Most readers don't want to learn new ways of thinking. They may like learning new facts, but regarding their outlook on the world, they want writers to validate and lend ammunition to their current attitudes. If you want to change Democrats to Republicans or Christians to athiests, good luck. Most people don't buy books that will challenge their belief.
So, along with learning how to craft a suspenseful story, the most effective formula for becoming a bestseller is to share the attitudes of the majority. Which makes life difficult for those of us who don't.
A very well read and learned librarian told me that successful writers are those whose internal metaphors and symbols, conscious and unconscious, are in accord with the ones in most people's minds. If this describes you, then your stories will come alive to those people and you can paint vivid pictures with a minimum of words. But suppose you're a bit quirky, and your internal symbols and metaphors are out of sync with the multitude's. You can attempt to discern what symbols and metaphors work best for most readers, say, by attending critique groups. But this may prove a challenge that would require more than one lifetime.
Similarly, if your beliefs about conspiracies or politics or spiritual growth or romance are close to what your readers believe and you can express their thoughts or desires, perhaps more fluently than they can, you may be half way to riches and fame.
But suppose your attitudes are somewhat singular. Suppose you think for yourself and you want to express what you think and that's a main reason you write. And suppose you dream of being looked up to, for financial reasons, by your brother the mortgage broker.
Next post I'll offer a few solutions.
1 comment:
Ken,
It seems every three to five hundred years our cultures, our thinking, the ways we relate and even something as inflexible as the Church undergo transformative changes. Each time we see things that previously were invisible, which doesn’t mean they were not being formerly experienced. As Wittgenstein says, “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)”
If, as you say, “you can express [the reader’s] thoughts or desires, perhaps more fluently than they can,” or in another sense make visible that which was formerly invisible but always sensed, then you have hit the mark. Dan Brown isn’t just a mystery writer, even his ‘commercialized’ writings have spoken to something of the unknowable known within many, something that we have always sensed but were unable to articulate. Isn’t the gift of the great writer making known what has always been sensed? A Republican or Democrat is not made simply by what is believed but also by what is repressed. Revealing the repressed or invisible, but nonetheless already there in the reader’s experience, seems to be the goal of every writer. I understand that this is beyond a ‘how-to’ response, but I am looking forward to everything you have to say on this subject.
George Steiner
“Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. . . . In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. . . . A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closeness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our questions to it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths.”
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