Welcome to Bruce Hartman's virtual book tour. Bruce is the author of The Rules of Dreaming. Bruce, would you rather write a NY Times bestseller which is light and fluffy or a book from your heart written because you love it?
Some people make a
good living writing bestsellers, and I respect them, especially if they also
happen to write good books. A fair
number of bestsellers are also very good books.
Writing a commercially successful book takes hard work and abilities
that most people (including most writers) don’t have. To write a commercially
successful novel that is also a very good book—I think of Life of Pi or Cloud Atlas
or some of Louise Erdrich’s books—is almost miraculous, but it’s worth
remembering that Faulkner and Hemingway were bestselling authors in their
day. Not too long ago the New York Times
fiction bestseller list didn’t include genre titles; now they predominate, and
the list of genres has expanded to include almost everything. Meanwhile the publishers have tried to squeeze
out profits through market segmentation, slicing and dicing the readers into a
data feed of genres and sub-genres that define how their reading dollars will
be spent. Writing the typical bestseller
has become more an exercise in demographics than in literature. Yet the most
inventive writers are always creating something new, even if the publishers
can’t take their eyes off the rear-view mirror.
Several of the biggest all-time bestsellers were initially rejected by
multiple publishers because they pioneered new genres or sub-genres: John Grisham’s The Firm, Tom Clancy’s The
Hunt for Red October, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. I know one (former) editor
who proudly boasts that he rejected The
Firm and would do the same thing again today. Today we are seeing the big publishers
running after 17-year-olds who self-publish on their phones!
Back to the question:
Would you rather write a NY Times bestseller which is light and fluffy or a
book from your heart written because you love it? Obviously that’s a false dichotomy. Most NY Times bestsellers aren’t light and
fluffy—quite a few are dark, violent and heavy.
And it’s quite possible for a really talented writer like Yann Martel or
Louise Erdrich to write from the heart and also score a commercial
success. As for myself, I think the best
advice came from André Gide:
“Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents
only one of a thousand attitudes. You
must find your own. If someone else
could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as
well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write
it. Grow fond only of that which you
can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or
patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.”
In other words, write the book that
only you can write. No other book is
worth writing. If you want to stay
strictly within one of the accepted genres (which is something I’ve never been
able to do), the challenge is all the greater: to stay within the genre and
still write the book that only you can write. The best genre fiction writers are able to put
that stamp of individuality on everything they write.
If you write the book that only you
can write, the publishing industry may eventually catch up with you, as it did
with John Grisham and Dan Brown. Or
maybe not; they’re running a business. But
here’s the good part: If they never
catch up with you, you didn’t waste your time. If you enjoy writing as much as I do, you
will have received 90% of the benefits that you could ever hope to achieve as a
writer. The only part you may miss—unless
you’re really lucky—is fame and fortune.
Thank you, Bruce. That was very interesting. Now let's move on to a blurb and excerpt.
BLURB:
The Rules of
Dreaming
A novel of madness,
music — and murder.
A beautiful opera
singer hangs herself on the eve of her debut at the Met. Seven years
later the opera she was rehearsing—Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann—begins
to take over the lives of her two schizophrenic children, the doctors who treat
them and everyone else who crosses their paths, until all are enmeshed in a
world of deception and delusion, of madness and ultimately of evil and
death. Onto this shadowy stage steps Nicole P., a graduate student who
discovers that she too has been assigned a role in the drama. What strange
destiny is being worked out in their lives?
EXCERPT:
Late last summer, after less than
two months at the Palmer Institute, I witnessed an extraordinary
performance. One of my patients, Hunter
Morgan (that was not his real name), sat down at the piano in the patient
lounge and started playing like a virtuoso.
Hunter was a twenty-one year old schizophrenic who had lived in the
Institute for the past seven years, and as far as anyone could remember he’d
never touched the piano before. The
piece he played was classical music—that was about all I could tell—and it
sounded fiendishly difficult, a whirlwind of chords and notes strung together
in a jarring rhythm that seemed the perfect analog of a mind spinning out of
control. He continued playing for about
ten minutes and then suddenly stopped in the middle of an intense climactic
passage. Without acknowledging his
audience—which consisted of his sister Antonia, his nurse Mrs. Paterson, a few
other patients and myself—he stood up from the piano and ran out of the room.
Since I was new
at the Institute, the impact of this performance was lost on me at first. I assumed that Hunter had been studying the
piano from an early age. It wasn’t until
later that afternoon, when I reviewed Hunter’s chart and questioned Mrs.
Paterson specifically about the piano playing, that I realized how uncanny this
incident really was.
“You mean he’s
never played the piano before?”
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Bruce
Hartman has been a bookseller, pianist, songwriter and attorney. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia. His previous novel, Perfectly Healthy Man Drops Dead, was published by Salvo Press in
2008.
http://www.brucehartmanbooks.com
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rules-of-Dreaming-ebook/dp/B00CWJOUYO/
Readers, follow Bruce's tour and comment often for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate from either Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Tour dates can be found at http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2013/04/virtual-book-tour-rules-of-dreaming-by.html
I appreciate a book that has been written from the heart far more than one that has been written just to be commercial.
ReplyDeletemarypres(AT)gmail(DOT)com
Thank you for hosting
ReplyDelete"Write the book that only you can write..." As a librarian, I'll be pondering that all day. I'm sure that there are thousands of books in my library that could have been written by any multitude of folks--not just by its single author. It's an interesting thing to think about!
ReplyDeletecatherinelee100 at gmail dot com
Write the book that you will be proud of, that's the important thing.
ReplyDeleteKit3247(at)aol(dot)com
I love your comments. Especially that one about writing from the heart, and also writing something no one else could write. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIntriguing question and answer
ReplyDeletebn100candg at hotmail dot com
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on writing. I agree that a story written from the heart is by far the best
ReplyDeletefencingromein at hotmail dot com
THanks for the excellent guest post! I actually wont even read NY times best sellers. I tend to find that what the flock of mindless sheep wants to read is nothing like what I want to read.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!
andralynn7 AT gmail DOT com
Sorry for the late post. I’m playing catch-up here so I’m just popping in to say HI and sorry I missed visiting with you on party day! Hope you all had a good time!
ReplyDeletekareninnc at gmail dot com