Hit Lit[image error] takes you on a journey from the Southern States racism of Gone with the Wind and How to Kill a Mockingbird through the terrors of a “murderous creature” in Jaws to murder and conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code. You’ll also learn what made these and another eight novels into bestsellers. At least that’s the promise made by author James. W. Hall.

James W. Hall is a professor at Florida International
University where he has taught literature and creative writing for around
thirty years. He has written poetry, has a Masters in creative writing and a
PhD in literature. As young boy he loved reading mystery novels and as an
professor he used to enjoy novels that, in his words were: considered avant-garde… these novels are experimental, fresh and
exciting, and best of all they require someone like me to help the uninitiated
student fully appreciate their esoteric beauty.  

One day, when working on his class for the next semester, Professor Hall came upon lists of bestsellers from the past. Among them were books he had read long before and books he’d wanted to read. He decided to take a break from the avant-garde and to offer a course on popular fiction. Reading novels for the course, Hall was surprised how much he felt connected to characters, such Scarlett O’Hara, and at how the excitement he’d felt as a child returned to his reading. He’s been teaching popular fiction ever since, examining what makes a book “successful.”

hot button topics

I became interested in reading Hit Lit during the Write.Publish.Sell Women in Publishing summit when author Joan Dempsey mentioned the inclusion of “hot button” topics as a major reason for many novels’ success and recommended Hall’s book. A hot button is a burning issue of the day, such as the American civil rights movement, which was in full swing in 1960 when Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, was published with its theme of racism. The novel has endured partly because, sadly, so has its theme; but even if racism is eradicated, people will always be interested in fairness. To Kill a Mockingbird was topical, but it also stood the test of time, unlike The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. This also hit on topics of the day but dated more than the other books on Hall’s list. So there’s a fine line in finding a topic burningly relevant to today’s world that will last into tomorrow. 

what’s in a bestseller

Hit Lit is about
more than hot button topics. Hall sees twelve features in common in the twelve
bestselling novels he chose. “Hot buttons” is one of these. The others are:

An Offer You Can’t RefuseThe Big PictureThe Golden CountryNothing but the Facts, Ma’amSecret SocietiesBumpkins Versus SlickersGod is Great, or Is He?American Dream/American NightmareA Dozen MavericksFractured FamiliesThe Juicy Parts.  

Some of these features are self-explanatory, so I’ll expand on a few that aren’t. While An Offer You Can’t Refuse is clearly a nod to The Godfather by Mario Puzo, (on Hall’s list) it doesn’t mean that you should go around threatening murder but that your novel needs to be entertaining and exciting enough that readers can’t put it down. You must hook them with the first few pages and then keep them wanting more. This chapter covers some of the tricks authors use to achieve that.

In the chapter, The Big Picture, Hall says that bestselling novels take place on expansive historical or social stages with that setting and its customs and beliefs getting more attention than the inner emotional world of the protagonists. This is similar to the hot button, in that if you can tap into something much bigger than the day-to-day lives of your characters then your novel has wider relevance. Nothing but the Facts, Ma’am simply means that bestselling novels include a lot of factual information.

Hall describes The Golden Country as a “lost Eden”: a place or time of innocence or beauty. In my opinion, this is the book’s weakest chapter, with Hall doing contortions to fit his chosen bestsellers into the theme. When the “lost Eden” is the natural world, it is filled with danger as well as beauty, which Hall attributes to American history, saying the wilderness: forged our pioneer spirit and helped stamp us with an enduring rough-and-tumble sensibility that distinguishes us from our fussy cousins across the Atlantic.

Hall backs up this theory with a reference to the novel 1984 by British writer, George Orwell (from
where he gets the name Golden Country.) He says Orwell’s Golden Country is an
idealised lost natural world and that American writers are more ambivalent in
their portrayals – because of that aforementioned tussle with the wilderness. As
a fussy cousin whose ancestors eked a living from land and sea and often
perished in the latter, I can definitely say that ambivalence is not American,
but universal. You can find the motif of the lost Eden in thousands of European
books, including fairy tales. Even Hall admits it appears in many books that
aren’t bestsellers.  

And it’s not in every one that is. With Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s semi-autobiographical tale of sex and drug addiction in the 1960s entertainment industry, Hall struggles to fit the novel into his narrative of the lost Eden, coming up with a lothario’s attempt to seduce the protagonist with a war story about a fellow soldier who reminisces about his farm the day before his death. Hall says of this character: …his brief appearance … resonates like the chime of a well-struck bell throughout the rest of the novel.

Valley of the Dolls is one of the few books on Hall’s list I have read. I was eighteen at the time, and what I remember about it is definitely not that passage! I did not pick up any sense of something more enduring, more profound, more fundamentally American, than simple existential turmoil.

Maybe that’s because I’m a fussy cousin, but I doubt it.

the real bestsellers

And that brings us to another weakness in Hit Lit. Its subtitle is Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers – but really it should be American Mostly-Twentieth Century Bestsellers. All Hall’s bestsellers are American and The Da Vinci Code was published in the 21st century.

While Hall’s bestsellers are all American, they are not the biggest bestsellers of the twentieth century. Number one is Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupé coming second. Hall’s choices aren’t even the biggest American bestsellers. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, released in 1951, sold over 65 million books, which is way more than many of the books on this list. Even Jonathan Livingston Seagull outstrips several. But then, like many of the books Hall omits, neither of those would come close to fitting into his definition of what makes a successful book. In the foreword he explains that he made some changes to the bestseller list he worked from, but doesn’t explain why. His logic for including books by John Grisham, Stephen King, Dan Brown and Tom Clancy is that he’s confident these books would be added to any modern reader’s top ten! His logic for missing Jonathan Livingston Seagull is that it’s mushy. He doesn’t even mention Catcher in the Rye. I think this is a pity. Even if these books were outliers, it would have been interesting to read some analysis of why they succeeded.

what’s missing from bestsellers

What’s missing from most of the bestselling novels Hall
chose is introspective, contemplative characters. Instead, he says: their pages are populated with apparent
stereotypes–the self-absorbed superficial southern belle, the young lawyer on
the make, the stalwart, stuffy CIA analyst, the guileless small-town girl who
loses her innocence.

So, if you, like me, are more interested in fiction that
delves deep into the human psyche, you might wonder why on earth I’m reading
about these books, and why I’ve even gone out and bought one of them. You might
wonder even more when I tell you I realised while reading Hit Lit that I truly am not interested in writing a bestseller at
any cost. Just there are features of bestsellers Hall lists that I have no
intention of incorporating into my novels there are features of my own writing
– such as introspective characters – that I’m not willing to discard. And,
having discovered Salinger outsold most of these, I don’t think writers need to
tie themselves in knots trying to incorporate every bestselling feature.

what I got from reading Hit Lit

But – you knew there was a “but” didn’t you? And here is it: while reading Hit Lit, I came to see that I could learn from it to improve the novel I’m currently working on. People often describe my writing as: “beautiful”, “lyrical” and similar words; for a long time, I thought achieving that quality was the most important aspect of fiction writing. However, Hall asks the question that I probably should have asked a long time ago:

So how is it that each of these characters blindsided me with such force that they made me question my cocky assumptions that psychological complexity was the sine qua none of literary achievement?

I can’t give you the answer to that in one sentence, because it took Hall well over 200 pages, but here’s one clue:

For the most part,
these novels are thoroughly sincere and heartfelt. There’s no attempt to cast
furtive signals to the reader, no evidence the language is trying to say
anything more than exactly what it says. It is that simplicity of tone, that
artlessness, that wins the hearts of so many readers…

It could make a writer weep to read that. Artlessness is what
wins hearts, not beautiful, lyrical writing. Have I wasted my entire writing
life, trying to create art when artlessness is what people want?

Well no. Catcher in
the Rye is art for sure, and from Hall’s list, To Kill a Mockingbird stands out as the most obviously artful. It
is a Pulitzer prize winner, its prose is frequently described as “lyrical,” and
the it is only the one of Hall’s top twelve to also make the Encyclopaedia
Britannica’s: 12 Novels Considered the
Best Ever Written.

I’m pretty certain it’s possible to create writing that is
beautiful and wins the hearts of
readers. I like simplicity of tone, and believe it can be artful. I’m not a fan
of obscure words just for the sake of them, nor of novels in which the author plays
games with the reader by withholding information in the way an adult might
taunt a child simply because they know something the child doesn’t.

Hall says the writing in these books win the hearts of so
many readers: for the very reason that it
is not exclusive. There is no attempt in the style or the storytelling method
to favor readers in the know over normal folks. Anyone and everyone is freely
admitted and on equal footing. No segregation allowed.

I can understand why Hall chose to omit the books he did. It’s easier to come up with a formula if you choose books that follow one, and possibly easier for writers to follow that formula than to hope for the best if writing a bestseller is their heart’s desire. In his introduction, Hall considers other factors besides his twelve features, and largely discards them – factors such as advertising, or endorsements by celebrities such as Oprah. He does so because he says it is impossible to replicate these and so he focuses on what it appears writers can control. But some of the books he chose were so heavily promoted this really can’t be ignored. For instance, the publicity budget for Valley of the Dolls was $50,000, (around $400,000 in today’s money.) Among the various tricks employed, Susann’s husband found out which bookshops provided the figures for the bestseller lists and had a small army of people out buying from those shops. When a book appears in bestseller lists, that gives credibility as well as visibility – and that does matter.

By discounting this, and by focusing so tightly on his chosen twelve features, Hall gives us a set of possible tools, but it is a bit like giving someone flour, butter, eggs and sugar and saying, “Bake something.” You could make a tasty cake with that, or you could make something terrible. A skilled baker would know the amount of each ingredient to add and would know which extra ingredients would make something really special. Some people can bake amazing bread with nothing but flour and water, whereas others wouldn’t even know where to start.

So what’s an aspiring author to do? In the end, it’s worth
reading Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers[image error], and if there are
elements you can easily incorporate into your own writing, then do, but I’m not
convinced that trying to rigidly “follow the rules” would necessarily mean
you’d produce a bestseller.