THAT is what I want to find out when I leave this coming Saturday for Los Angeles. I was lucky to be chosen as a creative writing fellow for one semester at Miami University in Ohio. I will be writing my third novel, and it's not going to be as literary as 'Riverrun,' my first novel that was published by Penguin Books in 2020.
Nor is it going to be a pastiche, a patchwork of styles and prose genres, like my second novel, 'The Country of Desire.''Riverrun' was influenced by two great writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera. My teacher, Rayvi Sunico, asked me to read 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' when I was taking up my MA in Literature at Ateneo de Manila University on a Robert Southwell scholarship.I was shocked by the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
' 'The Bestseller Code' as a book title is more forceful than 'Writing a Bestseller.' The book also notes that many best-selling novelists have worked as journalists or magazine editors. They have been trained to write accessible prose with a finger on the reader's pulse.The book also cautions against writing long descriptions, making the readers lose their way in the thicket of words.