Writing The Blockbuster Novel - Softcover

Zuckerman, Albert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765382474 ISBN 13: 9780765382474

Verlag: Forge Trade, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Albert Zuckerman, legendary literary agent, has worked with many bestselling authors, including Ken Follett, Olivia Goldsmith, Antoinette Van Heugten, Michael Lewis, and F. Paul Wilson. Zuckerman is a master at teaching writers the skills necessary to crack the bestseller list.

For this revised edition of Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Zuckerman has added an analysis of Nora Roberts's The Witness, which he uses along with classic books like Gone With the Wind and The Godfather, to illustrate his points. Zuckerman's commentary on Ken Follett's working outlines for The Man From St. Petersburg provide a blueprint for building links between plot and character. A new introduction discusses social media and self-publishing.

Writing the Blockbuster Novel is an essential tool for any aspiring author. As Dan Brown said in an interview: "Not long ago, I had an amusing experience meeting the author of a book I received as a gift nearly two decades ago a book that in many ways changed my life. I was halfway through writing my first novel when I was given a copy of Writing the Blockbuster Novel. [Zuckerman's] book helped me complete my manuscript and get it published. [When] I met Mr. Zuckerman for the first time. I gratefully told him that he had helped me. He jokingly replied that he planned to tell everyone that he had helped me write The Da Vinci Code."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Albert Zuckerman

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Writing the Blockbuster Novel

By Albert Zuckerman

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 1994 Albert Zuckerman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-8247-4

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Foreword by Ken Follett, 
Preface to the 2016 Edition, 
1. Getting Started, 
2. The Big Book: What Is It?, 
3. Setting Your Novel, 
4. The Outline Process, 
5. Larger-Than-Life Characters, 
6. Point of View, 
7. Tightening Character Relationships, 
8. Setting Up Scenes, 
9. Big Scenes, 
10. Weaving Plot Strands, 
11. Rhythm in Plotting, 
12. Story Points, 
13. Revision, 
14. Getting It Published and onto the Bestseller Lists, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

GETTING STARTED

This book is for writers — for storytellers who have had a novel published, maybe several; for authors who believe they have wrestled with and mastered the essentials of the craft of fiction but who can't break into hardcover; for authors whose books have been praised, awarded prizes, yet who can't earn a living from their work; and for authors who receive advances and royalties that are a fraction of what they feel they deserve.

It will also benefit beginners and veteran writers who have yet to publish a novel. But if you belong in these groups, remember that Rome wasn't built in a day. For a beginner, trying to write a blockbuster novel might be likened to a high school athlete trying to play with the Pittsburgh Steelers or a first-year piano student trying to perform Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. These things sometimes happen, but chances are you'll stand a better chance getting your first novel published if it's a work less ambitious in scope and scale — say, a category romance or mystery.

This book is by no means intended for all published novelists. It will offer no help to authors who mean to forge new paths in literature, to dazzle serious readers with a contemporary equivalent of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, or even Faulkner, or who aim to replicate the success of such recent "literary" bestsellers as Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, or A Visit from the Goon Squad. Rather, it will dissect and hopefully illuminate what in today's book publishing industry is generally called "the commercial bestseller."

The creation of any novel that succeeds in stirring the hearts of millions of readers around the world must involve an element of indescribable magic, akin in a way to the human soul. The miracle of divine or evolutionary engineering has resulted in a human body with myriad organs, glands, bones, veins, and tissues that can be x-rayed, sonogrammed, microscopically examined. Science can determine the qualities that set apart the ill from the healthy, the weak from the strong. With popular fiction, too, it is possible to peel away the surfaces of individual words and show how a blockbuster novel — like a watch — is built with a multitude of interlocking parts, all of which are needed precisely to move each other. In the best-loved novels, these parts are designed in ways that are on one hand unique but on the other appear to follow certain rules.

If you aspire to seeing your name on bestseller lists, you probably are familiar with the names of the authors who often appear there. Albert Zuckerman is not one of these. You may ask, Who is this guy? What are his qualifications? What gives him the authority to assert knowledge that many top publishing professionals — writers, editors, agents — freely admit eludes them?

The answer is that I have been midwife to more than a dozen mega-books — New York Times bestsellers, Literary Guild and Book of the Month Club Main Selections, choices of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, novels made into motion pictures and TV miniseries. I've worked with their authors from their stories' initial conception through constructing and reconstructing plot outlines, developing characters and intensifying their relationships, to rebuilding scenes and chapters in first-draft manuscripts, and finally enriching, rewriting, and polishing second and final drafts before delivery to their publishers.

Ken Follett has been generous enough to call me "the best editor in the world." A great compliment, but I may not be. What is clear, though, is that my working with him has in some measure helped bring about the sale of more than seventy-five million copies of his books. Particularly exciting to me has been working with an unpublished author, and then rocketing him into the publishing industry's stratosphere. My first such thrill came with Anne Tolstoi Wallach, whose Women's Work in 1982 garnered a then-record advance for a first novel: $850,000. My talented ex-wife, Eileen Goudge, after producing a bunch of young adult romances, set out in 1986 to write a mainstream women's novel on which I worked at her side. Garden of Lies, as part of a two-book contract, brought an advance of almost a million dollars, enjoyed nineteen weeks on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists, and has been published in seventeen languages.

These large sums help spread the word about a new author and incite a commitment to strong promotion from a publishing house, but you must not conclude that a small advance will necessarily doom your book to a tiny print run and obscurity. Jaws, including the movie income, is reputed to have earned Peter Benchley around ten million dollars. His guarantee from Doubleday was $7,500. For The Godfather, Mario Puzo's contract with Putnam provided $5,000. Paramount, however, paid him $25,000 (based on an outline and four chapters) for an option on the movie rights. Without that, Puzo could not have afforded to write his book.

Eye of the Needle found no takers among U.S. publishers when I first submitted it in outline form. In the mid-1970s, Follett was supporting a family with two small children and living hand-to-mouth, grinding out genre books and chasing after freelance writing jobs. He managed to get the book commissioned in England as a paperback original for a pittance. In this country, Follett's outline got no more than a yawn from publishers. But when the first-draft manuscript arrived in the spring of 1977, I got all excited. Here was a crackling thriller that had a shot at becoming a bestseller. To get a new author widely recognized, however, is murder, one of the hardest things in the world. Everything would depend on how well it was published.

I had been an agent for only three years and had placed a fair number of books but nothing with such great potential. How should I handle this? I nervously asked myself, not wanting to screw up my big chance. Traditional wisdom would have had me send out copies to the dozen or so major publishers and sell to the highest bidder. But I saw a danger in that. The big houses, the ones most likely to offer hefty advances, all had (and generally always do have) name authors under contract whose work would inevitably take precedence on their lists over that of an unknown. I wanted a publisher who would push like crazy for Follett and on whose list Eye of the Needle would be the top book.

Arbor House was a dynamic small publisher who, through clever advertising and production, had made a minor bestseller out of a less-than-wonderful biography of Montgomery Clift, which they had acquired from me for an advance of $5,000 after it had been rejected by thirty-nine other houses....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Forge Trade
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765382474
• ISBN 13: 9780765382474
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland