Get plot right: Lessons from 7 bestsellers

Get plot right: Lessons from 7 bestsellers



I could see this information as being pretty helpful, as most of the best sellers are not that well written and they are usually pretty quick reads. Maybe writing the next best seller is as easy as stealing a plot from one of the major mass market paper back writers, and inserting interesting characters.

Here is the list: (Click the link above for the entire article)



The Davinci Code by Dan Brown



The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larssen



The Thirteenth Tale by by Diane Setterfield

Diane Setterfield’s first novel became a best seller immediately after its release in 2006 and was made into a film by the BBC in 2013. The Thirteenth Tale hearkens back to its gothic predecessors. The plot itself shifts between past and present as the protagonist uncovers the family secrets of a famous novelist.

While the book’s structure and the particulars of its plot are original, the success of The Thirteenth Tale indicates that newness is not always what the public is seeking. Old-fashioned melodrama abounds in The Thirteenth Tale, and with its backdrop of antiquarian bookselling and echoes of nineteenth century classics, it is almost a polar opposite to the contemporary concerns of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What it shares with that, and other bestsellers, is a number of plot twist and unpredictable revelations that grip the reader.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Kostova’s 2005 novel The Historian quickly became the fastest-selling first novel in U.S. publishing history. Kostova based her story on the historical Vlad Tepes and the literary Count Dracula as she related the tale of a professor and his daughter in search of Tepes’ tomb.

The book includes lush descriptions of the many European countries in which it is set. Like The Da Vinci Code, it draws on a literary and historical background that most readers have a passing familiarity with and gives the reader a sense of access to secrets and historical details formerly concealed. Like several other bestsellers, secret histories and discoveries create an interest and make the book a page-turner. Unlike The Da Vinci Code but like The Thirteenth Victim, the time scope of The Historian is huge, set across three major periods in the twentieth century.

Another best-seller that occurs across a broad swathe of the twentieth century is one by South African writer Lauren Beukes:

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The serial killer is an ever-popular trope in thrillers and crime fiction, but Beukes marries it to time travel in her 2013 novel, later optioned by actor Leonardo di Caprio’s production company. The Shining Girls tells the story of one who seeks out young women to murder in order to maintain his connection with the time-travelling house he has stumbled into. What Beukes gets right in The Shining Girls is injecting something fresh into well-worn storytelling tropes such as serial killers with female victims.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins