Anthony Burgess concluded that best-selling novels are either romantic or didactic or both. Didactic means that which teaches or is morally instructive. Put another way, everybody likes romance and many readers want to learn when they read a story. He didn’t intend that his conclusions be regarded as a magical formula; everybody can’t write a best seller. But what he learned can help aspiring authors tailor their novels to the apparent psychic needs of their readers.
Romantic Novels
Burgess uses romance in the sense of everything having to do with the boy-girl thing, the emotional and sexual juice that makes boys different from girls. Viewed this way, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Barbara Cartland’s bodice rippers are both about romance. Men, being generally more crass, like skin and sex. Women, ordinarily more sexually civilized and restrained, crave romance in an emotional sense. They like the in-out too, but their psychic needs are more diffuse. Men are focused.
Novels that offer romance in whatever emotional or carnal level are novels that people more often buy and read. Women read more fiction than do men; that is why romance novels are by the far the most popular genre of fiction.
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