HOW TO WRITE A "BEST SELLER."

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1575, 19 October 1912, Page 9

HOW TO WRITE A "BEST SELLER."

The anonymous American writer who has been confessing how he came to write "best sellers" (says an English' paper) tells us a great deal about himself that might be interesting if he had told us who he was, but he ends, by keeping profoundly secret what many of his i'cllow-erai'tsmon would like to know— how to do likewise. He tells us that he passed through all the various grades of journalism, wrote librettos for comic operas, and at last, venturing upon novelwriting, made success enough by a first book to convince himself that fiction was his metier, and has stuck to it ever since. When; he has written a story he goes over 'all tho ground with his publisher, is careful in tho selection of an illustrator, and although himself preferring August or September as the month for publication, meekly leaves the final decision on that point to the publisher. When ho passes through, a town he visits tho booksellers, mentions his name, talks shop ami puis oil 110 "side", whatever, and, on tho whole, does so well that he finds it necessary to write only one book a year, and spends his spare time in trotting tho globe from China to Peru. All of which, for those who like this sort of thing, is the very sort of thing they will like, but we ar.e left in tho dark as to the writer's formula.

That he has a formula thero can be little doubt, and ho may have several. Novelists who, like tho writer in question, look u[ion their craft simply as a means of making money are not of the sort who accumulate material because' of its inherent interest to.themselves and then apply, artistic expcdi'ents'.'in'-order. 1 'to ; set'it forth to the best advantage. They have u perfectly clear idea of the particular section of tho public to which they are appealing, diagnose its preferences, and then set themselves to give it what it wants iii what quantity and quality they can. One of the simplest ami most profitable of formulas would seem to be that of the writer who frankly recognises that - the great body of novel renders are women, and especially young women, and lays his count with that fact. 111 such a case it is desirable that tho ccntral figure should be a heroine. She need not bo beautiful if 'he has an "{indefinable charm," she had better be in poor circumstances, and the more.she rises above the commonpleace the more difficult does tho reader find it to put herself in her. place. She must have more admirers than one. There may be humble ones to whom she wilt be very gracious and generous when ultimately she has married someone else and is rich. Then there shall be two admirers, serious rivals of each other, both equally worthy and equally wealthy, and if one has a title and an ancestry that goes back to the Norman Conquest,so much- tho better. The latter contingency indeed throws upon tho novelists the task of describing scenes in high life, of which he may bo profoundly ignorant, but then his reader is as ignorant as himself. Moreover, any approximation to reality in characters belonging to that sphere might bo a cruel disillusion; they are all conventionalised in previous works of .fiction of this class, and must conform to typo. Tho essential thing is that there should be two types—one tho haughty aristocrat who stickles' upon his birth and state, and is all indignation that his kinsman should wed a girl whoso blood is, by a shade or two. of a paler blue than his own, and the other a lady, as much an aristocrat as any of them, but who has had experience, and knows that the qualities that others plume themselves upon are shadows, not substantial things. It is the latter who takes a fancy to tlie heroine and helps her over many a stile on that journey that ends with lovers meeting ljeforo the altar.