Anthony Burgess concluded that best-selling novels are either romantic or didactic or both. Didactic means that which teaches or is morally instructive. Put another way, everybody likes romance and many readers want to learn when they read a story. He didn’t intend that his conclusions be regarded as a magical formula; everybody can’t write a best seller. But what he learned can help aspiring authors tailor their novels to the apparent psychic needs of their readers.
Romantic Novels
Burgess uses romance in the sense of everything having to do with the boy-girl thing, the emotional and sexual juice that makes boys different from girls. Viewed this way, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Barbara Cartland’s bodice rippers are both about romance. Men, being generally more crass, like skin and sex. Women, ordinarily more sexually civilized and restrained, crave romance in an emotional sense. They like the in-out too, but their psychic needs are more diffuse. Men are focused.
Novels that offer romance in whatever emotional or carnal level are novels that people more often buy and read. Women read more fiction than do men; that is why romance novels are by the far the most popular genre of fiction.
Didactic Novels
James Michener wrote bestselling novels that were famously didactic. He wrote stories about Hawaii, the Chesapeake Bay, Colorado and other places that traced those places from the primordial ooze through geographic evolution and the arrival and activities of generations of families and founders.
Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code is didactic; the reader learns all about Christian stories and rumors plus all sorts of secret codes and societies.
Jean Auel wrote commercially successful novels giving her readers details about way cave men lived. Her stories were also romantic; her heroine, who is seemingly everywhere and discovers everything, has a lover at her side, a real stud.
The Aspiring Author
Does this mean a beginning writer should attempt to copy Henry Miller of James Michener? No. Absolutely not. It does mean that you should think about the emotional needs that cause people to read fiction. What needs welling up from the psychic murk are more likely to make a potential reader pick your book up from a shelf and ignore the one next to it?
Male and Female Writers
The independence ordinarily afforded men give them more opportunity to have a variety of experiences. Aspiring women authors are often limited by their responsibilities as wives and mothers. The human imagination is a labyrinth of potential stories. We know from the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates among other women authors, that the female imagination can roam to some amazing places.
Emily Dickinson famously said, “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” When you sit down at your computer, remember to take your reader to lands that your reader does not know and wants to experience, and if there is romance and sex on the trip, so much the better.
Richard Hoyt - Novelist Richard Hoyt has a M.S. in journalism from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D in American studies from the University of Hawaii. ...
