My creative writing professor told us at the beginning of the semester that all we were going to do is write one story for the class to critique, and one story for him to critique. He randomly assigned us the week our first story was due, gave us the expected word count, and that was it. The subject and genre was up to us.

My due date was somewhere in the middle of the term, so I got to read about half of my classmates’ stories before it was my turn. I only remember one specific story out of all 20-something that I read that fall (more on that story later), but I do remember this: they all sucked.

Look, I know that it’s not very nice to say that, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

By the time I needed to start writing my own story, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do. First, I wanted to write something humorous. People who suck at writing almost always write drama. It’s a common misconception that if you make your characters miserable, it’ll make you seem deep, and it will make your readers think you’re a pretty introspective person with something really important to say. [People who suck at writing also tend to write a lot of sci fi and fantasy. Don’t misunderstand me – there’s a lot of really great sci fi and fantasy out there. I’m just saying that I’ve been to a lot of small-town book festivals and purchased a lot of really bad books and the overwhelming majority of them have been in those two genres. (Although romance/erotica is not too far behind.)]

The class had critiqued around a dozen ho-hum short stories by this point so my goal was to shake things up with something that would make them laugh. I also decided I wanted to write a female protagonist who wasn’t particularly strong, sexy, smart, or even likeable. I wanted her to really just be…normal. Relatable. Stuck in her ways. Afraid of confrontation. Searching for love, but not having the fortitude to actively hunt it down.

The week after I’d submitted my story, I showed up to class expecting to hear nothing but praise…that is, if anyone could even speak at all. They would all be laughing too hard to articulate any criticism, I was sure.

Of course that’s not what happened. How boring life would be if everyone liked you.

In short, no one “got” my story. I received the same amount of criticism as everyone who’d gone before me, and everything they said was correct and fair. My story wasn’t funny; it was trite. My MC wasn’t quirky; she was boring. Her enemy wasn’t understood to be the antagonist because I never explained his motivations or, really, anything. I’d wanted to come across as witty and high-brow but I hadn’t been able to pull it off. Not by a long shot.

Fast forward two more months of bitter critiques for the rest of my classmates.

For my final project, the story which would be read and critiqued only by the professor, I decided I’d give the audience what they wanted. They wanted easy-to-follow drama with mass appeal? I was gonna CSI: Miami that shit.

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Kate Landers’ Checkbox of Mass-Appeal Fiction:

• Make at least two characters bilingual. People who can speak 2+ languages at the same time are deep, yo. (I was pulling off a B- in Spanish that semester so check).
• Give your story an obvious metaphor so that your readers will easily be able to understand it, but will still feel smart for figuring it out (my bilingual characters were named Judy, Miguel, Geraldo, and Jesús).
• Kill an animal and/or child (you could also kill a beloved mother, father, or secret gay lover if you have to). (Spoiler to no one who has figured out the obvious metaphor in my story: Jesús was accidentally-ish killed by Judy).
• Leave the ending a little vague and mysterious. You gotta be delicate here. You don’t want your readers furiously picking apart loose ends; you just want to leave them a bit unsettled. They should be able to imagine what happens next, while accepting that it’s up for interpretation. (Go read Joan Lowery Nixon’s The Giver if you need an example.)

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As expected, I nailed it. A+++ The professor actually handed it back to me saying, “Why didn’t you write like this for the class?” He encouraged me to submit it to the college literary magazine’s contest, which I did. I won first place and $100 – still to this day one of the largest monetary awards I’ve ever received.

There’s a lesson to all this. Actually a few. In no particular order they are:

• If you wanna make money, just give the people what they want. Whatever artsy-fartsy thing you’ve written, dumb it down by about eight grade levels, add some/more sex and/or violence, and you’ll be on your way to a Universally Accepted Standard of Success.
• Just cause you suck at something sometimes, doesn’t mean you’ll always suck at it.
• But if you do suck at something, you better be okay with hearing about it from a jury of your peers.
• A LOT of people REALLY SUCK at writing. And an unfair amount of them actually get published. So if you think you’re even decent at it, just go ahead and try to put it out there. Either you’re actually better than the majority, or you’re just like them and therefore you’ll be ignorant, but in good company.

P.S. That one story I mentioned earlier? It was about a woman waiting for her lover to return home and when he finally does, she gives him so much grief about where he’s been that he loses his mind and murders her by ripping her to shreds and throwing her piece-by-piece into a blender. Because it turns out she was a sentient issue of National Geographic. Or maybe he was just insane. I can’t remember. It was hilarious, that’s all I can recall. Lots of great puns, like when he saves her “spine” for last.

P.P.S. While I no longer have a copy of that crap story (though I really wish I did so I could cringe over it on the days when I hate myself and laugh over it on the days when I’m proud of how far I’ve come), you can read my AWARD-WINNING story here.