Talking About Hit Literature
Write Better Now
It has felt like I’ve been talking about James Hall’s HIT LIT for months now, but this is it, my friends, the last post about it. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.
So, it’s the last post and I have a lot of feelings. Most of those feelings are about whether or not you should (meaning should I) write to be published, write to make a hit novel, and if doing so is on some sort of weird polarity with writing as expression or as art or to give the giant middle finger to commercialism.
I’m not going into that here.
Instead, we’re going to summarize everything so we can think about these features. Okay?
As NPR writes,
“Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, once cracked, ‘If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste."‘ What Metalious and her kin in best-sellerdom really possess, as Hall explains so well in Hit Lit, is the power to connect with readers through their hearts and guts as much as, if not more than, their minds."
I’m really fascinated by the fact that these 12 mega-bestsellers had these features in common:
Feature 1: “An Offer You Can’t Refuse”
Feature 2: Talk Controversy
Feature 3: “Colossal Characters Doing Magnificent Things on a Sweeping Stage”
Feature 4: “America as Paradise”
Feature 5: “An Abundance of Facts and Information”
Feature 6: Secret societies
Feature 7: “Bumpkins Versus Slickers”
Feature 8: “God Sells”
Feature 9: National Myths
Feature 10: “A Dozen Mavericks”
Feature 11: Fractured Families
Feature 12: Sex Stuff
These novels talk about the hot issues of their time of publication.
These novels have really high stakes.
In these novels the characters aren’t all from the same demographic.
These novels have big scope, use wilderness or landscape imagery, and have secret societies.
These novels have characters who go from a rural to an urban setting or vice versa and that movement “dramatizes a clash between agrarian values and the cultural norms of the city,” Hall writes.
These novels talk about religion, social norms, families, and have a rebel or a loner or a maverick in them. And they have an incident involving sex that somehow propels the plot.
Whew. That’s a lot, right?
It feels like a lot to me.
But I’m also really fascinated by the fact that they were, as Hall writes, “written in earthy, simple, earnest, transparent prose with plots that are driven by a ‘high concept’ and a minimum of backstory or psychological introspection.”
NO NAVEL GAZING
So, they are easy to read.
And they are propelled by the actions of their characters.
There is not a lot of navel gazing.
The problem for me, as a writer, is that I kind of like navel gazing.
The other problem is that if you don’t do enough navel gazing, critics call it “popcorn” like popcorn is bad and not my dead dad’s favorite treat. The secret may be to find a balance.
THIRD PERSON PAST TENSE
What isn’t mentioned is that most of these novels are written in third person past tense. These aren’t the first-person stories where the narrator is the “I” of the story. There’s a bit more distance than that between the reader and the narrator.
MOTIVATION AND BEING IN OVER YOUR HEAD
What else happens in that these characters in these novels are super motivated to get their goal. Who isn’t motivated to stop a killer shark from eating everyone at a beach, really?
Hall writes, “They are people by characters whose burning emotions drive them to commit bold and decisive actions. The varios motives that drive the characters to such passion are clear and precise and easy to sympathize with. Early on in each narrative, the hero seems to be in well over his (or her) head, which helps to stir the reader’s sense of pity or dread.”
And that sense of pity or dread makes the reader relate to the character.
RANDOM NOTE
I just received something from the Substack platform that says that they’ll pay for you to subscribe to LIVING HAPPY/WRITE BETTER NOW for a month. That’s sort of a win-win for both of us! So feel free to come on over for a month! <3 Seriously, I could totally use that $5.