Balls. Cool guys. Those two things would go a long ways to improving the general lot of fiction.

The vast majority of writers are nerds who have no guts. When they succeed, they generally fluke onto something by following their darker impulses. Everyone has darker impulses, but these generally lie submerged and out of reach for the average man.

S.M. Stirling wrote the brilliant Draka books, but larded it up with feminism as if atoning for the aggressive, dark feel of his books. There’s almost always a major drawback to good books in the same Stirling fashion. Nobody can write consistently well.

A big problem with the publishing world is that writing a novel is a major risk. You invest huge chunks of time to turn out a 350 page book, and it can easily be turned down by the literary gatekeepers. As you write, you are under immense pressure to conform and be “propulsive,” writing a book which flows and compels further reading. The secret pressures warp and distort the creative process to the point that all books start to sound the same, particularly in their beginnings.

There is also society’s judgment on writers for transgressing the norms. One of the few times Stephen King transgressed, he made an adolescent girl have an orgy with multiple male friends. The readers eventually forgave King because of his overall body of work, but that remains one of his most critically disapproved-of scenes. The films completely leave out that scene. The general cowardice is astounding.

Truly unique work cannot get a foothold because it is too different. I, Greg Nikolic, have wrestled with my natural inclination to be unique in my fiction and the vital imperative to be highly commercial and successful. When I am too much myself, I isolate my work and fail. The best path is to be typical but to spice it up with your divergent attitudes. A writer who conforms all the time is as bound for commercial failure as a writer who is different all the time.

Philip K. Dick was a unique writer, and so was Edgar Allen Poe, and both men paid the price with a financial level of living that was far below what it could have been.

Stephen King succeeded because he sacrificed his vision for a degree of conformity that made him sell. He had the cultural good sense to know what worked. His first book Carrie was about menstruation, a taboo subject largely, but taboo subjects make good fiction. King normalized all the elements he could, those surrounding the menstruation, and injected high-level characterization into an otherwise dreary topic. He took the forbidden and made it accessible, almost natural.

Dean Koontz did the same thing in his fiction. He had a slow start with his first novel in 1968, Star Quest. Science fiction was never going to pay the bills. Robert J. Sawyer, the Canadian sci-fi writer, has won the most awards in the field and is only worth a bare few million dollars. Dean Koontz writes of the real contemporary world and is worth hundreds of millions. You judge what is the better subject-matter to write about.

J.K. Rowling hid her gender behind a neutral abbreviated name on the advice of her publishers, who feared boys wouldn’t want to read her otherwise. She wrote about a boy hero. Girls will read about boy heroes but boys won’t read about girl heroines. Everything Rowling did was calculated to break her out of poverty by appealing to the subconscious biases and prejudices of her readers. She didn’t go against the grain; she worked with what was there.

Lee Child wrote the Jack Reacher series of novels. He emphasized rugged masculinity and freedom, and targeted the much-neglected male audience. He had excellent success because he created a dream that could be related to. Reacher isn’t tied down to one place, he carries a toothbrush and an ATM card and a passport for ID and that’s it. He’s a big man. He doesn’t live in mewling fear like others do. He is a wild card, unaffiliated with police or government, and cleaning up the shit in society. The stories go on as long as they need to, and no longer. Child is one of the very few writers who isn’t a nerd. His element of toughness enables him to put toughness in his main character. This is what lets him succeed.

People are hungry for books that can lose themselves in. Every writer gets stale as they go on in their career. They stop trying so hard, the way Celine Dion the singer stopped reaching for the hard notes. As they gain success, they start indulging themselves and stop caring about the reader as much. Stephen King tries to write a literary novel to win a prize. Dean Koontz obsesses over dogs to the detriment of story. The tension and balance just isn’t there anymore.

John Grisham’s sales slumped after the Nineties. He didn’t do anything about it. Why should he bother? He’s already rich.

Piers Anthony, the author of the Xanth books, is least impressed with Xanth and considers his other fiction to be closer to his heart. But no one wants to read it. They want more Xanth. Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight vampire romance books, shifts to The Host and science fiction and sees a vast slump in her sales. The Australian woman author of the Thornbirds romance soap opera fiction turns to writing of Ancient Rome and its men. The writers continually work against their own interests. They go rogue.

Stephen King remains vaguely commercial in his plots because he is conditioned by his upbringing to write that way, but he goes massively feminine in his approach to win prizes, or so he thinks. Chained to a single style of writing, he can’t break free, and even if he could, he’d just be another Stephanie Meyer.

Novelists abuse their fans. Rather than serving the interests of their fans on a daily basis, they go their own way, and often try to be smarter than they are. But they don’t care. The hunger that brought them success dissipates and cannot be recaptured. They get weak, spoiled, rotten. King is a prime example of this. His novella Rat from a recent anthology is terrible, boring, a run-on sentence of a story that does nothing and goes nowhere.

The tension of poverty and the threat of failure is necessary to keep writers on their toes. Without this, they will wander off and do their own unsuccessful thing.

The best writer is easily bored and writes gripping fiction to entertain himself. He writes typically, but in a way that is edgy, separating his work out from the more mundane traditionalists. He is careful about breaking rules, but not afraid to break them when it works. He has a fine cultural sense that informs him on what the masses like and want to see more of. He understands the deeper subconscious world, where men are free and stop conforming, and live darker dreams. He tailors his fiction to match that deeper world.

This last paragraph is most important and worth reading three times.