Raising the Stakes

Most creative writers spend their lives searching for the concept that will take the world by storm. If you’re attempting to write a novel and you’re not thinking this way, I would say your chances of making it are on a par with Iran’s chances of not getting bombed into oblivion by Israel if it continues playing with nuclear technology.

Of course there are plenty of novels out there with low-concept themes. These are the type of works that get the Man Booker Prize panel very excited. One person’s extraordinary journey through life, blah blah blah. Hey, nothing wrong with that if you want an adventure in literary craftsmanship – these authors can certainly write – but if you take a look at the list of winners over the past two decades I doubt many names will mean much to the Average Joe wandering around their local bookshop looking for a Sunday afternoon escape.

James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, and Ian McEwen stand out as writers you would know; names that have, almost by default, entered Average Joe’s consciousness. The rest … well, call me a literary heathen, but they mean little or nothing to me.

Before you approach the arduous task of writing a novel, you must establish what it is you are trying to create. Will the reader who wants a rip-roaring adventure about some super-spy battling to save the world from nuclear Armageddon really care if the prose is literary High Art? I’d suggest such a combination would be extremely detrimental. Many of the most successful blockbuster novels of recent years are nothing more than good stories competently written. The Twilight saga, the Vampire Diaries, Harry Potter. Are they literary masterpieces? No. Do they need to be? No.

You also need to establish in your mind what it is you personally wish to derive from your work. Are you after literary acclaim? Do you wish to fill your bank account with millions? Do you simply yearn to see your name on the front of a published work? Just one published work so you can die fulfilled?

Most writers fail because they don’t answer these questions. They don’t realise that the subject of their novel can never fulfil the scope of their ambitions. They won’t pause to consider whether other people will find even vaguely interesting what they may find utterly compelling.

The advice to write about what you know, or to write what you’d want to read, can be seriously flawed. If you ache with excitement whenever you see a new tail number on an aeroplane because you haven’t yet got it in your little notebook, and you want to convey that passion to the world in literary form, I’d say you’re probably not sitting on the next blockbuster novel.

There is no reason nowadays not to write about what you’d like to know. The internet provides all the research sources you could ever need to make yourself appear an expert on practically any subject, and you don’t need to fund a trip overseas to be able to convey the allure and sights and sounds of another country.

And you definitely do not need a novel idea. What I mean is, you don’t need to invent a new genre, or even create anything particularly radical within an old one. Although the most famous vampire novel was Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the first one was Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819. Since then, vampire literature has enthralled readers around the world. Amongst the best-known would be Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in 1975, The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, published from 1976 through to 2003, LJ Smith’s The Vampire Diaries first published as a trilogy back in 1991 and a hit TV series now, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, which began in 2005.

That’s nearly two hundred years of just one division of the horror genre, and you can bet it’s nowhere near exhausted.

As for write what you know? Which of those authors has ever been bitten by a vampire?