Conviction

Last week, I had a go at the more arty end of writing, the “in a trance” school. This week, I thought I’d alienate the rest of you by commenting on the other end of the scale, the “sausage factory” method.

The sausage method holds that writing is basically like producing sausages on a machine, except with words instead of dubious pork. You find your target market, you figure out what they like, and then you duplicate that, at a fixed rate of words per day. Bingo, instant bestseller.

Or not...

The trouble with this is that it’s nonsense. First, you will inevitably be writing derivative product. This may not matter to you if you’re just in it for the money (in which case you’re a total fool. You’d probably make much better money working in a shop). 

Second, you probably won’t be writing a bestseller. You’ll be writing the thing that people read when they’re tired of the person you’ve ripped off. It will, at best, be second-best and a second choice, and will have to contend with a lot of similar books written for the same reason.

Third, even authors who have a limited range aren’t cynics or hacks. A colleague once said of Lee Childs that “He writes the same book over and over again, but he writes it really well”. Everything I’ve read and heard suggests that Childs takes his work very seriously and is far from “phoning it in”. That’s probably why, even if he does write the same book over and over again, he makes a good job of it. 

 

Conviction

Which takes us onto a wider point. If you look at great “light” novels, the sort of thing dismissed as “genre” or “entertainment”, there’s always something deeper than the need to make a quick buck. You can’t read ‘Salem’s Lot without feeling that Stephen King cares about the decline of small-town America. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is full of observations about landscape and social class, as well as being a fast-moving thriller. Tim Willocks’ Green River Rising, a ferociously violent novel about a prison riot, has great sympathy for its heroes, people thrown away by a rotten system.

Perhaps it’s a desire to go slightly beyond the boxes that need to be ticked for the book to work. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of things that the author does care about, and which he is going to make you, the reader, care about even if you didn’t buy the book for that. It's a hard thing to define. The best word I can think to describe it is conviction, and I don’t think a novel can be truly great without it.