Is it always bad to be formulaic?

Thoughts from a (brief) conversation with Jack Higgins

Many years ago, I was writing a game set in Cold War Berlin. I wanted to get a big name attached to it, in the hope of attracting both funding and an audience. My first choice was Len Deighton, but he was retired and wasn’t interested. John Le Carré was too busy writing The Constant Gardener and turned us down flat. But Jack Higgins’s agent was open to exploring the idea.

I was excited at the prospect of working with Higgins. I read The Eagle Has Landed over and over as a kid. I hunted down every single book he wrote, even the early work he published under his own name, Harry Patterson, and numerous different pseudonyms. They weren’t great literature, they were just fun, fast, reads. I knew exactly what to expect, and Higgins delivered every single time.

I didn’t get to meet Higgins in person. Instead, his agent set us up with a conference call. We chatted for a few moments, and I did my best to stay on the side of respectful admiration, rather than fan-boy. He told me he was working on his new novel, Flight of Eagles.

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s about two brothers, from a mixed British and German family, both pilots. When WW2 breaks out, the family splits up, one brother joins the Luftwaffe and one joins the RAF, and they meet in the Battle of Britain.”

There was a long, awkward silence.

“How did you know?” asked Higgins, icily.

“Well, that seems like a typical Jack Higgins plot,” I said.

Without another word, he put the phone down. We didn’t end up working with him. Berlin Assassins never got made.

As his agent explained later, Higgins hated being thought of as a formulaic writer. In his mind, every one of his books was unique, different, and original. Guessing the plot to his new book was about as insulting as I could have got.

But to me, the point of reading a Higgins book was that it wasn’t different. I knew that every book was going to start on a dark, rainy night. I knew that his heroes would do everything “expertly”, whether that was pouring tea, lighting a cigarette, or kicking over a motorcycle. I knew that the most honest seeming person was going to end up as a traitor, and that the most dodgy villain would turn out to be a secret ally. It was guaranteed to give me exactly what I wanted, just wrapped up in slightly different packaging.

It took Higgins about 10 books to find his formula, and 25 books to perfect it. His early works were pretty dire, but he persistently honed his craft for about 15 years, until he found himself on the bestsellers lists, in the company of leading thriller writers such as Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley. And then he just kept going for another 45 years, churning out a total of 85 books, and selling well over 250 million copies worldwide.

I admire anyone who can do that. To me, that’s no different to the Rolling Stones, Santana, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper or other bands who develop their signature style and then keep right on doing it over and over again for half a century or more, to the delight of millions of fans.

Whose formula?

I don’t think having a formula is necessarily a bad thing. It can be one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal. But I think it comes down to one very important element. Are you developing your own formula, creating your own style of storytelling, and building on that?

Or are you simply aping what’s worked for other people?

In other words, are you trying to be you or are you trying to be them?