Susan Brown is a professional editor, writing coach, and book doctor. She’s had forty years of teaching college creative writing and book editing, and has guided dozens of books into print as an editor, and as a writing coach.

My friend Jeff Moran in Woodstock had previously mentioned Susan to me, and so I was intrigued when I heard that Susan was going to run a five week online writing workshop called “The Secrets of the Great Writers”.

Jeff had told me that Susan was a James Joyce scholar. That was a little bit intimidating, but also immediately credentializing. I’ve appreciated a number of books on writing, by Stephen King, George Saunders, Anne Lamotte, Mary Karr and others, and thought it might also be instructive, and interesting, to be part of a writing workshop, so I signed up for Susan’s class.

I learned a lot in the workshop, we had a terrific group of very talented fiction and memoir writers in the class, and it was a lot of fun. ​

One of the dozens of sources Susan identified for us during the workshop was a book called Hit Lit - Cracking the Code of the 20th Century’s Biggest Bestsellers, by James Hall. In his book, Hall identifies the features common to the biggest bestsellers of all time.

Susan and I discussed her Secrets of the Great Writers Workshop. Susan actually conducted an abbreviated Workshop on the Air. We discussed Hall’s Hit Lit and we discussed Ulysses.

We discussed storytelling. I loved this discussion.

The books examined in Hit-Lit, many of which are referred to in our discussion.

1. 
   Gone with the Wind*

2. 
   Peyton Place

3. 
   To Kill a Mockingbird*

4. 
   Valley of the Dolls

5. 
   The Godfather*

6. 
   The Exorcist

7. 
   Jaws

8. 
   The Dead Zone

9. 
   The Hunt for Red October*

10. 
    The Firm*

11. 
    The Bridges of Madison County; and

12. 
    The Da Vinci Code*

13. 
    *I’ve read these.

Some of the other books referred to by Susan:

Moby Dick

The Scarlet Letter

The Lighthouse

Sound and the Fury

The Lincoln Lawyer

Black Cherry Blues

Gone Baby Gone

Pride and Prejudice

Let the Great World Spin

Madame Bovary

The Glass Castle

Angela’s Ashes

Wild

Catcher in the Rye

Lolita

Ulysses

I encouraged Susan to run a class guiding us through Ulysses!