Free The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer Page B

man void of love (and money) will see a wealthy marriage as a splendid union.
    The ideal, and as you get older you do try to get closer to the ideal, is to write only what interests you. It will prove of interest to others or it won’t, but if you try to steer your way into success, you shouldn’t be a serious writer. Rather, you will do well to study the tricks of consistent best-seller authors while being certain to stay away from anything that’s
well written.
Reading good books could poison your satisfaction at having pulled off a bestseller. I don’t think Jackie Susann went to bed with Rainer Maria Rilke on her night table.

    Today, large literary canvases are usually left to best-selling novelists. They will have a cast of forty or fifty characters, and stories that traverse fifty to a hundred years. They’ll have several world wars, plus startling changes in the lives of several families. They do all that to keep their book moving. What usually characterizes these novels is that nothing is in them that you haven’t come across before. Most good writers tend these days to work on smaller canvases. Then, at least, you have the confidence that what you’re doing has some fictional truth. That’s reasonable. At least you’re contributing to knowledge rather than adding to the sludge of the culture. Of course, that can make it more difficult to take on a large topic. At the moment the only great writer who can handle forty or fifty characters and three or four decades is García Márquez.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is an amazing work. He succeeds in doing it, but how, I don’t know. In my Egyptian novel, it took me ten pages to go around a bend in the Nile.
    It’s counterproductive to think, I’m going to put this in because it will sell copies. Usually, that doesn’t work. There is an integrity to best-sellerdom—it is the best book that the author is capable of writing at that time. He or she believes in the book. That’s one reason it’s a best-seller. Stephen King was a desperately clumsy and repetitive writer when he started, but best-seller book readers responded to his sincerity. That was present on every badly written page. The popularity of bad writing is analogous to the enjoyment of fast food.
    I must say King has improved in style since he started. Hopefully, his readers also have, but that is not as certain.
    A best-seller strategy is to keep cooking up new ingredients for the story. But beware! Plot is equal to a drug. It can stimulate a novelist into hordes of narrative energy, and will certainly keep a reader on the page, but sooner or later, plot presents its bill, and dire exigencies come down upon the writer. The author who is over-burdened with plot is sometimes obliged to enter the character’s mind in order to keep things clear.
    Right here is where it all bogs down. A reader’s confidence in what he is reading will be subtly betrayed or even squandered should a novelist choose to enter the mind of a character but fail to bequeath the indispensable gift that the reader can nowknow more about the character than before. The internal monologues are usually routine and insist on telling us what we know already. There is almost no signature quality of mind.
    Of course, the damage is limited, since the internal ruminations of the characters in most mega-best-sellers are about what you would expect. Mega-best-seller readers want to be able to read and read and read—they do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations. Reality might lie out there, but that is not why they are reading.
    Editing tends to make best-sellers read more like each other. As one instance, few best-sellers don’t suffer from a spate of adjectives. For when a writer can’t find the nuance of an experience, he usually loads up with adjectives. That tells the reader what to think. This goes along with a tendency in publishing houses to get the emphasis on entertainment at all costs. Of course, a pervasive