The technology of bestseller production has long been an academic discipline for students of literature and beginning writers in the West. In recent years, textbooks for future authors of bestselling books have begun to appear in Russia as well, although the impression they leave is very contradictory. Their main harm is the "Bruce Almighty" syndrome, which gives the reader the illusion of mastering the secrets of literary skill. However, literature in this respect is similar to sports: even the best theory will not make a man a champion if he has not spent years on hard training. But even training under the guidance of the best coach is useless if the student does not possess the gift.
So, the best textbook for a writer is still the bestselling books. An author who can't get ideas for creativity out of them won't be helped by the best textbook or the best teacher.
So here are some recipes for creating a bestselling adventure novel:
A bestseller is all about creativity.
No matter what they say, literature is a team effort. Those who don't need co-authors need helpers who will take on the job of gathering materials for the book and reworking them. Dumas is said to be hardly the first exploiter of the labor of "literary negroes. But the word "exploitation" should not be understood too bluntly, in the spirit of Karl Marx's teachings. Simply that the money and honors are not evenly distributed among the participants in the project, according to the slogan "winner takes all," rather than in the spirit of communist egalitarianism. The winner of the Alexander Dumas literary project was Alexander Dumas himself, so it is not surprising that all the laurels went to him alone.
A bestseller is a fiction, a fairy tale, even if that tale is based on historical truth.
The key to a writer's success is the right strategy. A lecture on "is there life on Mars" to an audience that has come to see the show, as depicted in the old Soviet film Carnival Night, is doomed to fail. But if the reader is attacked in the spirit of "strategy of indirect action", he will gratefully accept anything that the older brother, the writer, will tell him about. Let it be not an absolute truth (does such a truth really exist?), but a relative one, or even a phantom, a simulacrum, or an illusion - no one will be offended.
The bestseller is the hero.
The protagonist of The Three Musketeers is the Gascon D'Artagnan, one of the most popular characters in world literature among readers. Like other beloved literary heroes, the captain of the Royal Musketeers is one of the incarnations of the mythical "thousand-faced hero" (in the terminology of philosopher and cultural scientist J. Campbell). The hero cannot help but be different from other people... The descendant of Béarn is smarter, braver and nobler than everyone else, has a better sword, and fortune is invariably on his side. Of course, he has his faults. D'Artagnan is too simple and hot-tempered, completely ignorant of life and people, and therefore constantly gets into ridiculous situations. But youth, as we know, is a disadvantage, which quickly passes. Gascon Timur's main advantage over his team is his determination. His fellow musketeers do not really know what they want from life. Aramis wants to be a priest - but he says more than he does. Porthos seems to dream of a profitable marriage, Athos does not live in the present but in his memories, and if he were not a nobleman he would have become an alcoholic. D'Artagnan is indomitable and assertive, like any mythological hero. He rides the famous green horse (whose color, rare in the animal world, was known to be the cause of his confrontation with the Count of Rochefort) and will not stop until he becomes a nobleman and marshal of France.
And yet, despite all his supermanliness, the image of D'Artagnan is very believable. The ability to give the image of an English sailor, a Gascon nobleman or a Soviet spy the features of an eternal "thousand-faced hero" is a property of literary genius.
The bestseller is the hero and the collective.
The literary hero, like the king in a theatrical play, is played by an entourage. D'Artagnan's entourage are the three musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis. By the way, why three, and not thirty-three rich musketeers? The answer lies in the field of psychology. Human abilities are limited, and his consciousness is designed in such a way that it can only perceive a narrow range of subjects well. There must be no more than three or four characters in the main roles - otherwise the reader will still begin to confuse and forget them. Writers were the first to realize this, and only much later - advertising and marketing experts.
Surprisingly, the images of the four musketeers coincide completely with the main types of human characters. Although it is unlikely that Dumas read any psychological treatises - and was there such a science as psychology in his time? Perhaps the point is that any good writer is a born psychologist, or, as they used to say in the old days, "the engineer of human souls. Just as any Gascon, in the words of Mikhail Boyarsky, the performer of the role of D'Artagnan in the Russian TV series, is "an academic from childhood.
