We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

In James Hall’s book, HIT LIT, he looks at twelve top-selling novels and tries to find similarities to their success.

One thing that he found in the twelve novels is the theme of “America as paradise.”

He writes, “America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs.”

Despite the decade the story was written in, he and his students, he wrote, kept discovering the motif of America as a lost Eden.

“American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself,” he writes. “Surely, part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.”

Blame it on the Puritans, maybe, but Americans have traditionally been into making novels into bestsellers if they talk about this.

Often, the story has to do with getting back to this golden land that the hero or heroine has been cast out of or alienated from. Think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind trying to get back to her vision of the South and Tara, her home. Think Michael Corleone in the Godfather cast out of the family and its golden promise.

That longing to go back to the way things were (a more innocent time, a more accepting family or culture, a place of safety) is a common aspect in American hit novels.

Alfred Kazin says way back in On Native Grounds (1956), a lot of American literature “rests upon a tradition of enmity to the established order, more significantly a profound alienation from it.”

You can see this happen in the books that have sold over 100 million novels as well

The English books: A Tale of Two Cities, the first Harry Potter, And Then There Were None, The Hobbit, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland all have the loss of innocence or place and then the desire to get back to it or at least some mourning of it.

These are English novels, though. The top-selling American novels are the Da Vinci Code and The Bridges of Madison County, both selling over 80 million copies. Both involve protagonists who lose their safe worlds and lean into something secret, something complicated, across large vistas and settings.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Go to your greener pastures and escape the rodeo, but also be okay with coming back home to where it’s safe, too.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It’s from the AP

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

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WRITE SUBMIT SUPPORT

It’s my last time teaching Write, Submit, Support at the Writing Barn. It’s online. It’s six-months. It’s a kick-butt program. Come hang out with me and a few other writers for six...

So, last week was Shaun’s birthday. Yay, Shaun!

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

And today, we’re talking about a main element in writing a hit novel. Some people call it The Big Clock. Some people call it a Ticking Clock. Some people call it The Timer. Dramatic theory is fancy and calls it a Timelock, but basically, it’s the ticking bomb, a known and harsh deadline that your character has before it all explodes in her face.

Glen C. Strathy explains, “The technique is to give the protagonist a set amount of time by which to achieve the Story Goal or else suffer the consequence. Generally, you create tension by not allowing your protagonist to achieve the goal until the very last second (which is also the crisis of the story). We call this type of limit a ticking clock.”

So, examples might be:

1. You only have until 4 p.m. to get the antidote to your zombie hamster Ham-Hammy-Ham-Ham before he is a zombie forever.
2. An evil group of cheese-loving bunnies will eat ALL THE CHEESE IN THE WORLD if they don’t receive 3,000 pounds of gouda by nightfall.
3. A puppy-nado is coming in three hours and you have to evacuate the town of Bar Harbor before then. WILL YOU MAKE IT IN TIME? Actually, do you want to?

Strathy also calls this “an excellent way to keep your plot under control. For instance, if you give your characters a 24-hour ticking clock, you know all the events of your story must take place within that timeframe.”

It’s a way to keep your plot from going all wild and willy-nilly.

Cool, right?

James W. Hall calls it an “ever moving second hand” that “raises the anxiety level.”

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Dogs use the time element constantly. Whining and returning to your goal, always upping the want and stakes help.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

INSTANT NOODLES!

Holiday Issue (V4 I3): Holiday Noods

HOLIDAY NOODS is our 2024 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday fails (any December holiday, from Hannukah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best funny work about noodles that happens to ALSO be holiday-themed in some way. The point of the end-of-year issue is always to be light-hearted to downright silly.

Submissions close OCTOBER 15, 2024 and the issue publishes DECEMBER 1, 2024.

INSTANT NOODLES IS CURATED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE OLD SCRATCH PRESS COLLECTIVE

Submission link is here.

COOL WRITING EXERCISE: THE STATUS QUO

What is the status quo as your novel starts?

Got it?

What changes it?

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Got it from here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. <...

A lot of the writers I teach get really freaked out about structure. They go on multiple craft book journeys trying to find the structure that resonates with them, the one that gives them that beautiful a-ha moment. Who can blame them?

Don't we all want that beautiful a-ha moment?

They learn about pinch points, rising action, falling action, subplots, inciting incidents, midpoints, themes, narrative arc, emotional arc, hamster zombies (just kidding) and they hyperventilate along the way.

There is no reason to hyperventilate if this way of looking at writing structure doesn’t work for your brain. You can simplify it a lot with no zombie hamsters involved.

Ready?

Here is the simplest structure choice.

• You have a character.
• Your character has a problem. Let everyone reading know she has a problem.
• How will she solve it?
• Make her try to solve it.
• Make her fail.
• Make her try to solve it again.
• Make her fail again.
• Do this until near the end (¾'s in) and make everything seem absolutely hopeless.
• Let her solve the damn problem.
• Let her rejoice.

How many times should she try?

In our Western culture, we like the number three for some reason. I'm personally more of a fan of the number four. But we authors tend to give the main character three big attempts to solve her issue before we let her succeed. We're mean like that.

Make it tougher

We call this the rising action, but basically it means that each time she tries to fix things, it should be harder, there should be more at risk, she should be more desperate and emotionally invested. We, the readers, should also be more invested as it goes along.

When the attempt fails, the tension gets a bit mellower until it rises again even higher for the second and third attempts. It becomes a pattern.

That's It - The Simplest Plot Structure Ever

Really. It's a pretty simple plot structure but it works. No, I didn't mention inciting incidents and midpoints and other things, because this is the simple plot structure. Key word: simple.

But, don't forget that even with the simplest of plot structures, the point of the story is to have it make sense. When your character does something, let there be consequences that logically move us to the next part of the story. Remember cause and effect? That's important to us writers.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie says to just keep trying.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Shenandoah. Genre: Fiction. Payment: $80 per 1000 words of prose up to $400. Deadline: Opens September 10, 2024, and closes when they reach capacity.

The Last Line. Genre: Fiction that ends with the last line provided. Payment: $20-$40. Deadline: October 1, 2024.

COOL WRITING EXERCISE

This is via Reedsy:

“The Outsider

“If you're working on a novel or short story, write a pivotal scene from an outside observer's perspective who has no role in the story.

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