The Maverick: An Element of Superhits?
Misfits. Loners. Outsiders. It's cool.
The rebels. The misfit. The loner. The maverick.
Your character doesn’t fit into the real world?
That’s the opposite of a problem when it comes to helping your book sales, apparently.
In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.
And the misfit? The maverick? That’s a big feature of what Hall found in the 12 books he analyzed, (Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code).
The tension between individualism and conformity has long been a fascination in American culture, Hall argues.
“The heroes and heroines … are all rebels, loners, misfits or mavericks. They don’t fit in worth a damn, and that’s one of the reasons we love them so much,” he writes.
There is this “tension between mavericks and conventionalists operates at the core of the biggest bestsellers.”
And in the novels? The heroes reject conformity.
Maybe your novel should too?
Michael Korda says, “At least half the books on any given week’s bestseller list are there to the immense surprise and puzzlement of their publishers … That’s why publishers find it so hard to repeat their successes – half the time they can’t figure out how they happened in the first place.”
THE MAVERICK ARCHETYPE
We’ve spoken about the maverick archetype in the podcast before, but I thought it might be helpful to put it here, too.
A lot of writers use archetypes in their stories. Sometimes we don't even realize that we're doing it, actually.
There’s something really compelling about the heroes that don’t quite fit in especially the mavericks. The Huck Finns and Han Solos of the world and/or universe.
For whatever reason, the mavericks have turned away from civilization. Maybe it’s to find out what happened to their missing mom. Maybe it’s because their own elite family oppressed them and their quirks. Maybe it’s because they are doing a Thoreau and they wanted to see what it was like to be Spartan and nonconformist in a society that stresses conformity above all else.
Literary critic, Northrop Frye wrote about mavericks as heroes in novels in the U.S. and said,
“Placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.”
Northrop Frye
To conform or to not conform has often been the question. Apologies to Shakespeare. And it’s been a question both in American society and in its books, right?
How the main character fits into mainstream society is often the subject of some really good and compelling books like Gone With the Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird. They reject conforming. They strike out on their own.
The maverick is a character archetype.
Here’s the definition of an archetype from studiobinder.com
“An archetype is a consistent and typical version of a particular thing. It can be human, an object, or a particular set of behaviors, but the point is that it fits into a time-tested mold that embodies a pure form.”
studiobinder.com
Anyways, though that site is about scriptwriting, I think it has a lot of great information about writing characters.
It asks:
“Why do character archetypes exist?
“Human beings tend to find their place within a group dynamic based around their strongest personality traits.
“You may have a group of friends with similar interests...
“But often one will be the “social butterfly” while another will be the "homebody."
“Your friends will begin to identify each other by these consistent traits.
“You’ve now defined yourself by a character archetype.”
studiobinder.com again.
The maverick archetype is obviously one of many, but what of their key motivations is the act of self-preservation. They break the rules to get their goals. Brave. Competent. Sometimes a bit snippy. Their temper is a bit fiery.
That pull between convention and autonomy has the possibility of making a story truly stick out as something extraordinarily special. Don’t be afraid to lean into it.
I (Carrie) am not a fan of Gone With The Wind because I couldn’t stand Scarlett and the racial tones that happen throughout, but the characters are iconic and are a good reference point for us writers when we think about maverick characters.
Are you a maverick? Do you write them? What's your archetype?
We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.