Whenever I lecture creative writing students, I insist they remember one point even if they forget everything else I say. You can’t fake it. You can’t write a book you don’t believe in, and expect it to do well. The first person you must sell an idea to is yourself. If you don’t believe in it, no one else will.
Stated so baldly, the recommendation to “be yourself” sounds like the kind of soppy advice you find on a sentimental greetings card. So allow me to hand over to Gore Vidal – that most unsentimental of American writers. (“There is no warm, lovable person,” he said of himself. “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”)
From the 1930s to the 1950s Hollywood executives would periodically decide to move upmarket by hiring proper writers such as Vidal, Dorothy Parker. F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. They looked at the journeymen who churned out the weepies and the cowboy movies that enthralled millions, and thought that, surely, authors of their status could do the same. They would come up with trashy scripts of their own, and pocket the money that would allow them to focus on the serious literature they were meant to write.
Vidal described how the old hands in the movie business soon put them right.
“‘Shit has its own integrity’. The Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table in the MGM commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our pictures would entirely lack the one basic homely ingredient that spells boffo world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Back in the 1980s, I watched on as one of my university friends learned the same lesson. He wanted money, as students do. In those days, Mills & Boon romances sold so many copies supermarkets would stack them by the tills. My friend decided that he was far more intelligent than their regular authors. He was studying English literature at Oxford, after all. He was also convinced that he could write well – his time in student journalism had proved that to his satisfaction. If he banged out a couple of romances a year, he could spend the rest of his course living in luxury.
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