Home » Reading & Literature » Mass Market Fiction » Three Things Every Bestseller Has

Three Things Every Bestseller Has

© Deborah Cannon

Every writer knows that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. What does a bestselling story have that others lack?

The beginning of a bestseller includes an Inciting Incident. An inciting incident is an event that either 'happens' to the hero or that the hero 'makes happen' which sets his life off balance. He reacts to this event by trying to right the balance of his life, which sends him on his quest. The key to making the inciting incident work is to have the hero react. If the hero does not react or reacts too late, the suspense is lost.

In Peter Benchley's blockbuster, JAWS, sheriff Brody finds the body of a dead half-eaten girl on the beach. This sets him on his quest to destroy the shark before the shark can destroy the town's livelihood by scaring off the tourists. This raises the story's main question: Will the sheriff kill the shark or will the shark kill the sheriff?

Imagine how boring this novel would have been had the sheriff not known of the shark's presence or the death of the girl right from the start. Imagine if the story opened with officer Brody moving from New York city to Amity Island, looking forward to his quiet new life as a resort town sheriff. We meet his family, the mayor, the townspeople. Then the tourists arrive and have a lovely time on the beach. The girl is found half-eaten and sheriff Brody calls in the CSI team from the mainland rather than dealing with the problem himself.

The middle of the book can be the hardest part to write. The excitement of inventing your fictional world has passed; the ending is too remote. Middles are where things often go wrong. Holes appear in the logic and credibility of your plot. Characters refuse to play the roles they should. Heroes become pedestrian and villains become hackneyed. Your subplots run into dead ends and the narrative comes to a halt.

What to do? Bestselling authors raise the stakes. If you have set up your inciting incident and placed it at the right moment in your narrative and your hero reacts, the direction of your story will be obvious. What you can do to guide your plot to a gripping climax is to crank it up a notch. Everyone who has ever taken a creative writing course or read a how-to writing book knows that you are supposed to give your characters High Stakes. But have you done this? One way to test your manuscript is to ask yourself: What is my hero's goal? What does he lose if he doesn't get what he wants? Something huge has to be at risk. And if he loses the fight, the consequences must be devastating.

The copyright of the article Three Things Every Bestseller Has in Mass Market Fiction is owned by Deborah Cannon. Permission to republish Three Things Every Bestseller Has in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.