Re: A wonderful "how to write" page!
And the worst part is, many of those people are making a lot more money than I will probably ever see.
Now, you see, that's a perfect example of why I think literary snobbery is a bad idea for a writer. You're tacitly relegating yourself to second best because you can't get along with a lot of commercial fiction. Well, I can't get along with a lot of commercial fiction either (see Sturgeon's law), but that won't stop me from studying it.
Writing "popular" fiction is a skill. You can analyze it and learn it, the same as you can learn grammar or any other element of writing. And that's what the likes of Stephen King and John Grisholm do while the academics waste their time with things like post-modern deconstructionism and lit-crit theory (not that I've got anything against those). Once you've studied what makes popular writers popular, you can come up with a few general rules of thumb for yourself.
At the risk of digressing from the topic, I give you a couple of examples, gleaned from the likes of Stephen King and J K Rowling.
(1) Popular fiction has a sense of movement, as opposed to literary fiction, which tends to be more static and reflective. That sense of movement comes, not so much from characters moving through their environment, but from the characters pursuing some specific goal. It's further accentuated by making this goal a moving target. For an example of this, think of a murder mystery where the investigator's chief suspect becomes the next victim. The investigator has to stop and rethink. In this way, the writer creates a sense of movement in the plot -- the sense that the story is changing and developing.
(2) On a similar note, popular fiction relies on good pacing. By "good" I don't necessarily mean "fast". Contrast is usually more important than speed. Stephen King, for example, generally starts slow and then picks up as the novel progresses: if
Stairway to Heaven was a novel, it would be written by Stephen King. It's the contrast between slow and fast that draws people in. In a more general way, you can create contrast by juxtaposing long and short chapters, or slow and fast paced scenes.
(3) Popular fiction invokes a point of familiarity with its readers. J K Rowling is the best example of this. Her stories are set in a school. In that school we have the incompetent teacher (Trelawny), the unreasonable teacher (Snape), the disciplinarian (McGonnagle), the nerd (Neville Longbottom), the school bully (Malfoy), plus exams, detentions, school sports and all the other trappings. Rowling's target audience instantly recognizes all of this, and perhaps feels that here, at last, is someone who truly
understands what it's like, and who's willing to tell the truth about it. The reference points don't stop there either. Anyone who's read any of those English children's adventure stories will recognize where Rowling is coming from. And anyone familiar with fantasy will recognize a lot of the fantastic elements. For a slightly different example of creating familiarity, you can look to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle created this connection with his readers, not by throwing in familiar things, but by writing each of the stories to a specific structure. The repetition of the structure means that you can pick up a Sherlock Holmes story and know exactly what to expect, and all formula fiction since has relied on this idea.
(4) A lot of popular fiction has what, I guess, you would call a MacGuffin -- some device or idea that carries the story along, which is distinctive enough and interesting enough to appeal to readers. In
The Firm by John Grisham, it's the idea of what happens if you get what you think is your dream job, only to discover you're working for the mafia. In
The Scar by China Mieville it's a floating pirate city, built on the hulls of thousands of old ships lashed together. The best MacGuffins can become their own memes, that propagate themselves in the popular imagination ("Use the force, Luke!")
The point of all this is that you don't have to blindly copy King, Grisham, J K Rowling, or any other popular author. (And, in fact, copies are usually less successful than the originals.) What you can do is get a sense of what these authors do, and adapt their techniques to your own work. And you can do that without having to compromise your artistic integrity. There's no point being a snob about it. If a book is successful, then the author must have done
something right (and I don't believe that luck plays anything more than a trivial role, given that books are mostly sold through word of mouth).
What are you going to do otherwise? Complain about how stupid the general reading public is, while you write books so rarefied you can't place them?
