How to Write a Commercial Novel
A thought experiment on form and formula
Dear Friends,
My friend Nicole was in town last week on tour for her debut memoir, Wonderland. The book is named after a turn-of-the-century amusement park—or rather—in the East-of-Boston area that she grew up in, many local businesses plucked their names from the defunct park (it was only open for around five years in the early 1900s).
Nicole and I met in an evening fiction workshop nearly fifteen years ago, and both of us ended up there by more circumstance than purpose. She had a group of MFA friends who had signed up and encouraged each other to attend; as for me: the class ended up occurring at my day job (a literary nonprofit), and someone had to lock the doors up at night (thus, I sat in the class, becoming part of it). I'm oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, because the person who ran this atypical workshop is an editor of notoriety, and talking about his workshop/methodology could be an entire newsletter in itself.
What I would say though is something that Nicole and I both shared (which was also a core ideal behind the workshop) is that we found fiction by pacing ourselves as the sentence level. What I mean by this is creating prose that is focused on the musicality of language, particularly the relationship between grammar and sound. The scholar B. R. Myers once criticized this type of writing (prominent in literary fiction) as “the cult of the sentence.” He meant this pejoratively (despite making it sound punk as hell), suggesting that brilliant sentences should not be mistaken for or considered a substitute for an overall strong novel.
It’s a pretty overdone argument at this point: that lit fic is pretentious and therefore created through an act of insincerity, focusing on pomp and style over substance. Alternatively, the stereotype that genre fic is stylistically plain while being too focused on plot and trope-based conventions is equally musty. Plenty of writers have proven this dichotomy is baseless, so it’s not worth rehashing. What I do want to revisit though is not the act of writing itself, but the act of publishing, which is something I usually strongly emphasize as two separate practices.
I don’t think it would be partisan to suggest that works of fiction that err on the side of experiment often end up published on small, indie, and/or university presses. On the inverse, the works of fiction that understand genre convention are more likely to be picked up by traditional publishers and distributed widely to readers looking for those conventions.
A topic that came up at Nicole’s book event is the presence of hustle culture strung throughout her memoir. When the two of us got some drinks after her event, we talked about hustling for jobs, the gig economy, the high cost of living—and if those of us who naturally gravitate toward a type of non-mainstream art-making could ever force their own hands to write something for a commercial audience. Nicole mentioned that Ottessa Moshfegh had spoken to this exact question (specifically, that she held that mindset when writing her novel Eileen), which I was able to find recounted in an 2016 interview with Harper's Bazaar1:
I wanted to attract the reader who might reach for something commercial to read on an airplane. Something that looked like it would transport the reader to another place, but maybe not teach them anything or challenge them. That's the reason why I think most people read, for the same reason they watch TV. They want to escape their reality, and there's nothing wrong with that except that when you're in an imagined reality, you're extremely suggestible. Your subconscious is porous. You're influenced by everything that's going on in that alternative realm.…
So I thought, if I could get the reader to come with me to this place, and then startle them with some frank realities, then maybe consciousness could shift a little bit. That was my hope with Eileen, positioning it as a traditional mainstream novel. I also knew that I didn't want to be one of those experimental literary writers that has to scrounge for change for the rest of her life.…
I have to say: I’m a little obsessed with this sentiment as a type of thought experiment. I’ve already written about how my own MFA experience was more focused on having the time and space to innovate rather than any focus on what it means to find out where you exist in a vast publishing landscape. Part of my own personal journey following my masters degree has been trying to contain my own wildest impulses, learn how to shape them as I edit. While I do stand by my sentiment that writing is its own siloed practice, that doesn’t mean I’m not unaware of the possibility of writing and editing toward publication. As an educator, I’ve even been thinking about what it would be like to teach a graduate course on crafting a commercial novel beat-by-beat at an MFA program (presumably, one that has an existing culture of generating literary fiction from the æther).
I know that my interest in commercial publishing—on some level—is just a side effect of someone who has been hustling as a creative for quite a long time, and therefore fascinated by the fantasy of not having to scrounge for change for the rest of one’s life. Genre and the spaces between is also just one of my scholarly interests. I don’t actually believe that most literary writers (or writers like myself who found fiction through writing poetry) have the specific skill sets or instincts to write toward commercial fiction, but I’m going to humor this line of thought for a moment to say, okay, what if this could be reverse-engineered? What if we could all walk the same trail toward generating commercially successful fiction by following a guide? What would be the bridge to get there?
My next thought was considering the relationships between "form" and "formula." Most poets and writers are familiar with form. Poets learn how to write villanelles, haiku, sonnets…. These forms are structures and organizational principles toward creating a piece of work. Similarly, flash fiction has a limited word count. A memoir is based on personal memories. Epistolary novels incorporate letter-writing and consider who is writing the letter and who is receiving it. That is: most of us are familiar with the concept of writing based on a set of rules.
"Formula" similarly signifies being able to recognize patterns and conventions that often lead to predictable outcomes. These could be romance-based tropes, the Hero's Journey, or other formulaic elements to meet audience expectations. “Formula” might sound like a dirty word, but I find something genius in being able to comprehend a marketable genre and make writing that fills a predetermined shape. It sounds deceptively simple, but personally, I could think of no tougher task.
So me being, well, me… went off to look for some formulas for writing long-form works. The one I was most familiar with was Save the Cat!, which I had seen recommended for screenwriters wanting to create television and movie scripts while hitting specific plot beats. I was however surprised to find out that the StC series also makes books for novel-writing—and even an app! I ended up grabbing the software (there’s student and teacher pricing) to play around. Something that I found most fascinating about StC is that you can plug in a page-based goal (e.g.: 300 pages), and it will tell you where various plot beats should fall based on aforementioned page numbers. For example, in my 300-page test novel, I should write the “Catalyst” around page 31. This is, as StC puts it, “the ‘something’ that sets the story into motion, the moment the hero's life has changed, the first ‘whammy….’”
For some of you, writing by hitting certain beats may seem like the most obvious task in the world. As someone who learned to write by starting with one sentence and spinning it toward the next one and the one after that (I guess what some people might call ‘pantsing,’ meaning, you ‘write by the seat of your pants’), the thought of plotting in a way to hit beat-based markers is alien. It made me think: okay, so if being able to keep the rhythm of convention is one of (if not the most important) elements of writing formulaically, what else is there? I ended up thinking about commercially successful books/series and trying to find some commonalities between them. What follows are my notes and thoughts.
A Treatise on Writing Commercial Fiction: The Elements
Story Beats: The writer must consider structural points around which the story is built, helping to maintain pacing, tension, and engagement throughout the narrative. The key is to write with the purpose of entertaining the reader. This might mean taking cues from other popular media (e.g.: movies and television and potentially even video games) in terms of how the narrative is structured. The writer is encouraged to follow a guiding principle such as Snyder’s Save the Cat, Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Yorke’s Into the Woods, and so on. Maintaining a steady pace, hitting suspenseful notes, and mixing pulp (action/adventure) with introspection (quieter moments) is used to hold reader interest.
High-Stakes Plot: It’s Freytag's Pyramid by way of an epinephrine-spiked electrocardiogram. This feeds into the story beats mentioned above. To paraphrase Bonnie Tyler: the powder keg needs to give off sparks. The sooner this occurs, the better. The reader needs to be hooked in almost immediately. The reader needs to understand that the protagonist(s) have clear objectives they need to achieve, often against great odds. Depending on the beats that you, the writer, are trying to hit, you need to account for threats and challenges that keep the tension high and the reader engaged. This also means creating a satisfyingly traditional conclusion or at least a cliffhanger (assuming the book is part of a series) that readers can sink their teeth into.
Genre Elements: While a lot of popular contemporary books fall into Young Adult and New Adult categories, those books also bring in themes, motifs, and/or clichés that are recognizable within a particular genre or type of storytelling. This could be wizards, dragons, vampires, Greco-Roman deities, post-apocalyptic settings, billionaire boyfriends, interstellar wars, serial killers, conspiracy theories, Tudor England settings, or Viking invasions. Tropes provide a sense of familiarity and predictability; that is, they provide comfort to the reader. They also provide shortcuts as far as storytelling is concerned. The less time you explain what a dragon is, the more time you are able to focus on what unique contributions you may have to your storyworld and its genre(s).
Conventional, yet Unique World-building: In a sort of addendum to the above, the writer must understand the conventions of the genre(s) they are trying to write into. At the same time, something new must be built on top of previous conventions. The reader needs at least a few innovative details to become excited by. At the same time, I would say that awareness of conventions and trends also fits into this, because it means you know what topics and tropes to write away from because they might have already been popularized by another writer whose arena you don’t want to fight your way into. Finding an under-popular genre/subgenre that already has established roots in publishing might be a smarter way to go.
Escapism and Immersion: Much like what Moshfegh said in the quote above, the reader needs to be able to be transported to some place. Reading needs to be an experience of qualitative time. The reader must get lost in the pages, often combined with their genre expectations. For fantasy, this could mean experiencing wonder. For sci-fi, this could mean experiencing possibility. For horror, it’s all about atmosphere—feeling dread. With mystery or thrillers, you’re the invisible assistant helping to crack the case. In other instances, it could simply come down to wish fulfillment. At the end of the day, this often just comes down to being able to develop setting(s) that your reader can move about in.
Compelling Protagonists &/or Strong Supporting Characters: Perhaps this is self-evident, the protagonist needs to be someone compelling and entertaining. They need to hold your average reader’s interest, even if they are not fully likeable. Additionally, dialogue and exposition is key. Readers want to understand character voices and what separates one character from the next. I do think it’s possible to create an empty protagonist that is just a stand-in to create space for the reader to self-insert into, but this also means the other characters (or setting or plot or all of the above) need to be rich enough to compensate for how flat the protagonist is. Either way, the protagonist needs to grow and change or otherwise be changed by the world around them by the end of the book or series.
Universal Themes: This isn’t the space for nuance or introspective gray areas. This isn’t the place for a deep look at the human condition. We’re talking about ‘Good vs. Evil,’ ‘Love Conquers All,’ ‘The Struggle for Equality,’ ‘Destroying Nature Is Bad.…’ The theme is apparent within the first fifty pages, and might even be directly announced to the reader via the protagonist or a secondary character. The reader may experience ethical dilemmas and moral questions—encouraging readers to think deeply—but not too deeply. The themes are easily recognized because the reader has been encountering them in books, movies, and television for their entire lives.
Broad Appeal: The manuscript is written towards cross-generational appeal. While it may come from a type of ‘#OwnVoices’ demographic or intersection of identities, commercial publishing often means trying to generalize more than specialize. Alternatively, this means writing toward the majority; diversity tends to exist in the secondary characters, if it exists at all. Additionally, genres may be blended to attract wider readerships (see ‘Romance Elements’ below).
Romance Elements: While this is something else that seems purely optional, I would be remiss to mention how many commercial novels/series develop romance between characters on the page. The difference between a book fitting into the proper ‘Romance’ genre and books with romantic elements is that with the former, everything is being done in service of bringing two (or more) characters together. Most romance readers read a book with the expectation that the love interests will get together and experience a HEA (happily ever after) or HFN (happily for now) by the end of the book. I’d say that most non-commercial books forefront some other aspect of the plot, and romantic or sexual dalliances become a sub-genre of the primary genre. One advantage to romantic subplots is that they can help bake in some character growth for the protagonist or side characters.
Affinity Groups: For me, this means creating a culture outside of books, that is, nurturing your potential fandom by giving them in-narrative options to associate with and feel seen by. It’s a mixture between astrology and high school cliques. The Harry Potter books popularized this with Hogwarts and its four Houses. Fourth Wing has four Quadrants (paths) that students can "major in" at Basgiath War College; A Court of Thorns and Roses has various monarchical Courts ruled by Faerie folk; Hunger Games had its various Districts…. While I don’t think this is necessary by any means, it’s an opportunity to rally collectives within your audience(s). The categories are artificial, but we are tasked with asking ourselves where we fit in. Are you the jock, the nerd, the goth, or the oddball? Additionally, assuming you do end up traditionally publishing, this is also potentially throwing a bone to marketing and publicity to engage with.
What do you think? Is there something I’m missing inside this thought experiment? Does my thesis sound plausible? Is it actually possible to reverse-engineer the market? Is it cynical to write this way? Perverse? Another means of survival? For what it’s worth, I don’t think most people write to find fame, success, or financial security. Just in the same way that most people don’t buy a lotto ticket assuming they’re actually going to win. That all being said, is there really much difference than a poet-writer following rules to create a sestina vs. a set of rules to generate a novel in a line of genre tradition? Is there not still artistry and making careful choices based on a type of knowledge? I’m still not certain, but it’s been my obsession-of-the-month—and an oddly enjoyable rabbit hole to fall down.
Until next time,
JD