Category Archives: Writing

In praise of authorial intrusion

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An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

— opening sentence in the novel “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” by Henry Fielding, 1749

Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.

— Shakespeare, The Biography, Peter Ackroyd

I’ve broken a rule in my latest self-pubbed novel, and I’m worse than unrepentant. I’m defiantly unrepentant. It’s the rule forbidding “authorial intrusion.” Here’s how my novel opens.

There are a ton of stories about it floating around on the web. Half of them are baloney. The other half—baloney and cheese.

The woman is a biologist. A trained scientist. Meaning: for her, things either stack up to the measure of the five senses or you brush them aside.

So forget what you’ve read.

Forget what you’ve read from people who say she’s some kind of New Age Messiah.

And while you’re at it, forget the stuff that denounces her as a cynical fraud.

Here’s what really happened.

The book, not by coincidence, is about a woman who discovers she can see fairies. This makes it a fairy tale, and I’ve begun it with my own little twist of Once Upon a Time.

Which makes me, of course, a Bad Writer.

I wouldn’t have been judged so harshly a couple centuries ago. There was a time when authorial intrusion was not only accepted, but expected. Not today. Today, if you were to pester an agent or editor with a novel that opens like mine, your book would go straight to the reject pile.

Now I’m not saying this new novel I’ve pubbed is good. On the contrary. A) It’s not my place to say whether it’s good. And B) the experience of attempting fiction is a humbling one. Writing a good novel is extraordinarily difficult. And having finished four, I am still only a rank beginner.

It would be presumptive of me to suggest I’ve managed to produce anything that might be objectively described as “good.”

So my thoughts on authorial intrusion, or any other stylistic convention, don’t carry any particular authority. But hell. This is the Internet, and I have an opinion ;-)

It goes something like this.

There was a time when fiction was closer to its oral roots.

Before the emergence of a literate middle class, stories were told, not read, and the teller — the author — was therefore a part of the experience. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in a village square in the 12th century, somewhere in Europe, where a small crowd has gathered around someone telling a story — relating an account of some battle, perhaps, or the death of a monarch, or a shipwreck, or pirate raid. A person gifted with a sense of timing, and an expressive vocabulary, a sense of how to play the audience’s emotions, would hold their interest longer. People would ask the speaker to repeat the story. The story teller would gain a reputation, would become sought-after.

And then there were the tales that were repeated orally, the epic poems and fairy tales. Why are there so often multiple versions of these stories? Because some of the people who got their hands on these stories changed things, edited things, added embellishments. These were the storytellers who knew how to juice the plot, how to better engage listeners.

Early novels translated this oral experience to paper.

When Fielding begins the tale of Tom Jones, he does so by inviting the reader to come into a public house, put down a bit of money, and have a listen. Fielding is there, in the room, not self-consciously but because it’s assumed he should be there. It’s Fielding, telling the story; reading his novel is simply a way of inviting him into your drawing room. There’s no 20th Century  conceit that he be invisible, that the story is somehow “a completely independent world.”

So what happened?

Why did authorial intrusion become taboo?

I’m no lit scholar, but I can hazard a guess. As more and more people fancied themselves novelists, the pool of second- and third-rate novelists grew. And many of these writers handled authorial intrusion clumsily.

You’ve probably come across an example, if you’ve ever picked up a badly written 19th century novel in a thrift store. It can be extremely off-putting to find yourself lectured by some long-winded boor in the middle of what is supposed to be a novel.

But our fiction taste-setters haven’t decided that authorial intrusion is taboo only if it’s badly done. They’ve made it taboo entirely. The reason for this (they say) is that authorial intrusion breaks the spell. Even the phrase itself suggests a despoiling: something intrudes on that “completely independent world;” the author has become an interloper, a violator.

Again, I agree that if done badly, authorial intrusion can spoil the mood.

But how strange that in, say, television dramas or comedies, the Fourth Wall is no longer off-limits, but in fiction it’s assumed the reader must be continually immersed in an alternative world; that the experience will be ruined if the author calls attention to the fact that the work is fiction, the characters are fiction — that you’re reading an invented tale spun by another human being.

Perhaps we’ve lost the ability, as novel readers, to switch back and forth from “suspension of disbelief” to an awareness that that novels are actually a collusion between reader and writer.

But I don’t think that’s the case.

Our literary gatekeepers have done too good a job at screening fiction against a master list of taboos.

And as a result, writers haven’t had the option of experimenting with authorial intrusion. We don’t know when it works, or doesn’t work, because it’s a tool that’s been locked away.

And that’s too bad.

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up on Vanity Fair that you’ve maybe come across. [UPDATE: link sadly no longer works…] Hitchens’ cancer has now progressed to the point where it is destroying his vocal cords. The piece is about the interconnectedness of self/personality, writing, and voice.  “To a great degree, in public and private,” he writes, “I ‘was’ my voice.”

And now that he’s losing his voice, he appreciates how much the quality of writing depends on the quality of one’s speaking.

In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page.

He closes the piece with advice for writers, starting with this:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”

The ability to hold an audience’s interest orally is no different than the ability to hold an audience’s interest on the page.

Now in the oral tradition, speakers used literary devices to invite their listeners into a fictional world. But it’s silly to assume that once you were past the “once upon a time” gate, the story teller never again “intruded.”

Of course they did. “Once upon a time” the spinner of tales was an active participant in the experience, casting a spell, then withholding it, teasing, making promises and then pretending to back off of them — like the grandfather reading the story in Princess Bride, interrupting a scene to tell his grandson not to worry, Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by eels. Yet.

Authorial intrusion was once part of the experience.

Not only that, but it added to the listener’s pleasure — just as Fielding’s greeting adds to the pleasure of reading Tom Jones.

So yeah. It’s a shame we’ve thrown out this particular baby on account of some stinky Victorian bathwater. But maybe now that indie authors are retaking the industry, we’ll see some authorial winking and nudging inserted here and there.

And maybe readers will actually enjoy it.

Maybe writers will begin to understand that the notion of a “completely  independent world” is itself a conceit, and in some respects an increasingly tiresome one.

Maybe we’ll start to realize that authors don’t need to always be invisible.

Maybe we’ll welcome our story tellers back into the room with us, pull up our chairs and start to listen . . .

E-Voice. Some Thoughts on Social Media.

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I’ve always felt that the line between social media and traditional media was an artificial one, but it occurs to me now that my perspective is shaped by my being, when it really comes down to it, a writer first.

When your primary goal is to communicate, your audience is always there, in front of you. You’re always trying to tell a story that will connect with your readers.

What’s different, with social media, is that readers can talk back.

I recently added the TaylorMade Facebook page to my FB feed, and I was reading the comments this morning to a new post they’ve put up. It’s a short note about some new irons that are now available (Tour Preferred MB, MC, and CB irons), and one of the things that is immediately obvious is that some peoples’ comments are . . . shall we say, feisty.

How different from the days when a PR or marketing communications person would issue a press release without having to exit his or her comfortable mar-com bubble. If someone’s response to your company’s news was negative– “that’s ugly/too expensive/like someone else’s brand better”–you wouldn’t know. Sure, some inkling of those responses might trickle back to you over time, but it would be long after the release was issued, published, and essentially forgotten.

Now you know immediately.

And that’s a good thing, for a couple of reasons. First, it affords companies the opportunity to gather feedback. No, the comments on a Facebook page don’t reach the standards of bona fide market research, but there is data in there, if you know how to qualify it.

Equally important, the feedback ensures you put communication first.

Communication is not a one-way endeavor. It requires listening as well as talking. It’s reciprocal.

Which gets me to what I think of as “e-voice.”

The risk with traditional marketing communications has always been that the company’s voice sounds out-of-touch. You see it in pieces that are “corporate-y.” They speak with marketing department lingo instead of sounding like real people, by which I mean the folks who actually might buy the product or service. The language is stiff and formal, instead of being conversational. At its worst, the communications devolve into flat descriptions of features-benefits, devoid of any humanity whatsoever. It becomes noise–and people tune it out.

Carry that style into the realm of social media, and you set yourself up for mockery or worse. One local business here in Roch, in a particularly egregious example, has used its Twitter account to repeat the marketing tagline created for its radio and television ads. Sorry, but that is no way to win a social media audience.

E-voice is different. E-voice is genuine. It feels like it’s a real human being, not a marketing slogan bot. It is casual, conversational. And it is always aware of that reciprocity. Even when the person tweeting or facebooking or blogging doesn’t respond to commentors, e-voice always sounds as if it’s addressing actual people. It is always an invitation to converse, rather than a one-sided proclamation of some kind.

There was a time when companies, sensing all this, got a bit nervous. And some probably still are. But an e-voice doesn’t need to be out of control. It doesn’t need to diverge from the parameters set by a company’s brand and reputation.

In fact, e-voice is essentially a kind of fictional character, bound as surely as a fictional character by the constraints of personality, habits, values, even decorum.

You could think of e-voice as the 2D textual version of Old Spice Guy. It’s a creation, a manufactured entity, and yet because it has a personality it suggests a life of its own, and so resonates with its audience.

You almost need to start, with social media, by creating this character–this persona–behind the scenes. The rest just follows naturally, and the conversation begins.

Can novels take your breath away?

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Dani Amore, writing on technorati.com [UPDATE: link no longer good…], weighs in on the “how to price an ebook” debate by attempting a comparison between songs and novels. This cracked me up:

A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.

But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.

But should they be?

Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?

And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?

7 reasons why you should NOT be in a writing group

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Okay, so this post extolling the virtues of writing groups is about poetry, a literary pursuit for which the chance of monetary pay-off is so slim it’s basically off the table entirely. [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry!]

But if you’re writing fiction, and your goal as a writer is to find a real audience for your work, sorry, but I think you have to be very cautious about joining a writing group.

Here’s why.

1. Blind leading the blind. If you want to learn how to become a success in anything, you need to find mentors,  models, and teachers who are already successful at that thing. A writing group — unless it’s well-stocked with published authors — can’t offer you anything but the opinions of people who are capable of educated guesses, at best. At worst, they may well be naive or even ignorant. You have to ask yourself: what sort of person do you want advising you on your work?

2. Your precious time. Participating in a writing group takes time. The meetings alone take time. Critiquing other peoples’ work takes time. And what could you be doing, if you weren’t spending all that time on your writing group? Um, writing, perhaps?

3. And your precious focus. One of the most important things you have to do, as a writer, is to pinpoint what you want to accomplish with your WIP. Any time anyone peers over your shoulder, points at a sentence/character/theme and says “well, what about this, though?” and you are obligated (because you’re polite!) to respond, then guess what. You’ve just been distracted. And when you’re distracted, you’re not honing in on what you’re trying do do, as a writer.

4. Committee syndrome. Related to #3, but important enough to merit it’s own line on the list. Committees create only one thing: consensus. Committees cannot create novels, or any other kind of art for that matter. The minute you start offering your writing up to some committee, you build a nice consensus on what’s “good” and what “works” etc. etc., but you are also consigning your WIP to mediocrity or worse.

5. False security. Say you manage to wow your writing group members with your latest example of scintillating prose. So what? To paraphrase Dean Wesley Smith, the only readers who matter are the ones who are going to pay you for your work. And here’s the thing: being praised for something we’ve written is a peak experience — it’s satisfying, it sates us as a culmination of sorts. The danger is that after that peak, we tend to let up. This is often subconscious, of course. “Oh,” says our sneaky little mind. “I’ve done it. I’m finished. I can rest for a bit now.” Well guess what — you’re not finished. Wowing your reading group means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. And every second you spend your time polishing that little trophy on your shelf is another second you’ve wasted when you should be pressing forward toward your real goals as a writer.

6. False insecurity. Okay, let’s look at the opposite scenarios. Say your writing group hates your latest example of scintillating prose. Does that mean you stink? Well first of all, maybe not. See #1 above. But even if the group is correct, and your stuff could use some work, what do you gain by knowing? Nothing, except if you count it as a “gain” when you let people suck you dry of all that pesky self-confidence. Look, it takes tremendous courage to become a writer. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re spending your bravery reserves on the wrong things.

7. Creating and judging are mutually exclusive pursuits–and the creating bit is the one that is most important to writers. It’s “the zone.” I’m a golfer. And I can tell you that if I’m in a self-critical frame of mind, I cannot hit a pure golf shot. Well guess what, the same goes with writing. Yes, there’s a place for looking at your work critically. The risk is that participating in a writing group will cause you to add too much of that self-critical mode to the mix that makes up your writing life — in a sense, to your identity as a writer. Put another way, as a writer you have to learn to get in the zone, and that means controlling the self-critical periods of your writing cycles very, very carefully — because too much self-critical destroys creativity.

So does that mean writing groups over absolutely no benefits? Well, no. They may be a networking resource. They may be your outlook for socializing. You may, if you’re lucky, win a couple of future readers through writing group contacts.

But if you want to invest in yourself as a writer by getting feedback on your work? Look for workshops where you can learn from published, successful writers.

My 2 cents.

Fear of the banal is a good thing, actually

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Okay, so I so get this post, and I’m glad there are writers out there who have the sense to be afraid of being banal. And here is why, and yes I’m harping again on the topic I alluded to a few posts ago: you can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody passing along tips about the “craft” of writing, and craft is all very well and good, but tell you what it’s not everything, not by a long shot. If you (the writer) pay close attention, when you write, you’ll notice that there is a point when the thing you are trying to write about has No Form, and than a moment when it has Form — that is the moment at which you are able to express it with words. And that moment, or event, or demarcation, not sure exactly, has something to do with perception, which in turn has something to do with consciousness. So you can’t necessarily equate Writing with Being, but you can’t separate the two, either — and Being can’t be taught — although we can, with time, chip away at the things that get between us and our connection with Being.

(This all sounds very abstract, but abstraction is another trap, as well. We also have to remember William Carlos William’s caution no idea but in things. The antidote to falling into the trap of becoming too abstract.)

But if we avoid that trap, hell yes banality is a nightmare, but not one we fend off via craft — it’s one we fend off by being authentic, and then communicating that authenticity in our writing.

When Hemingway said “write the truest sentence you know” I think this is what he meant. I didn’t understand that for the longest time, but I think, now, that is what he meant . . .

Dialogue tips for the mouths of babes

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Okay, so the intent of this piece is not to help fictioneers but to lament a trend in spoken English.

It’s by Clark Whelton, who as a speech writer for NY City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani (!) screened interns over a number of years.

Around 1985, he noticed that college grads began to sound increasingly inarticulate.

I agree, this is lamentable. (And what does this say about the future market for fiction? Whoa, let’s not go there . . .)

But if we set aside our angst for a sec, we have some great tips here in how to write dialogue when the speaker is a teen/young adult.

There is, of course, the ubiquity of the word “like,” and the interrogative rise at the end of declarative sentences (personally, I wouldn’t end declaratives with question marks too often in my fiction; its the sort of thing that should be used sparingly; but if used sparingly is a great tool for conveying that speech pattern in a character).

Another that is pretty well known — to the point of being widely parodied — is “Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation.” Example: “So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”

Then there’s the verbal tic Whelton calls “Double-clutching.” The example he gives: “What I said was, I said . . .”

He also gives some examples from Catcher in the Rye:

All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”).

Pretty nice little tutorial there, don’t you think?

The trick will be to write this kind of dialogue without making your character sound like a nitwit, or worse yet annoying your readers. LOL

Related: The Decline of the Imperative.

Can you think a good book?

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That’s a serious question.

I’m pondering it because of the explosion of writerly advice that crops up all over the intertubes these days.

Like this piece, which has a lot to offer, don’t get me wrong.

And goodness knows craft is important.

But I wonder sometimes.

For the first couple hundred years after the birth of “the novel,” writers didn’t worry about things like “structure.” Yet they managed to turn out very nice books.

How?

Okay, devil’s advocate. Maybe only *some* of them turned out very nice books. Maybe I don’t realize how many terrible novels were written by contemporaries of Fielding and Tolstoy and Dostoevski and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Maybe there were hundreds or thousands of self-pubbed novels along the way that were such crap it was good riddance to them the second they were forgotten.

But that still doesn’t explain how someone working with pen and paper or typewriter could turn out an Anna Karenina or Great Gatsby without first having consumed a library’s worth of books on the craft of writing.

How could that happen?

Well. Maybe it has to do with oral story-telling.

Maybe great writers — in the classical sense — are (were?) actually great listeners. And I mean listening in the sense of paying attention to how how language — and more specifically story-telling — affects other people.

Can you tell, when you’re relating something that happened to you while you were at the grocery store last week, when your audience has begun to lose interest?

(Ooh, I hope so!)

It doesn’t have to be when you tell a story in the formal sense. We all constantly narrate our lives to other people. We’re constantly telling stories. When someone asks you how you’re doing, and you say, “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” you’re telling a story. A very dull story incidentally. Please spice it up next time. Give your story some structure!

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???)  — five minutes she said, right, it was more like an hour, and the kid has this horrific cold, she soaked a box and a half of Kleenex easily before mom toodled back up on her scooter again, and of course three days later I wake up all stuffy, fever of a hundred and two, omg, please bring soup!

But that’s not all. If at any point during your tale about your self-centered neighbor and her snot-nosed urchin you notice your audience’s attention is starting to wane — you edit. Immediately. On the spot.

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — well long story short, the kid had a cold, gave it to me, I’m miserable, please bring soup!

We’d get a lot closer to spinning good stories on paper if we paid attention to how our stories hold people’s attention when we spin stories orally.

So yeah. I think there was a time when writers honed the aspect of the craft we now label with words like “structure” by telling stories — or more specifically, by paying attention to the way people react as they listen to stories.

Tell you something else. When writers began to play with the novel as if it were a painting — moving words around as if they were objects, rather than written versions of oral language — and in that way devised what in its most extreme form we’d call experimental fiction, they began to separate the novel from the connection it once had with with oral story telling.

It amounted to a distortion, of course. So maybe one reason some people need to study “craft,” now, is because the “the novel” became so distorted that post mid 20th century writers are . . . not ignorant, exactly, but maybe the connection of the novel to oral story telling isn’t as obvious to writers today as it once was, and as it needs to be.

I’m not sure, however, that this is something that can be taught from the head. Which gets back, finally, to the title of this post. The ability to pick up on the non-verbal signals people give off, when they’re listening to a story, is not something you do with your intellect.

It’s something you do with your whole self — your body, your heart.

Imposing rules on a novel via your head might result in a novel that is well-thought-out.

But is that the same as “good”?

The coming nonfiction e-tsunami. Watch out for floating “Babe Ruth bars.”

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Website Magazine cites a research report from Yankee Group [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry!] that estimates ebook sales will reach $2.7 billion in sales in 2013. That’s compared to $313 million two years ago, in 2009.

Quite the leap.

Average prices, meanwhile are expected to drop to $7.

The article suggests that the downward price trend is one reason for the explosion in sales. Makes sense — it’s basic economic principle, after all.

Given that Website Magazine‘s audience is web developers and small business owners, it’s no surprise that the article veers to the topic of self-publishing white papers, how-to’s, and re-packaged blog posts. It also suggests business owners jump on the trend by publishing ebooks themselves:

Expertise in any industry can be used to create an e-book in short order, then sell that material or use it as a promotional or cross-sell incentive.

True. But I hope business owners realize that self-publishing a badly written, poorly organized ebook will be a liability, not a smart business decision. And I think it’s a stretch to suggest that the average small business owner can expect to “add revenue along the way.”

Business owners who self-publish should expect nothing more than pocket change. They should focus instead on the value of the ebook as a promotional tool.

Yes, there will be exceptions, but only if the venture meets at least one or two of the following criteria:

  • It already has an audience — i.e. it’s an established business vs. a start-up nobody’s ever heard of;
  • The topic is both catchy and compelling;
  • The business does a great job at PR and marketing the ebook;
  • The ebook offers information of genuine value;
  • The ebook is well-written enough that readers can understand and apply whatever it’s trying to teach them.

What percentage of ebooks in the coming nonfiction tsunami will meet at least two of those conditions, do you think?

And what percentage will more resemble floating Babe Ruth bars?

New Kindle feature a soft sell tool for writers?

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Article on the MSNBC Technoblog by Wilson Rothman [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] leads with the news that the next Kindle OS is going to support “real” page numbers.

That’s a good thing — but what really caught my interest is another upcoming new feature, “Before You Go . . . ” which Rothman says will let readers more easily rate books — and buy new ones:

Just as you’re finishing a book, you’ll now get a “seamless” invitation to rate the book, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and of course, buy more books like it, or by the same author.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled.

On the one hand, this might help writers build audiences. After all, what better time to sell another book than when your scintillating prose is fresh in a reader’s mind?

But I also wonder whether I might personally find it a bit annoying to have my e-reader suggest I take an action of some kind.

Will there be a forced interim step between the last page of a book and the home screen?

Will it seem intrusive?

UPDATE 10/1/2011: New post on how to rate a Kindle book.

Too old to write?

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In a blog post that also appeared in The Guardian, Amanda Craig voices her suspicion that publishers favor younger women writers. [UPDATE: link no longer works.] “Up until the 1980s,” she writes, “it was expected that novelists would be people of some age and experience.”

Today, however,

publishers would far rather I were some stripling of twenty-five. Novelists now regularly get their teeth done (I am not going to mention Martin Amis, because his really were a medical necessity.) We all, if female, discuss plastic surgery with increasing urgency and interest, and every so often one or two disappear and return looking strangely fresher.

Holy denouement Batman!

Being a writer now requires a gal to become superficial and obsessed with her looks????

Deep breath.

Okay.

I could take some cheap shots at “the publishing industry” here, but I won’t, because A. you don’t need me to, you can compose a few zingers just as well yourself and B. I rather like the publishing industry and feel a bit sorry for it, and want to leave it alone.

And publishing, as a business, is more like gambling than anything else.

I can understand the inclination to place a bet on someone who is at the dawn of her professional life, rather than someone who spends weekends shopping for cemetery plots.

But where does that leave “the novel” — you know? The novel as an art form. That “the novel.”

Let me tell you a secret. I tried to write novels when I was in my 20s.

I couldn’t. And I know why, now. I had  nothing to say.

When it came down to putting something to paper, the only time I felt I was being honest was when I wrote poetry, because the only thing I “had” was emotion; the only thing I could do as a writer that had any integrity as I understood it was to wallop a handful of emotion up against some lamp post or car door or fella and put some words around what it felt like.

It’s a limitation common to every young writer. It has to be. It takes time to build a rich enough frame of reference to do anything else. It takes years and years.

How does a young writer get around that?

Why, by studying the “craft” of writing. You know! Because by using the “craft” of writing, you can fashion something out of nothing. You add a little verby glue to your nouny sawdust and mold it and sculpt it into the dearest characters, the most fetching characters, the most charming plots. Anyone can do it! Anyone can.

Only tell me this. What does such a novel accomplish?

I’m being serious here.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I often abandon novels half-read. Very often, appallingly often. And these are “well-written” novels in the sense we’ve come to understand “well written” today. But there is something missing from them — they leave me with the feeling that they are wasting my time. So my question is: for what am I trading the three, four hours that it takes me to read a novel? What I am getting in return? Entertainment? Diversion?

Diversion?

If that’s all, then “craft” is all the novelist needs. Bless you then, dear writer, go off and craft to your heart’s delight. Goodness knows there’s a huge market of people who crave diversion.

But what if I want more? What if I want my life to be changed? What if I want to be the guy who read David Gemmel’s The Legend, and then when he saw another guy being beaten up, he heard the words “What would Boromir do?” and intervened, and saved a man’s life?

What if I want the novel I read to somehow become a transformative experience for me?

Can such a novel be written by a 20 something equipped with nothing more than craft and a handful of emotion to wallop up against things?