The impressive, prolific, award-winning author Janet Gover will be joining us at Retreats For You for her course, Write a book that sells, in November. (Details here).
In the meantime, here is Janet speaking on writing popular fiction…
When it comes to writing popular fiction—those books you see in the supermarket and on the tables just inside the doors of a bookshop— some people talk about a ‘formula’. Particularly for genre fiction: romance, crime, horror, sci fi. The books that sell in huge numbers.
The good news for readers, but bad news for writers, is that there is no formula. Nothing that offers guaranteed success. There are, however, expectations that we as writers need to meet. Expectations of publishers and agents, and of readers.
Think about your ‘reader’ self for a moment. If you’re reading a crime novel, you want to know who-done-it by the end. In a romance, you want a happy-ever-after. In a horror novel, you want the evil force destroyed; at least for now. As readers, we want the good people to win and the bad ones to lose. It doesn’t always happen that way in real life, but fiction is a lot tidier than real life and we can expect these things to happen.
So if we know how it’s going to end, why read the book? It’s all about the journey.
That’s where learned technique comes in. How do you create and use an inciting incident? Look for a point of no return and pile on the emotion. Find your inner conflict and build that into a climax and resolution. This is the sort of thing we’ll be talking about at the retreat. There are ‘secret tricks’ that add impact to every stage of your writing, and I can tell you they are not all that secret nor are they tricky to learn.
The most successful books do wonderful things with the character’s journey—heartbreaking, scary, white-knuckle things—so at the end of the book we can release the breath we’ve been holding , sigh and feel that good has triumphed.
That’s what creates books that sell; an emotional connection with the journey, even if we think we have a good idea how it’s going to end.
Of course, we can also turn those expectations on their ear, and that’s the breakout mega-successful novel. It’s also a lot of fun. You’ll learn more about how to do that, too, in November.
Find more about Janet’s November event here.