Maurice Stoker On Writing a Prize Winning Best Seller - 4

4) Make certain the reader gets it in the end

Do not write as did Joyce in Ulysses, Lowry in Under the Volcano, or Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. Everything must be laid bare, though not necessarily early on (adds to the pseudo-mystery). By dropping hints and insinuations the reader is kept in suspense regarding what the book is actually about, though you will eventually lay it all out so no one has a bit of doubt regarding the smallest iota of story, so no one will need to think or intuit what may have been beneath it all (always bad form in best-seller-writing to cause the reader to stop flipping pages, to of necessity break pace and, God forbid, Think).

It is best to choose a simple story. The makings of a decent short story are best, as is done here (The God of Small Things). Add many chapters providing fragmented details of events, most of no consequence and out of sequence, as noted above, so it can be called nonlinear, and with no explication, since they are to be repeated ad infinitum later. The reader cannot be trusted to remember anything that happened earlier, and as noted assumed forgetting is often used as a plot device lest the work lose any shred of credibility. Add plenty of external events regarding major characters without relevance to the central story that do not reveal anything about the characters except to add to the fodder for the "psychological event" to follow.

Here (The God of Small Things) the author has chosen a simple story which she essentially blurts out in a single chapter, thirteen, with a bit more detail to follow. But nothing that preceded this chapter needed to be told, except to build the façade (remember this?) of words and events aimed at making the reader believe some horrendous event is to transpire. What transpires is mundane to anyone who happens to read newspapers or watch television news. But after the reader has waded through over two hundred pages to get there, it will not be a let down because the reader is hungry to get THE POINT. If you see that your work could have been implemented as a short story buried in irrelevant froth, you are on the right track.

5) Apply comic book psychology to one or more character traits impacted (medical sense) by the crowning event to which all the scraps and innuendoes converge

This gives the reader an Ah-Ha, since the reader figures out the single point to which the author leads via the nose ring. Of course, what is Required is black and white causality, as nothing else will do. Impact, not affect, (as in event A impacts event B and character trait C leading from impacted prose to plot impaction), which has gone unexplained but not unnoticed. The reader of this novel (The God of Small Things) ought to be able to say immediately what was the hub of this causal nexus (or perhaps ought not be considering writing best-selling Booker (and maybe Pulitzer) Prize winners).

6) Don't make the reader use a dictionary

But do make up your own words; senseless words that pile up in extended collisions (chain collisions) inducing reader stumbling and perhaps some MEGO, though not too much (as short bursts of MEGO make the reader believe something significant has transpired in crossing the finish line of the last words after viewing each of them in succession, but extended MEGO causes the reader to toss the book and grab the cocktail-party crib notes). Repeat such words endlessly. Use them willy-nilly, as silly names, too, silly-milly willy-nilly. Perhaps luck will grant you an author of some Repute to remark that in such a SIGNIFICANT and ORIGINAL work an author must invent a new language (as in Finnegan's Wake?), said quote placed prominently on the book cover.

Nor does it hurt to throw in some foreign words in italics. Orgulho.

7) Use plenty of semi-passive copular verb-adjective constructions

It is a useful thing is fun is best way to make stumbling pace stumble best way to use lots of unnecessary words not a problem for authors because not requiring thought. Makes serious editing unnecessary.

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