A Perelandra College writing student recently commented that she wants to be a bestselling author so she can enlighten or awaken people. This gave me pause, and prompted considerable reflection about what makes a bestselling author. 

To make any sense of this topic, we need a solid definition of bestseller. 

One author might claim bestseller status because a given bookstore tallies its sales by the month and his book ranked among the top ten during one of those months, perhaps because he visited for a booksigning and drew dozens of buyers, since it was his hometown.

Another author, whose long time career was public relations, developed an elaborate plan to lure folks to an online book launch party. She was attempting to land in the top hundred selling books of the day on amazon.com and thereby claim bestseller status.

Even the bestselling claims that give specifics may not be as reputable as they seem. If an author, by luck or design, happens to be featured at signings in the same week in the four or five stores the local newspaper surveys to determine its bestseller list, this may give a valid yet misleading claim to bestseller status. Such things can even occur in major cities, say Los Angeles, with the Times.

For this discussion, I'll define bestseller as a book that shows up on many bestseller lists and puts the author in a position to quit his day job without rousing anger or trepidation in his family.

And I'll turn to the heart of the matter by suggesting that the desire to become a bestselling author may be in conflict with other, and perhaps more important, desires. So those who aspire to be read by millions had best pause in their quest and answer a few questions before plotting their strategy.

First question: Do you want to write about what you witness, experience, and/or believe, or about what people want to read?

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Here's a rather long quote from Josephine Tey (the speaker is Grant in The Singing Sands) 

"It's a harmless sort of weakness," Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.

"That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in the mirror and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable. You can never convince Vanity that anyone else is of the slightest importance; he just doesn't understand what you are talking about. He will kill a person rather than be put to the inconvenience of doing a six month stretch."

"But that's being insane."

"Not according to Vanity's reckoning. And certainly not in the medical sense. It is merely Vanity being logical. It is, as I said, a frightening trait, and the basis of all criminal personality. Criminals--true criminals, as opposed to the little man who cooks the accounts in an emergency or the man who kills his wife when he finds her in bed with a stranger--true criminals vary in looks and tastes and intelligence and method as widely as the rest of the world does, but they have one invariable characteristic, their pathological vanity."

I'm thinking about M. Scott Peck, in People of the Lie, arguing that all of what we call evil is rooted in narcissism, and of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley character who is perfectly charming except he needs to bump off whomever gets into his way. 

And I'm considering widening Tey's analysis to include even those we don't usually label criminals but just dishonest, such as liars and all kinds of cheats. 

Of course there are degrees of vanity. Still, observing people from this angle might serve to warn us about those we ought to keep our distance from. And no doubt it would help us write real and convincing  bad guys.

I'm developing a class in memoir for Perelandra College.  Yesterday a sort of introduction came to me. 

Here's a note I'll send students:

Unless you're a celebrity or have lived through some wild and overt (not interior) drama, nobody except maybe friends and family wants to read about you. At least when picking up a memoir, they want to read about themselves or people they know and are puzzled about.

So, to find more than ten readers for you memoir, you need to: 1. become such a stunning prose stylist that the one out of a hundred or so potential readers who appreciate fine writing will keep reading for that alone, or 2. focus your story on an element of your life or the overcoming of a problem that everybody, most everybody, or lots of people can relate to on account of their own experience.

The best example that comes to mind, I had the honor of teaching a class Philip Yancey attended. He's a masterful writer of non-fiction, but he hadn't yet tackled a memoir, and he was preparing to write one. We talked afterward and he said that during the class he had recognized the focus of his memoir. The story would be overcoming a childhood spent around a toxic kind of religion.

I'd bet a few hundred million of us can relate to that.