Here’s a thought: you can’t write a blockbuster to
order. In fact, you don’t know that a book will become a blockbuster until
after it’s become a bestseller, and the two aren’t necessarily synonymous.
However, as Sarah Harrison is quick to point out, there are certain things you
can do to encourage your novel towards becoming a blockbuster. As someone whose
book beat Jeffrey Archer’s to the no.1 bestseller slot, she’s better
qualified than most to tell us what they are, which she does in her own
extremely entertaining style.
So what makes a blockbuster? Go out and read a few, advises
Harrison, and if you don’t want to, then maybe you should think about writing
something else altogether. But here’s a clue: everything about a blockbuster
is big, from its size to its appeal, its scope to the impact it makes on the
reader. There is no room for half-measures in writing a blockbuster, so it seems
likely that delicate water-colour studies of a fragile relationship are unlikely
to provide good subject matter for a blockbuster. On the other hand, pursuit of
a lifelong love across three continents through political upheavals is probably
a good place to start, and it’s surely no coincidence that Harrison’s first
successful novel was an epic set in World War One.
For Harrison, the first and most important thing is the
idea. Ideas are like timid animals, needing to be stalked, all sightings noted
and filed away somewhere. Unusually, when writers are so often advised to keep
copious notebooks, Harrison rarely notes down her ideas but stuffs them away in
a corner of her memory, creating a jumble of thoughts and notions which
gradually come together to produce something even bigger and better. Having said
that, she has no doubt that certain times and certain places are more fertile
ground for blockbusters than others, and that some milieus can be very
productive – think Jilly Cooper and riding. And vitally important is the
book’s theme, providing the underlying impetus for the novel.
Having established all this, Harrison turns her attention
to the business of planning the novel. Unlike some writers, she doesn’t plan
every detail before beginning to write, but neither does she believe that a
writer can start a book ‘cold’. Some sub-conscious planning surely goes on
and there is therefore no harm in formalising it just a little. After all, you
don’t have to follow the plan slavishly once you get started, do you?
Nevertheless, it helps to know which direction you’re setting off in.
Similarly, it helps to know about your characters, as they will be carrying the
burden of the novel for you. What are they called, what do they do, what do they
look like, and what do they feel about X, whom they’ve only just met? All
these clues pile up to create the riveting character, and Harrison expertly
navigates the reader through this all-important process.
Perhaps the hardest part of writing a novel is the
day-to-day slog of getting it done, particularly when you’re dealing with a
book that’s big in every respect. Needless to say, there are no shortcuts.
Harrison is sympathetic to the writer’s plight but the book still has to be
written, and there is nothing to do but to sit down to it each day and write.
However, there are some tricks to make the process more bearable and Harrison
offers a few of them, from barricading yourself in a room without a telephone to
working a set number of hours per day, and to hell with what other writers claim
to do.
And then the fun begins. Your book’s done, it’s sold,
and now you have to sell it all over again because, as Harrison notes, the great
and unavoidable truth is that a book is indivisible from its author and so,
unusually for a book of this nature, she describes the process of promoting the
novel, setting it alongside the problems created by the fact of the book being
finished. It’s an interesting and unexpected glimpse of the downside of the
writer’s life but a reminder too that the best thing to do is to start writing
again.
In setting out to write this book, Sarah Harrison defined
her task as being to put the writer in the right frame to write. With a book
that is so honest and straightforward in its approach, so cheerfully cynical, it’s
difficult to find yourself in anything but the right frame of mind.
