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We’ll start by helping you find the iconic book idea that already exists within you. Going back to our original construct, our goal is to create an idea that stands the test of time. And there are only two characteristics of such an idea.
- it’s entertaining.
- it has meaning, that’s it.
If an idea has the potential to be entertaining and can pose a deeper question about what it means to be a human then you know you have an iconic idea.
Let’s take ‘The Catcher in the Rye‘ for example.
The meaning in that is obvious. It’s about finding your place in a world that seems unreal and superficial. A feeling all of us have experienced. But if the book had just stopped at that it would be self-important and brooding. Like some kind of a French epic. Instead, the entertainment comes from a rebellious road trip, of a teenager in strange New York.
On the other end of the spectrum, the ‘Harry Potter‘ series is obviously extremely entertaining. But what makes the book endure is that at its core it’s about a kid realizing the trump of his own choices. His own self over his destiny. Hence, this fundamental equation. Entertainment plus meaning is equal to an iconic idea. A purely entertaining novel like a genre detective or a genre serial killer novel never stands the test of time.
On the other hand, novels that are thick and heavy on meaning never truly connect with the reader. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t write a detective story but keep the same construct in mind. It should be entertaining, yet have a deeper sense of meaning. Even if it’s a question you raise about the human condition versus providing any kind of solution. I think all other distinctions literary, commercial, young adult genre fiction, romance fiction are meaningless. A story is a story and these are the characteristics of a great story.
Now let’s deconstruct this equation one level more so you have a crystal clear direction on how to come up with entertainment and meaning that is uniquely yours.
Let’s start with entertainment.
Write about a secret world a hidden society, you have insider access to. This is a very important concept because that’s why most debut novelists fail. They’ll write about the postmodern dissatisfaction of living in New York City. All they write is about a messy breakup in college.
Why does that not work?
- If you go back to our original insight powerful story dissolves the reader’s ego. Makes them forget about themselves for the period of reading the story.
- If all you’re doing is creating the same world that the reader already knows of. You’ll never achieve the transcendence a great story is capable of.
That’s why a secret society is so powerful.
You’re creating a new world for the reader to inhabit and that’s entertaining. Now the secret world doesn’t have to be as elaborate as a wizardly school like ‘Harry Potter‘ or the mafia-like the ‘Godfather‘. These are great interesting secret worlds. But there are secret worlds that exist all around us. John Grisham does it so well with the law firms and you can choose anything as well. You could set a story in Silicon Valley. Or Harvard Business School or to push it forward, a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey. These are entertaining secret worlds because very few people have access to them and yet they’re all in culture, all interesting. So you don’t need to be some super imaginative creative type to create a secret world. You just have to have a spark of interest for something. Then research, research, research to understand every detail, every aspect of the world, so you can recreate it through your writing.
I had defaulted into the secret world construct for my first two novels and even in my third novel, The Yoga of Max’s Discontent’, I had created an elaborate world of hidden yoga ashrams and monasteries high in the Himalayas. Yet my novel was being rejected again and again. I re-looked it and realized that the secret world was being introduced only in the middle third of my novel, when my protagonist reaches India. But the first third of the novel was set in New York City and I was just showing a regular life. That’s why it wasn’t working. I fixed it by giving my protagonist a background of being born in the Bronx housing projects in the 1970s which are full of violence drugs and shootings. Very few people knew that world. As soon as I made that change the novel immediately had a frenzy among literary agents. The novel was entertaining right from the start because readers were being immediately introduced to a secret world.
So now I want you to think of a secret world that you want to spend the next year creating. With this just one choice, you’ll come 100 times closer to creating a novel that sells immediately.
So we talked about entertainment now let’s look at the meaning.
This is actually much simpler. Think hard.
– What is the biggest, deepest, most personal question you’ve ever struggled with in your life? Think! Done?
Now just keep unwrapping layers of that question and you’ll find the underlining meaning of your novel. For instance, let’s take a common rather superficial question.
– Why don’t I have the courage to quit my job to pursue my passion? Let’s unwrap the question.
– What’s stopping you from quitting your job? Is it because you’re worried that your life will go in a tailspin without a job?
– Will you reach destitution and regret? You can already see one path emerging. It’s about balancing the fear of regrets with the fear of an unlived life.
Something many people struggle with. So it’s a very universal emotion.
On the other hand, what’s making you want to quit your job so urgently?
Is it because someone close to you has died recently making you question mortality and meaning? That’s another path. A man or woman’s quest to understand mortality. Or it could be a third reason. Once you figure out the deep burning question in your life then keep asking yourself why, why, why? And you’ll get to the underlining meaning you should use in your novel. And chances are it’ll be very, very universal.
For instance, my second novel touched a lot of people very deeply in India because it came from a question that was very important in my life.
I was 31 years old when I wrote that book. I just ended a seven-year-old relationship. I had made some terrible decisions in my career. I found myself hanging on by a thread to a pretty bad job in the middle of the 2008 recession and I had zero savings because I’d just come back from a trip around the world.
During the same time, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. So suddenly I’m 31, broke, single, unemployed and all this was a big deal to me because I’m Indian. And in India, you have a script. By 30 you’re married, you have one kid, another on the way. You have a proper job, you have savings, you’re buying a house, all that stuff, and I had self-destructed completely.
But in the middle of my regrets, I started to realize that all this happened because I was just trying to grow. To push my boundaries in my life, in my career. To travel the world beyond the narrow confines of my experience.
They were all mistakes of ambition. So the dominant question in my life was am I a failure because I have nothing to show for all my experiences? Or in a sense am I a success because I try to live a life bigger than my capabilities?
Now that became an underlying thought in my novel that I kind of tried to answer through the protagonist’s journey. That’s why the book struck such a chord with thousands in India. So many people were trying to answer the same question about failure and success in a conservative society.
I think that’s the reason why if you’re completely honest with the deep question in your life, now or in the past, you’ll touch a lot of people with your writing. Because the human condition is very similar. The deeper you go within yourself the deeper you’ll touch people.
So in summary that’s all you need to create an iconic idea: entertainment and meaning.
Entertainment will come through bringing a secret world you know or want to know of to life.
Meaning is a consequence of unwrapping the deepest quest in your own life.
Now time for the first of only five writing exercises. This one will help you get to the heart of your idea. What I want you to do now, is to create a logline for your book. Which is a technique I’ve borrowed from screenplay writers and find very, very useful for fiction. This is a single line that condenses your book to its core essence by combining the entertainment and meaning we talked about. Don’t worry. It’s going to change as we go further into the course. But it’ll ground you a little for the next few sections.
So now let’s see some sample log lines. For ‘Twilight‘ it could be – a young girl falls in love with a vampire, who loves her but thirsts for her blood at the same time. Immediately you know there’s something interesting there. Girl, vampire, love, it’s entertaining.
But it’s also about love in all its metaphorical complexity. So there’s some hint of a meaning here as well. For ‘Breaking Bad’ it’s probably a high school chemistry teacher becomes a drug lord to get back in control of his life. Again you know there’s immediate intrigue here. A secret society of drug lords. And meaning wise also we’ve all struggled to be completely in control of our circumstances. So it meets that criteria. So now that’s all I want you to do.
Write a logline using everything we’ve talked about, entertainment and meaning, and you’ll be very, very close to cracking your iconic idea. Aren’t you digging this?
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