Two questions arise. How useful are creative writing courses and manuals that promise you bestsellerdom? And can an author make it big with the help of these schools alone or does he or she still need an editor and publisher or a literary agent?
Successful publishing of literary fiction depends on collaboration between the writer, the literary editor-cum-publisher and the mass media. Every link in the chain is important for success. Publishers and writers have a common interest to sell more and more and the mass media is very eager to collaborate for their own reasons. Developments in print and communications technology have led to a vast diversification of media outlets—newspapers, magazines, supplements, TV channels. They all have an inexhaustible appetite for raw material; discussion and gossip about books and writers are a very cheap source of such material. No writer can possibly have all the connections, know all the tricks of marketing and publicity—he or she needs professional help from publishers and their marketing teams to hype the book into the market at a time when "everything is in, nothing is out".
Very simply, a blockbuster that every career novelist (defined as one who has contaminated literary values for considerations of fame and money) dreams of is not an ordinary novel. It is something manufactured for people who pay the bills according to their likes and dislikes. Or,
Writing the Blockbuster Novel has isolated some common elements in most 'block-ies'. These boil down to High Stakes (that is, a character's life, a nation's future which can be seen in Michael Crichton's Disclosure), Larger-than-Life Characters, The Dramatic Question (Can she keep her shameful secret?), High Concept (like Jeffrey Archer's Honour Among Thieves) and Multiple Points of View and Erotic Setting. These complex and diverse elements have to be knocked into a meaningful whole either by the author or the editor.
But beyond all this it is Topicality that is the golden rule—write something that is the topic of the day. Crichton's novels that have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide are a classic case, because all his novels touched "the anxieties of the age". These include menacing science (Jurassic Park), menacing Japanese (Rising Sun) and now menacing women (Disclosure). Crichton's novels work because they are terrific barometers of social fevers of our times.
Because topicality is the central theme of all blockbusters, there are many who are convinced that at the lower end of the social scale there is a magic blockbuster formula and that cracking the code will bring automatic fame and fortune. So, some kind of a formula has been worked out which is something like this: Plot + Topicality + Characters + Setting + N (where N stands for passions, commitments or excitements).
But are craft and technique all that matter? Don't fads and fashions change? John Le Carre's spy novels of the Cold War were 'blockies' but that can't be said for his post-Cold War Our Game. Aren't the blockbusters of today highly conservative inspirational novels with themes of hope, redemption, conviction and re-birth—like James Waller's Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy and James Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. The fact is that the concept of the blockbuster and the indefinable element that makes it tick is dog-eared and fluid because everything is in a state of flux.
So the best advice to budding millionaires-in-the-making about to embark on writing courses is to take them but always bear in mind Ben Johnson's couplet: "Fool," said my muse to me, "look into thy heart and write."
