The bestseller lists have always been dominated by tellers of good stories. From Dickens and Poe to Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling nothing sells better than a book with a brilliant story.

Truly great stories endure for thousands of years. The fairy tales of Cinderella, Aladin and Red Riding Hood have their roots in the spoken word of ancient cultures, going back to times before people could even read or write.

Look at television. The most watched programmes on TV tend to be the ones with the best, most original stories: ‘Heroes’, ‘Lost’, the soaps. People love to be taken out of their drab, everyday lives and propelled into worlds beyond their experience. The same goes for movies.

It doesn’t matter what the setting is – whether it’s Hollywood, Hawaii or the next street to where you live – the most important factor is the story.

And for a successful story, you need structure. You have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You have to have a protagonist who experiences conflict when he strives to achieve his (or her) goal.

For more about story structure and plotting, check out:

Million Dollar Story

Where many would-be writers go wrong is in thinking that they can copy a winning formula. Some get away with it with limited success, but everyone involved – from their publisher to their readers and even themselves – know they are following rather than leading.
They also miss the point. To write a “blockbuster”, a true bestseller, you need to be original. Though maybe not totally original.
Before Joanne Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, there was no tradition of books about schoolboy wizards. If there had been, her efforts would almost certainly have been lost in the crowd.
J.K. Rowling didn’t invent stories about wizards and she didn’t invent stories set in public schools (as we call “private” schools in the UK). What she did was to combine the two into a situation that offered a wealth of dramatic possibilities. The result was a series of fantastically successful stories about a schoolboy wizard called Harry Potter and his friends.
Needless to say, there have been dozens and dozen of books published since then trying to emulate J.K. Rowling’s success, but none of them have made their authors millionaires.
Dan Brown didn’t so much invent the genre of “code mysteries” as resurrect it and give it new life. Back in 2003 the thriller genre was in decline. Stale novels containing serial characters who had run out of plots and the demise of the Soviet Union combined to deflate the genre. ‘The Da Vinci Code’ woke everyone up with its great story, full of original aspects.
As a reviewer, I’ve lost track of the dozens of copycat novels that have plopped on to my mat since then. One even managed to top the New York Times bestseller lists. But the bottom line is that none of these clones made the impact or gave their authors the money that Dan Brown has earned from his original idea.
To make it really big, you’ve got to be original first.

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Although your novel must have a great story for it to succeed, it also needs to be populated by believable, flesh-and-blood, characters. Here’s a real review from Amazon (I’ll spare the author’s blushes by not identifying the book in question) that’s typical of many on there:
“Part of the blurb called it ‘unpretentious writing’, but it would be better to call it uninspired – I don’t think we’re witnessing the start of a stellar career: no cliché goes unused, and it’s the same with stereotype characters.
“I wanted to like this book – I like a period setting for crime novels, but for me the skill level just wasn’t there, and life’s too short to read so-so books.”
If the author had spent more time working on his characters, then I’ll bet that review would never have been so negative. Readers can forgive many failings in novels, including “no cliché going unturned”, but never cardboard or stereotypical characters. If the reader doesn’t care about and relate to the people in the book – especially the protagonist and the antagonist (a.k.a. hero and villain) – then all is lost.
Here’s a simple three-step way to generate real characters.
Step One: take a long, hard look at your story and decide exactly what characters you will need. Just the main guys, don’t worry about minor roles at this stage. Jot down the absolute basic information about who they are and what their roles are: protagonist, antagonist, protagonist’s friend, protagonist’s boss at work, and so on. You can give them names (though remember that nothing’s written in stone at this stage and everything can be changed and improved on before you start to write) or you can leave naming them until after step two.
Step Two: build up your characters into flesh and blood – metaphorically speaking. Think about what their part is in your story and slowly build up a picture of each character. Decide their sex. Their age. Think about their habits, what quirky mannerisms they might have. What do they look like?
Once you have a broad framework of physical aspects, move on to decide what motivates each character. What their past is. Write a mini biography for them. Think about how will they change during the course of your novel.
Remember: everything you write at this stage can be changed as you work on the other characters and begin to plot your story. If any character starts looking like or behaving like any other character you have seen in fiction or in the movies, change it. These are your characters, not someone else’s. Be original.
Step Three: interview your characters. Yes, pretend you are a radio or TV interviewer and ask your character a series of questions to find out who they are. Write down the questions and the answers. Imagine what their voices sound likes. If any questions do not receive satisfactory or unlikely answers, change the biography accordingly.
At the end of the process, you should have a set of believable, flesh and blood characters. And, even more important, you will know enough about them and what makes them tick to be able to write your story.
Here’s another useful hint: if, during the writing process, you run into a problem or a block concerning one or more of your characters, interview them again. Find out what they think. You might be surprised at the results.
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As you will already know, the plot (or storyline) is the main story of a novel. The question is whether you should work out a detailed plot before you start to write or not.
If you are aiming to write a blockbuster, then the answer is a resounding YES. You will remember the first tip: “The Story is Everything” and how without a properly worked out story, you have nothing. Working out that story is called plotting.
Whether or not you plot in advance, once you have written your novel it will have a storyline. The difference between a novel that’s written “on the hoof” without detailed planning and one that’s closely-plotted, could well be the difference between one that will never be published and one that sells a million copies.
Bestsellers, especially in the fields of thrillers, suspense, mystery, adventure and so on, are invariably closely plotted. Their authors have spent a long time working out stories that will please and excite their readers.
I’m always amazed at writers who would not set out on a fifty mile journey without an up-to-date road map and yet think nothing of embarking on a novel without any idea as to their eventual destination. And there are a thousand more chances of getting lost in a novel as there are in a fifty mile road trip!
Remember the old saying: “Fail to plan, plan to fail.”
For detailed plotting advice, check out my invaluable report, Million Dollar Story

Give your protagonist a hard time. Not because you should behave like a sadist but because conflict and adversity are what drives your story along.
If, for example, you are writing the script of a Road Movie in which your protagonist travels from Chicago to Los Angeles and nothing bad happens to him the whole way, then that would be one very boring movie. If, on the other hand, he were chased by a mad trucker, shot at by bikers and blown up in a diner, that would be more interesting.
Give your hero a worthy antagonist and make things look hopeless for him. Put obstacles in his way. If it looks like he’s about to succeed at something, snatch it away before it can happen.
Pile on the pressure from outside. If your hero is unjustly convicted and on the run, make ordinary, law-abiding citizens his enemies. Children should tell on him, people he thinks of as friends must give him up to the law.
And nature should play its part. If he’s hiding out, turn the night-time temperature down to minus ten. Blow away his shelter. Soak him in torrential rain. Poison his water.
The tougher things are for your hero and the tougher the opposition that faces him, the better your story will be.
Your hero should bend under the insurmountable odds that face him. All his strengths and skills must be stretched to breaking point. But he must never give up – at least, not for long.

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People don’t have to read your novel. There are plenty of other things they could be doing, such as watching television, walking the dog, mending the shelf in the bathroom and even (believe it or not) reading someone else’s book. It’s therefore imperative that you grab them with your first line and make sure you keep them until the very last.
Put everything you’ve got into the first line, the first paragraph and the first chapter. (That’s not to say you can take it easy with the rest of the book, just make sure the first is the creme de la creme.) Make that initial chapter as exciting an introduction to your fictional world as you possibly can. Don’t worry too much about explanations, about who’s who – all that can come later – just give them 100% action.
If your book is a romance, start with a steamy sex scene; if it’s a murder mystery, start with a killing; if it’s a western, start with a stampede or a shoot-out… you get the idea. You’ve got to hook your reader from the start. If you don’t, you’ll never see them again.
Modern action films start with a chase or a heist , sometimes even before the credits have rolled. Learn from the movie makers. They’re spending hundreds of million dollars making their product, a fortune marketing them, and they need it to succeed. The last thing they want is a mass walk-out from the cinema.
Occasionally, the opening ten minutes are the best thing in the movie, and that’s something you’ve got to guard against as a writer. Having started with a bang, you’ve got to make sure the rest of the novel lives up to it.
Don’t try and keep up the same pace throughout the novel, that would only serve to exhaust your reader. Regulate the speed and pace of the book to build up to a climax. Maybe several climaxes before the big bang at the end.
Once you’ve established who your characters are and the situation they’ve found themselves in, you’ve got to get the reader on your side and keep them there.
One essential is that the reader enjoys your protagonist as a character and must care what happens to him or her. That doesn’t mean to say that they have to approve of the lead character or even like them, as Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels and others ably demonstrate.
The reader also has to approve of the mission the hero embarks on, whether it be to win the girl (or boy) or save the world from nuclear annihilation. If the reader doesn’t give two hoots about the character or what he does then they’re not going to read any further.

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“What a great novel – I finished in a single sitting!” That’s the kind of comment you want.
Not (taken almost at random from the Amazon site): “I had to read the ending three times and I still cannot work out what actually happened. Parts of the rest of the story were almost as incomprehensible. Characters appeared and disappeared without any explanation and there’d be conversations you’d have to keep re-reading in order to work out who was saying what. A total disaster. Don’t waste your time like I did.” Ouch.
Aside from the obvious precaution of making sure that your plot is easy to follow, there are several ways to make reading your novel more of a pleasure. When naming characters, avoid two people having names that start with the same letter. Janet and Jemma, Pat and Pete, Eric and Ernst may be totally different in your mind, but to a reader they could easily be confused.
Write as if you were talking to a friend. Avoid long words and putting in two when one will do just as well. You might want to go easy on the adverbs too.
Cut out long descriptions that do nothing to advance the story. Do we need to know the kitchen is painted in three shades of green, “including the shade of lime you find in airport lounges”? It may add atmosphere but if there’s too much atmosphere, you’ll bore the reader.
Although it’s nice to know what kind of music the protagonist likes, we don’t need long lists of what he’s listening to. Aside from the fact that most people will not have heard of Jaco Pastorius, not everybody has the same musical taste and it will not advance the story one iota. The same goes for lists of cooking ingredients, the streets he travels down, and so on.
Don’t think you have to burden the reader with your characters on a 24 hour basis. Only tell us about the interesting things that happen. Let the reader fill in the blanks. We all eat breakfast, we all go to the toilet, and we don’t necessarily need to know about it when our hero does.
Elmore Leonard sums all this stuff up in a single line: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip”.
There’s another expression much loved by authors: “Murder your darlings”. It was coined by British critic and writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who, in his ‘On The Art Of Writing’ (1916) said: “…if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’”
This simply means that if you look at your writing and a passage stands out as a piece of particularly fine literature, then it must go. Unless you are writing high literary fiction or poetry (and I take it you are not), then writing should not look like writing.
Elmore Leonard again: “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”
One good tip to see if your writing flows and is easily understandable, is to read it out loud to yourself. You’ll soon spot any parts that grate or are unclear.

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If you like reading Suspense novels, then write Suspense novels. The same goes for Mysteries, Romances, Science Fiction… the lot. Never ever contemplate writing a novel you wouldn’t want to read yourself.
Enthusiasm is something you’re going to need pots of in order to get through the hard slog of writing a book. And you’re not writing just any old book, you are writing a bestseller, a blockbuster. And for that, you’re going to need all the enthusiasm you can muster – maybe more.
The best research an author can undertake is to read fiction, preferably the type of fiction you want to write. It’s important that you read only good fiction. I say this because whenever you read a book, a little bit of it enters your consciousness and transfers itself into the part of your brain that does the writing. The process is totally unconscious, but it happens. Better to absorb the good than the bad, I say.
Avoid comparing your work to anything that you read. One of two things will happen: either you will despair and wonder why you can’t write anything nearly as good, or else you’ll be amazed at how much better you are than the author in question. Both extremes are dangerous and probably wrong.
The only person not qualified to judge your writing is you: you’re far too close. And anyway, who’s to say what’s good or bad? I keep going on about Dan Brown’s appalling writing style (and it is bad), but the guy has sold millions more books than me. Who’s the schmuck?
It’s good to feel confident, but don’t let it run away with you.
The negative comparisons are the worst. Around half the would-be novelists I meet don’t actually finish their novel because of feelings of inadequacy. Does a bricklayer stop showing up for work because a guy who works on the next site is so much better at laying bricks than he is? No, he does not and neither should you.
If you are struck by feelings of inadequacy go and grab a Dan Brown novel. It’ll make you feel better in seconds.

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To succeed and hold the reader, all fiction must be believable. No matter how bizarre the story-line, we have to believe in the characters and in the message the author is sending
Although we know that there is no such place as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, we’ll gladly suspend our disbelief sufficiently to let J.K. Rowling tell us stories set there. Similarly, in Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton manages to convince us that an island exists on which dinosaurs roam; and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels – although set in a spy fantasy world that has never existed – continue to sell in their millions, fifty or more years after they were written.
On the other hand, we’ll reject a contemporary novel set in a city very much like our own for being totally unrealistic. So what‘s the difference?
The difference comes down to three things:
Research: For Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton undertook a mountain of research and came up with a plausible way of cloning dinosaurs from the blood of mosquitos trapped in amber. It doesn’t matter that it’s impossible to do, the reader is prepared to suspend disbelief because the science of the book is so credible. The author took the trouble to research his subject, and so we trust him. Make sure your facts are correct. Build up you reader’s trust by researching your subject thoroughly. There is an old adage, ‘write about what you know’, but rather than don’t write about something, research it until you do know.
Believable Characters: When characters are three-dimensional and rounded, we believe in them. And if the people are real, then the world they inhabit appears all the more genuine.
Suspension of Disbelief: The reader starts out wanting to believe. Belief is the default setting and for that to change something has to go badly wrong. Whenever a reader opens a new book he is in effect saying to the author: “Entertain me”. It’s up to you to ensure that you keep the faith with your reader.
One thing guaranteed to lose your reader’s trust is “genre flipping”. People like what they like and they like to know what they’re reading. On the whole, people who read mysteries like to read mysteries and not vampire stories. People who read Westerns might not be too keen on Romance or Science Fiction.
In case you need telling: don’t write a Western in which vampires appear half way through. Similarly, don’t pepper your whodunnit with aliens from the Planet Zog. At least not until you’ve made your second million from writing. After that, they’ll let you do pretty much what you want.

For more help on story and plotting click here

The Da Vinci Code is a great title. Why? Because it couples “code” with the name of a famous Renaissance artist everyone will have heard of. It gives a clue what the book is about and hints at mystery. What more could you ask?
Having a descriptive title is obviously an asset and wherever possible that’s what you should aim for. If someone is searching the shelves for a romance and they come across Erich Segal’s ‘Love Story’, then that would work for them. Similarly, ‘The Perfect Murder’ for the mystery fan and ‘The Terror’ to seekers of macabre fiction.
But beware. As a new author, you should avoid picking a title that has already been used. Jim Kelly recently wrote a novel called ‘Death Watch’, joining books of the same title by Sally Spencer, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, John Dickson Carr, Elizabeth Forrest, Jerry Ahern and others. Great title, but does that cancel out the downside of its multiple use?
Imagine the scenario: you hear somewhere that a book called ‘Death Watch’ is worth checking out. You didn’t catch the author’s name but you search for it by title on the internet. You find 14 different books called ‘Death Watch’. Which one do you go for? The chances of your buying Mr Kelly’s are less than 14-1. No sale.
You should also consider the length of your title. The usual advice given by publishers and writing “gurus” is to keep it short. Let’s examine the number one titles in the New York Times Bestseller fiction list for 2009:
‘Black Ops’, ‘Plum Spooky’, ‘The Associate’, ‘Promises In Death’, ‘Handle With Care’, ‘True Detectives’, ‘Long Lost’, ‘Turn Coat’, ‘Just Take My Heart’, ‘First Family’, ‘The 8th Confession’, ‘Dead and Gone’, ‘Wicked Prey’, ‘Gone Tomorrow’, ‘The Scarecrow’, ‘Skin Trade’, ‘Relentless’, ‘Knockout’, ‘Finger Lickin’ Fifteen’, ‘Swimsuit’, Black Hills’, ‘Best Friends Forever’, ‘The Defector’, ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’, ‘Bad Moon Rising’, ‘South of Broad’, ‘Alex Cross’s Trial ‘, ‘Dark Slayer’, ‘The Last Song’, ‘The Lost Symbol’, ‘The Gathering Storm’, ‘Ford County’, ‘Under the Dome’, ‘I, Alex Cross’, ‘”U” Is For Undertow’.
You will notice that the list contains just one six-word title and that the vast majority are between one and three words. From that you might deduce that a short title will sell better than a long title – just don’t tell J.K. Rowling!
Think too about internet searches. If you Google “Wicked Prey”, the first result up is the novel by John Sandford. In fact, all the results pretty much refer to that novel. But if you Google “Bad Moon Rising” you’re swamped by Creedence Clearwater sites. Remember Google when picking a title.
One last word about titles: don’t get too attached to the one you finally decide on. Publishers and their editors have a nasty habit of renaming books. Just remember, they’re the experts!

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