Lee Child Has An Interesting Theory About Writing Popular Fiction
These are the opportunities and satisfactions you have to deliver to be a successful popular fiction writer
Jack Reacher might not be everyone's favourite hero, but he is mine. I’ve read every book his creator, Lee Child, has written.
We might never have had Jack Reacher if it hadn’t been for something James Dover Grant’s television boss said to him that made it impossible for him to continue working, “You’re fired.”
Grant was 40. He said nothing.
Instead, he took the pen name of Lee Child and wrote The Killing Floor, introducing us to Jack Reacher, the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode. Reacher has been thrilling a worldwide audience since 1997.
Writing Popular Fiction
Lee Child recently added a course on writing popular fiction to BBC Maestro’s subscription-based streaming platform. Intrigued, I jumped at the chance and signed up.
In his introduction, Lee Child talks about the one qualification a writer needs — you have to be a reader. Age is no barrier, he argues. He sees the wisdom, knowledge, and experience we gain from our trips around the sun as a benefit to writing.
“You have to put something inside you before it can come out.”
— Lee Child, Writing Popular Fiction.
It’s in our ancestry
To become the most powerful animal on the planet, something remarkable happened in our development.
It’s been seven million years since we branched off and evolved from our common ancestor. It wasn’t until about two and a half million years ago our brains began to enlarge.
Large brains use up a lot of energy.
It was first thought this coincided with our ability to cook our food and thus increase our caloric intake to fuel our larger brains. Recent research suggests that this was initially down to the consumption of fermented food.
The human brain has since tripled in size, the invention of cooking one million years ago provided the extra nourishment our metabolically expensive brain tissue needs.
It was our huge brain that allowed us to develop our language.
Lee Child puts down our remarkable human success story to language.
“Sophisticated syntactical language was our salvation.”
— Lee Child, Writing Popular Fiction.
All evolution is about having a better chance of being alive in the morning. Language gave us the ability to pass on information. At first, we tied our communication to the truth — non-fiction.
It had to be.
If one of our ancestors said a pasture was predator-free, it had better be. Otherwise, his tribe died. It was a matter of survival. And it was our language that made our present success possible.
Storytelling was our evolutionary advantage.
Prehistoric humans learned to memorise information and teach it to others in their tribe. Long before we learned to write language, we had to store it in our heads by listening and repeating it.
These stories would initially be about survival: where to find food, why we should avoid dangerous waters, how we can use spears to ward off predators.
We accumulated knowledge through what we experienced and through language we learned from what others experienced.
When our ability to communicate became sophisticated enough to share scenarios that might happen, our position on the planet as the dominant species began.
We could guess the future.
And in guessing the future, we could plan courses of action. If this happens, we should do that. If that happens, we should do this. Our communication evolved into imaginative stories.
Fiction.
The stories we told would have been about empowerment, encouragement, parables, teaching, and education — things that needed to be pre-discussed to give people strength, courage and reassurance.
This is the purpose of fiction.
We told fictional stories to imagine what could happen. These stories consoled us and gave us ideas and tactics to use when we encountered dangerous events.
If we could go back in time
How far back in our history would we have to go before we found a newborn baby incapable of keeping up with the children of today?
Could a child born in the 1800s learn to operate an iPad? Could it learn at the same rate as a child born today?
Scientists estimate it to be about 35,000 years ago.
Imagine compressing all of human history into just one year. Twenty-one thousand years would pass each day, or fifteen years each minute. That means we were still wielding the most basic stone tools around mid-December.
Humans, like ourselves, Homo sapiens, only appeared around 27 December.
Our rate of innovation and economic growth didn’t kick in until 11.30 p.m., on New Year’s Eve. The First World War began around 3 minutes to midnight.
Yet, nearly 2,000 generations into our history, we find prehistoric people had the same intellectual potential, curiosity and thirst for knowledge as a child born today.
Modern life is relatively safe
Albeit frustrating.
But we still carry around with us, in the primitive parts of our brains, our prehistoric evolutionary traits. When we read or watch a film or a TV series, we benefit from the knowledge we gain. That is how we evolved to learn.
Storytelling is our connection to our past.
Imagine picking up your child and tossing him into the air. It's scary for him. He will fall to the ground and hurt himself. But he doesn’t cry, he laughs. He laughs because there is a safety net — he knows you will catch him.
Storytelling is the same.
We can immerse ourselves in a book and the author can tune us into the peril their character is facing, but there is a safety net for us. It isn’t real. But we still experience the emotion.
Jack Reacher is giving us something we don’t experience in life very often, danger, the thrill of the chase, bringing home the bison.
Imagine our ancestors hunting game and returning to their cave with meat for the entire tribe. How would they feel? We don’t get the same satisfaction from a trip to the butchers. That’s why we love being thrilled, it’s inborn.
Today, we are bombarded with the ills of the world, theft, robberies, and murders — bad news sells.
Sometimes it affects us personally, perhaps our bicycle gets stolen and we know that we will never see it again. Reading about Reacher dispensing swift and effective justice to the bad guys is our way of satisfying our deeply held instinctive need for satisfying stories.
Reading fiction replaces what we no longer get in our modern-day living and it does it in very specific ways. You know it is going to be okay. You know Reacher always gets his man and he’ll be back to fight another day.
In the end, we are relieved, delighted, and satisfied. Thrilling stories encourage us, empower us, and console us.
When you are writing fiction, says Lee Child, have an acute sense of why.
“What do people want from this? Analyse your feelings when you finish a book. How do your deep-down instincts react to the story?”
“The more you think about those feelings and how they relate to our evolutionary past, the simpler it becomes.”
According to the mind that birthed Jack Reacher, you have to deliver those same opportunities and satisfactions to your reader.