Demystifying the best seller’s techniques

Down, alone and having time to kill after failing in doing anything creative I looked for some inspiration. I surfed through my 200 GB of world classic movie collection –Pier Paolo Pasolini. Claude Chabrol   Jean-Luc Godard (from 1980 onward); well…after few hours I couldn’t concentrate on any one and most of them had a negative affect on me as well.

I was down and the theme, content, negativity of those entire movies was nauseating.

In past also I had gone through passes like this (dark)  I stopped and tried to finish Terra Amata by French author and Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio.

I found it was about nothingness  my recurring theme. It’s been six months and I am halfway through the book, it seems I will need three more months (and three bout of depression) to finish it. Nothingness and the negativity associated with it were becoming repulsive, so I kept the book aside.

Thankfully after a couple of days I fell sick and this time I didn’t dared  to venture into the mistake I made just 2 days before.

Again I had to kill the time this time I decided to do it with something light and palatable.

I opened R 2020.

By evening I finished the book.

And after finishing it (me Mr. dark painter as my friend decodes me for my passivity) I too had some good vibes.

Mr Bhagat has become a phenomenon .You may love him or you may hat him, but you can not ignore him, what makes him what he is, I pondered.

After many months I picked up my pen started writing it down on my diary.

As I was blank so I thought of typing and uploading those 11 points (read 5.5 x2)

I wrote:

He is what he is because he could hold the nerve of the Indian reader because He

1. Writes in (simple) English
2. Use short sentences (the Nobel aspirants consumes one paragraph for one sentence) with words that most of us use when they are (ab) using English.
3. The most of the narratives are in conversations, not about subplot or mental mind game, smell, taste, scenery of the place. For all those he uses only one or two sentence so that reader can understand where the characters are and what they are feeling about. Thankfully most bad times pass very fast keeping the reader happy.
4. Love / romance will be there -unabashed .Most of the Nobel aspirant will try to write what is real /Mr .Bhagat will write what we fantasize about it-boy meet girl then he meets /hates /fights ….. (and whether movie ,music or popular literature romance sells)
5. The theme will be about something to which common people (read target audience, mostly youth) could relate to.
6. the protagonist tells the common feeling of a young guy (about girls ,sex, rich ,…..or common thought bubble of the youth )
7. Enough of humour and satire in every page so that no one is bored.
8. Sex –at the time when it seems reader are losing the grip, it freshen the mind up, so that writer can give you the final punch.
9. The protagonist will do the thing that most of the target reader do like –eating in Café Coffee day ,loitering in a popular hangout places(CP  , Dasaswamedh Ghat etc)
10. At the end the protagonist (a looser like most of us) become a winner (morally) and also to the eye of the reader (his main objective).
11.  Most importantly  There is a story –an opening ,a climax ,an ending (with a twist )  .He will not try any other new/unknown / zigzag narrative literary style (like most Noble aspirant do)  

Still there are many following the trend written above but this man is far ahead.

There are criticism against him also ,But I strongly feels in a democracy we all follow a cafeteria approach .You have all in the menu but reader have the right to choose /discard among all .