How to Write a Bestseller: Tips from the Industry’s Finest

When reading how-to tips from any writer, always remember that what technique or attitude works for him or her might be so alien to your creative nature that to adopt it unthinkingly will do you no good and might hamstring you. While grammar, syntax, and craft can be taught, writing fiction is–or should be–such an intensely personal enterprise that the story and its meaning comes from a place deep inside yourself and involves approaches that are unique to you. Take advice, yes, but think it through thoroughly and be sure it works for you.

A truly big book is a perfect blend of inspired premise, larger-than-life characters, high-stakes story, deeply felt themes, vivid setting and much more. It is a kind of literary gestalt, a welling up of inspired material…

Get out of the past. Get over trends. To write high-impact 21st century fiction, you must start by becoming highly personal. Find your voice, yes, but more than that, challenge yourself to be unafraid, independent, open, aware, and true to your own heart. You must become your most authentic self

Writers work similarly to actors; you have to be able to identify with a character. Even if you’re writing a psychopath, you have to find that little piece of psychopath that you have within yourself, and then you have to enlarge them a bit. Scary? Well, that’s what you have to do. Most humans are complex — we’re so full of different ingredients that we’ll be able to find most things within ourselves. Just use your imagination. Crime writing can be a dark universe, so, mentally, it’s tiring to write.

It’s that sense of possibility. That feeling of your heart welling so big it could explode. Everything felt so big and so important in that moment, like all the parts of the universe had finally—yet fleetingly—clicked into place. It’s, in a word, intense.

Ever since I began writing, I’ve been a collector. Not of things—shells, stamps, figurines, stuffed monkeys, autographs, etc.—but of possibilities. Odd happenings and images from around the world and in my dreams that could—and often do—make their way into my writing. While many might be considered mundane observances, paired with the right character in the right situation, I know they’ll make terrifically fantastic occurrences.

Show Not Tell. It’s better to show through a character’s actions than “tell” by having the narrator describe. Ex. 1: “Garth became nervous” is “telling.” It is better to “show” with: “Garth’s hands trembled.”

I think what hooks people into my stories is the pace. I try to leave out the parts people skip. But that’s my style. I read books by a lot of great writers. I think I’m an okay writer, but a very good storyteller.

Let the title choose itself. There are no rules when it comes to the title of a novel. Ideas come in all different ways.

Pull literary heists. Do I steal from other books? Definitely. And if I’m a thief, I can tell you I’m stealing but I can’t tell you who I have robbed.

Make it a daily habit. The only way to improve your writing – or get started at all – is to do it daily. Brande recommends 15 minutes. Philippa [Pride] says seven minutes, because it’s very achievable but also enough to make progress. The real test is whether you can commit to the routine.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.

Find a paragraph that sounds exactly the way you want to sound for this work, and tape it to your computer so that it’s always in front of you.

It’s easy to daydream about your story but you have to sit down and write.

Creative energy is like toothpaste. Once you squeeze it out you better use it because it’s gone after that.

Imagine that I’m telling you about my day and I say, “I woke up. I ate breakfast. I left for work.” Is that a story? After all, it has a protagonist who makes choices that lead to a natural progression of events, it contains three acts and it has a beginning, a middle and an end—and that’s what makes something a story, right? Well, actually, no. It’s not.

Cause and effect are King. Everything in a story must be caused by the action or event that precedes it. When a reader tells you that he couldn’t put a book down, often it’s because everything in the story followed logically. Stories that move forward naturally, cause to effect, keep the reader engrossed and flipping pages.

A story is a set of motivational units, strung like pearls on a string. Every scene must serve a specific purpose. Every scene should propel the story forward. Every scene must make the next scene inevitable

Imagine that I’m telling you about my day and I say, “I woke up. I ate breakfast. I left for work.” Is that a story? After all, it has a protagonist who makes choices that lead to a natural progression of events, it contains three acts and it has a beginning, a middle and an end—and that’s what makes something a story, right? Well, actually, no. It’s not.

And if, while your egoistically trying to get immortality, while you’re trying to make the world a better place, while you’re trying to get at people who put you down, please don’t forget, you have to entertain us. You have to enable us to look at ourselves. Because when we’re looking up at the screen, we’re not looking at the actors who are saying your wonderful lines, we’re not looking at the characters you have so lavishly and lovingly created, we’re certainly not looking at you, we’re looking at ourselves. Because only we are the storytellers. And only we can give you immortality.