I Started Reading Fiction From Authors Who’ve Sold 100 Million Books, This Is What I Learned

You know those reading lists with titles like “100 Books To Change Your Life”?

The ones that always contain Atomic Habits, Meditations, or Thinking Fast and Slow?

I hate those.

So, recently I decided to only read popular mass-market fiction by well-known authors who’ve sold at least 100 million books. We aren’t going high-brow here, either. No Tolstoy or Moby Dick. These are detective stories, thrillers, and all the other genres “smart people don’t read.”

Here’s what I learned…

Your Quality Of Writing Doesn’t Matter

With rare exceptions, like Michael Crichton or Stephen King, many successful authors have something of an amateurish writing style.

There are numerous video essays critiquing the Harry Potter series. And almost all of them criticize J. K. Rowling’s poor prose (such as her over-reliance on parentheses that create cumbersome run-on sentences).

But, she’s not alone.

The majority of popular writers have a clunky writing style that wouldn’t hold up in a college-level English class.

Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic! (a book I actually liked) starts off with 50 pages of the most ham-handed exposition dumps imaginable. Also, our globe-trotting secret agent hero introduces himself dramatically as “Pitt. Dirk Pitt.”

Yet, the overall story and pacing is good enough to overcome these issues.

Good Fiction And Good Non-Fiction Are Indistinguishable

You could buy a non-fiction Robert Greene book about Machiavellianism and political scheming, or you could read James Clavell’s excellent novel Tai-Pan or George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

All three contain the same lessons.

There’s a quote that goes “Fiction is reality filtered through the lens of art.”

And it’s true.

Enjoyable fiction often shares hidden truths about human nature, or it presents real world facts and events in a stylized manner.