s stepfather, Lucas, tearing drunkenly at Selena’s blouse.
Soon after, Lucas is carted off to a hospital because of his alcoholism, and Selena finds romance and comfort with Ted Carter, a handsome and generous young man from an affluent family. Constance then hires Selena to work at her apparel store and hires Nellie, Selena’s mother, to clean her house.
When the principal of the local high school passes away, Leslie Harrington, the wealthiest, most powerful man in Peyton Place—and chairman of the school board—hires Tomas Makris to replace him. Makris is a handsome Greek man, Ivy League educated, from New York. Constance immediately fears that he may have some connection to her past and dreads the presence of the new stranger in town. The moment he sees her, however, Makris falls in love and sets about wooing the unwilling Constance MacKenzie.
Two years later, Allison, who dreams of being a writer, lands a job at the local newspaper writing human-interest stories about the people and events that shape Peyton Place. By this time, Makris has made headway in his romancing of Constance. They’re secretly engaged, a fact that Makris keeps insisting Constance reveal to her daughter.
Meanwhile, Selena Cross visits Doc Swain because she’s discovered she is pregnant and knows that her stepfather, Lucas, is responsible. Abortions are illegal, but Doc Swain performs one anyway, believing himself to be saving Selena from a terrible situation. The procedure is a success, and soon afterward Doc Swain forces Lucas to leave town.
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