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.

LET’S HANG OUT!

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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. <...