How to write a best-seller

Adapted from The Observer, Sunday 9 June 2002

Read the following article by Robert McCrum (The Observer, Sunday 9 June 2002) on how to write a best-seller and answer the following questions.

Robert McCrum gives four golden rules

Bestsellers and bestseller lists exercise a strange, and slightly shameful, fascination. I am often surprised at Observer readers who confess with mild embarrassment to an addiction to their monitoring of the lists. And all this is long before we get to the people who speculate in an idle way about somehow writing a bestseller themselves, hitting the jackpot and, er, living happily ever after in Philip Larkin's 'shuttered château'.Of course it can't be done. You might as well stand in a field during a thunderstorm and hope to be struck by lightning. Bestsellers defy analysis. But if you did want to prospect for this fool's gold, here are four guidelines.

First, make sure you attempt fiction rather than non-fiction. Fiction is just one genre, non-fiction runs the gamut. The public's appetite for novels of all sorts is far broader and potentially more commercial than the market for, say, history or popular science.

Second, having chosen fiction, don't forget to tell a good story. Grab the reader by the throat on page one, get your narrative fingers round his or her collar in the first chapter and don't let go until everyone's living happily ever after, burying the dead in a wintry twilight or driving off into a better and a finer future.

And don't be too original. Shakespeare himself did not disdain well-tried tales. There are various theories about the number of basic plots in the world. Some people say three, some seven, some ten. There's no harm in having your fiction conform to a fictional archetype.

But don't - my third law - become too calculating. If one thing characterises the writers of bestselling books, it is that, to a person, they believe in their star. Every line they write is scratched in letters of fire.

And, finally, if you decide to put sex into your work: beware. This is the most difficult kind of writing, and almost always makes the writer look ridiculous.

So much for principles. The sad truth is that while aspects of these guiding notions can be detected in every bestseller, you could follow my suggestions to the letter and still strike seams of utter dross.

Now read the text again and do the vocabulary exercise that follows.