Three ingredients for the literary “secret sauce” of success and recommended teaching books
Welcome to Flight School:
A burger with some melty cheese and a swipe of mayo and catsup is fine, but if you add secret sauce (which traditionally used to be mayo mixed with relish and catsup, but has now been upgraded to spicy aioli or even pesto aioli), you know that same burger becomes unforgettable. After eating a burger with that deliciousness smeared on the bun, you will never go back.
That’s how I feel about story now that I understand what it takes for a good book to be a great book. A great book contains the literary equivalent of secret sauce and a good book…doesn’t.
I can hardly read most books these days because, sadly, they fall flat. You know what I’m talking about here too. Like me, I’m sure you’ve spent money buying a book and hours reading it feeling enthusiastic and thrilled at first only to notice the whole thing petters out mid-way at the end. When this happens, even when it’s the most amazingly stylized book with breathtaking prose, you get a sinking sensation in your gut followed by that “what the hell?” thought in your brain. The worst part of this process is that you forget this knowing, usually after going on line to read reviews that are huge raves, because your healthy instincts are negated by doubt and insecurity. “Maybe I just didn’t get it,” you often tell yourself.
But wait.
Hold on.
You did get it. The book didn’t work. And you are being “sold” into believing it did.
You have to remember that publishing is a business, books are marketed for the maximum sales, and reviewers are paid (ever heard of influencers)?
Bottom line: You understand more than you know and that feeling in your gut is your first clue that the literary secret sauce was left out.
Literary Secret Sauce Ingredients:
1. Structure.
2. Plot.
3. And knowing the core value at stake.
Instructions: Study each independently with examples, then pull the three together, and apply them to your memoir.
Back in the day of writing and then selling my first memoir, I hadn’t been taught this literary secret sauce. Rather, I was brushed away from thinking about all three. “Too abstract.” “Too distracting.” “Too obvious,” I was told.
Tom and every other teacher I worked with focused on word choices, sentence construction, and the flow of those words and sentences into my paragraphs instead. I received only the most oblique teaching on scene-writing as well. “Just copy me,” was the primary instruction by one of my teachers who, so frustrated by the fact I wasn’t writing scenes he tossed an essay he had written at me. “Just copy this,” he said.
That is not teaching. That is hoping a student will learn through osmosis. That is, and forgive my bluntness…BS!
And if you think this kind of teaching isn’t happening now…think again. They are out there, right now, pedaling their wares. Teachers I admire call all three of the secret sauce ingredients a waste of time. Which is great for them, they are big wigs who make a ton of money off your ignorance, but again that’s BS. So, let’s figure this out. Let’s think a little more deeply. Let’s do a better job.
When the Forest for the Trees group told me my memoir could be better they were collectively talking about the literary secret sauce.
(I’m digging that term, frankly. I might be taking it and using it for my Foundations Teaching this fall. Learn how to make your book shine with a little Literary Secret Sauce. What do you think?)
But it was too late. As Kim said, Pocket Books owned my book and it was on the conveyor belt toward publication.
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