Tiny egg, giant chicken

Once, a long time back, I read a draft query letter from a writer who’d worked as cabin staff on a major airline and had written a book based in that world. In her query letter, she claimed that the natural market for her book was X million people, because that was how many people took a flight each year.

It would be easy to mock that kind of thinking, but I do remember (with a cringe) that my attempts to pitch my first novel in the US took an embarrassingly similar approach. Roughly, “Some of this book is set in New York, and New York is in America, so therefore…” Hmm. Well – I lived and learned.

The bigger truth is, I think, a more or less opposite one: the more intensively local you are, the more interesting you have the potential to be.

For me, the ultimate example of this is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. I happen to know Hornby’s agent and she told me that he came to her with six different pitch ideas. She hated the first five and told him so. He, downcast, said, ‘Well, you’re really not going to like my #6 option.’

She nudged him anyway, and he told her about his obsession with the Arsenal Football Club and his idea for a book about that obsession. Now the agent in question is as far from being a football fan as you can imagine. I’d be confident that she’s never watched a football match in real life, and probably never even on TV. But she loved the idea – and told him to write the book.

He wrote it. It became a huge hit in Britain. It was even a hit in the US, which was still less interested in soccerball then than it is now.

Is that surprising or not surprising?

Well, on the X-number-of-people-have-taken-flights model, the book should not have done as well as it did, certainly not in the US.

But that’s not quite the point.

First, the book was a hyper-knowledgeable novel about a niche subculture. Not just that of fandom, or of English-football-fandom, but specifically of Arsenal FC-fandom. (Which, by the way, is the best sort.) People love to gain entrance to those niche communities. That’s why JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was a hit; why Tara Westover’s Educated was.

Second, and paradoxically, the book wasn’t really about football at all – it was about obsession and addiction and the psychological toll of placing your emotions in the hands of a beast (football) which has no interest at all in your welfare.

And then third, we have this:

“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” – Hemingway

And also this:

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” – Fitzgerald

In writing, the universal arises out of the particular. Seeking to expand the audience by broadening the overt topic of your text is precisely the wrong strategy.

By diving into his ultra-niche world, Hornby ended up delivering a memoir that spoke to all those who read it. His niche story said to his readers that you are not ‘lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.’

And yes, it remains true that American readers read mostly American-authored books. But you don’t crack that problem by sitting in Daventry or Donegal and having your characters say Yee-hah as they crack open Budweisers and adjust the tilt of their Stetsons. If you do that, it’ll almost certainly feel inauthentic, unless you are exceptionally skilled. And even if it felt authentic, you still have a problem: you’re now a writer who isn’t American writing fiction that’s not meaningfully distinguishable from a zillion works by actual Americans. Why would any agent pick yours?

So, double down on what you have.

Pick your real passion – the setting you care about, the obsession that keeps you awake at night – and write about that. The smaller your egg, the bigger the chicken.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY //

The Ultimate Start Lesson Four / Tiny and big

Two FFs this week. For those of you following our much-beloved The Ultimate Start course, which this week focused on world-building, it’s:

• Rewrite your opening 500 words, this time trimming any unnecessary backstory or description. 

When you’re ready, upload your work here.

And for the rest of us, a different sort of FF.

• Find a 250-word passage that delivers something big via something tiny. The archetypal example here is Jay Gatsby dislodging a clock. The act is tiny – and only briefly mentioned – but the metaphorical reverberation lasts through the book and beyond. As ever, please give us title, genre and any explanation we need.

Share your work in this forum whenever you’re ready. 

Til soon. 

Harry