The Secret Formula

The first time I interviewed Garth Stein, the author of, among other things, the mega-bestseller The Art of Racing in the Rain, he described one of the most common questions he was asked when he spoke to other writers. Garth, you see, had cracked the bestseller code. His book was enjoying the kind of sustained success novelists literally dream of. How, these aspiring writers wanted to know, do you write a bestseller? What’s the secret?

“I always tell them the same thing,” he explained. “Just writing the best fricking book you can write.”

I believe Garth gave them great advice, as infuriatingly imprecise as it may have been for some. After all, that’s what he did. He wrote a book he absolutely had to write (you can hear him tell that story here) as well as he could possibly write it. Then it exploded. Richard Bach did the same thing when wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, as did Erik Larson when he wrote Devil in the White City, as did Diana Gabaldon when she wrote Outlander. None of them knew they were writing bestsellers when they wrote them. All they knew for sure was they were very interested in the stories they were telling.

This is good news. Not only isn’t there some secret formula, no writer alive should want one. In every writer is something immeasurably valuable seeking its form. You know this. You have always felt it. You may not know how to admit it without sounding vain, you may be confused when your work is rejected, you may doubt that value as you reread the drafts of what you’ve written. Yet the feeling persists, as steady as your heart.

Our greatest challenge is to allow what’s within us to find its form, the form it was meant to take, even if that form is different than anything we’ve seen before, even if it looks very much the same. When you do, what you have written will seem at once new and familiar, as if someone played you a recording, and you heard your own voice aloud for the first time. If it goes on to become a bestseller, you will only be surprised for a little while. You’d kept what was within you a secret for a time, but now that secret the is out you learned you weren’t the only one keeping it.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com