Hit Lit Book Report

So the author studied 12 of the all time best-sellers of the last 75 years and noted some recurring themes and features. Everything he’s observed is consistent with both The Bestseller Code and the Hero Journey

Bestsellers tend to be written in earthy, straightforward, simple prose. Character motives are straightforward, clear and precise and easy to sympathize with. Must express a deeply-rooted emotion.

1. An offer you can’t refuse: This is the high-concept premise or the dramatic question. Genres tend to have their own dramatic questions. Will the detective catch the killer? Will the hero manage to survive? How will the character’s adult life be shaped by the events of their youth?

1. 1. Bestsellers ask this question right away. Will Scarlett ever marry Ashley? Will the shark come back for a second bite? How will Michael Corleone resist being drawn into the family business?
	2. Bestsellers make themselves unique with genre mashups. Eg. Hunt for Red October is a detective story and an international intrigue thriller.
	3. Complications: Ashley marries Melanie. Scarlett marries Charles. Rhett tries to seduce Scarlett. Michael’s wife is murdered
	4. All the heroes in these novels are men and women of deep conviction and fervent, stubborn resolve, capable of passions that rise well beyond the normal range of human experience.
	5. Readers seem to get a huge dopamine reward for deciphering the secret thoughts and motives of the characters.
	6. Reader has to understand and sympathize with the protag’s driving force.
	7. Pity and fear for the protag keeps the reader engaged. Aristotle said “Pity and fear are the great emotional engines for tragedy (drama).”
	8. Speed. Get the reader engaged right away in the present without wallowing in backstory. Characters arrive fully formed on the stage.
	9. Suspense: the protag encounters increasingly perilous obstacles
	10. Readers like to be privy to facts the protag doesn’t have
	11. Ticking clock. Pressures mount. Time is running out.

1. Hot Buttons

1. 1. One surefire way to rile up folks is to raise the controversy du jour. Whether it was a conscious strategy or not, the authors on our list raised one or more highly contentious topics of the day.

1. 1. 1. Racism
		2. Sexism
		3. Sexual conflict
		4. war/political upheaval
		5. Evildoers
		6. Secret societies/secret knowledge
		7. family
		8. etc.
	2. Create a simple storyline that idealizes one side of the argument and demonizes the other.
	3. Don’t be so topical that your story is outdated in ten years.

1. The big picture--colossal characters doing magnificent things on a sweeping stage

1. 1. The most successful characters were embodyments of their age--Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, The Invisible Man
	2. Vital, earthy, even coarse characters.
	3. A big villain--The Catholic Church, the institution of slavery/racism, the civil war, a monstrous shark, two world superpowers

1. The Golden Country--America as paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs in recent bestsellers

1. 1. Old world v New. Virginal wilderness (a new Eden) v centuries of tradition and civilization
	2. A more primitive, earthy world that refines the protag and reduces him/her to essentials (Into the Woods)
	3. The baseline or true homeland from which the protag is tragically alienated and is struggling to get back to--Scarlett struggling to return to Tara and restore its original beauty and strength.
	4. The snake in the garden, the bite from the apple
	5. The garden contaminated
	6. Golden opportunity--one man’s golden country is another one’s opportunity to exploit

1. Knowledge/Expertise--An abundance of facts and information, including everything from etiquette to the nuts-and-bolts layout of a submarine fills these twelve books. The didactic function is as old as the novel form itself and continues to be a chief attraction in bestselling novels.

1. 1. Everything you ever wanted to know about sexual exploits/nuclear submarines/great European art/social etiquette etc. Apparently, readers love to learn stuff, or at least to feel that the author is an authority.
	2. Gossip and inside information
	3. Hall suggests that readers read in part to improve themselves. I personally am dubious about this conclusion.

1. Secret Societies--all twelve of these bestsellers expose the inner workings of at least one secret society--any group that for one reason or another has isolated itself from the rest of the world by creating a collection of rules, rites, sacraments or covert behaviors that reinforces its separation from the larger population. It is exclusive, usually powerful in some domain, with its own initiation rituals, sense of justice and duty, sometimes its own language and even its own criminal code

1. 1. From the International Order of the Friendly Society of the Raccoons to the illuminati to the elaborate social rules and mores of high society. Joe McCarthy’s claim to have the names of communists and Soviet spies.
	2. Privileged Glimpses--seeing into a world from which we are normally excluded
	3. Heroes of these stories are overwhelmingly poor or lower middle class
	4. Secret realms of knowledge--shark hunting, the law etc.
	5. Bedroom secrets--what naughtinesses are people up to behind closed doors.
	6. Conspiracies

1. Bumpkins v Slickers--In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.

1. 1. Basically, this is the transition from the protag’s ordinary world--whatever that happens to be--to the special world. Into the Woods again.
	2. Fish out of water
	3. Country girls in the city
	4. City boys in the country
	5. City is a kind of proving ground
	6. Contrariwise, the rural may be portrayed as evil--pagan, ignorant, uncivilized

1. Religion--Our twelve bestsellers all feature religion in prominent ways, consistently critiquing orthodox religious practice and the dangers of zealotry.

1. 1. Religious themed novels sell--from The DaVinci code to the Left Behind series to The Lord of the Rings
	2. Bestsellers tend overall to be heretical--suspicious of traditional or orthodox religion, often coming down on the side of atheism even in books like The Exorcist.
	3. Outing Hypocrisy
	4. STruggle between faith and doubt
	5. Common sense v religious conviction

1. American Dream v American Nightmare--Americans delight in reenactments of our national myths. The rise from humble roots to become rich and powerful. A character struggling against injustice and, finally, triumphing over oppression. And we are also grimly fascinated by the flip side of these stories.

1. 1. Girl goes to the city to seek her fortune and is corrupted and destroyed instead.
	2. Good, decent boy-scout type fellow falls prey to unthinkable horrors instead of being rewarded for virtue and hard work
	3. Hard-working law student winds up working for the evil law firm
	4. Immigrant Narrative--the triumph of social mobility
	5. The bootstrap myth
	6. Cynicism about the myth of equality, justice and social mobility
	7. The American Dream has both a light and a dark side--it may reward the good, but it may just as easily reward evil
	8. The golden promise of America as a paradise

1. A Dozen Mavericks--The heroes and heroines of our twelve bestsellers are all rebels, loners, misfits or mavericks. They don’t fit in worth a damn, and that’s one of the reasons we love them so much.

1. 1. The protagonist sees the falsity in convention and resolves to go his own way.
	2. There may be a thin line between a maverick and a slacker.
	3. The reader’s respect for orthodoxy tends to ebb and flow. In some periods, they admire the maverick who goes his own way, then ten years later, they may vilify the same behavior and prefer stories in which the individual makes adjustments and sacrifices to fit into the larger social context.
	4. Standing up for right and justice against all society
	5. Wanting to be normal
	6. Being dragged back into the conventional world
	7. Books and Mavericks--it shouldn’t be a surprise that writers of books create heroes who are bookish oddballs and flaky loners, outsiders.

1. Fractured Families--in each of our twelve novels, a member of a broken family finds an ingenious way to transcend his or her crazy stress

1. 1. All twelve of the stories studied feature protags with broken families--lost spouses, parents, children, or all three.
	2. Life traumas--protags tend to have lots of ‘em
	3. Sacred family--threat to family is a significant motivator--threats to children, threats to spouse etc.
	4. Female-free zone--all men’s men, manly men together. Women may be motivators but never appear onstage
	5. Missing parents

1. The Juicy Parts--In every novel on our list, one key sexual encounter plays a decisive role in the outcome of the plot and in the transformation of the protagonist.

1. 1. Books about sex are second in frequency after historical novels and are about equal to spies and intrigue (which is interesting in light of The Bestseller Code which points out that actual sex scenes occupy only 1%-3% of the total wordage of bestselling books, but I think the reason for the disparity is that a book may be \*about\* sex (and the tensions it produces) without showing the actual sex. That is, the foreplay is more interesting than the main event.
	2. The topic, whether an activity, a preoccupation or a problem, forms a major theme or is described frequently enough to be important to the book...one scene of a battle does not make a war novel, and one scene of sex sufficient for an R movie rating does not make a book about sex.
	3. Sex scenes in bestsellers seem to be at the center of gender relations--reenacting one of America’s most dramatic social movements--the struggle of women for empowerment, equality and independence (not sure Hall supports this sufficiently)
	4. Sex as female power--the one area where a woman could reliably control a man (although the female protag may ultimately find this is an illusion)
	5. Heroines break with  gender stereotypes--having a radical change of perspective after an intense sexual encounter
	6. Sex as a watershed event, the demarcation/transformation after which the characters confront the ultimate challenge of the story. (personally, I think this harks back to the “encounter with the goddess” that pops up in the hero journey)
	7. May provoke a nasty puritan backlash--the woman (rarely the man) is punished for transgressing social limits (goes back to sex as female power which must immediately be punished/destroyed)
	8. Sex as a trap for men--oops, now he can be blackmailed for cheating on the wife. Not the same as being punished for being a sexual person. It’s a betrayal by a wicked woman who used her unlawful sexuality to tempt and seduce a poor helpless man who is prey to his own urges, and it wasn’t (really) his fault.
	9. Sexual awakening--sex may even have redemptive power
	10. Religious sex--sex as worship (Song of Solomon anyone?) primitive fertility rites, encounter with the goddess, feminine power