What Shall Novelists Write About?

 

 

The Library of Congress holds over 40,000,000 books. It will add over another 2.5 million this year. The litmus test of a book’s utility and worthiness is getting to be more stringent. We don’t need merely books that offer more of the same or something no better than what is already out there. We need more quality books that can advance our world.

Society needs its novelists to explore all potential ways of thinking, where they can convert random, exploratory questions into complete books — and bring to life a mere what-if scenario. We need to see all sides to a situation, dispute, or issue. We need to imagine how it would feel when what we fear or hate happens — or when our wildest dreams come true. We need a healthy outlet to explore what seems unimaginable, unpredictable, unreasonable. Books can do all of this for us. The great ones do.

Many books can feature great ideas and deliver a poor execution of them — or provide a good execution of a not-so-exciting or unique idea.

How do novelists take an amazing idea, create awesome characters, deliver great dialogue, and have a story that surprises and delights us?

Writers of every genre search for something new to write about — or to write about the familiar in a seemingly unfamiliar way. They labor over endings, specific characters, or setting details and every word that feels ever so out of place. For as many stories that have already been written and published, so many more await their day in the sun. For the not-yet-created, their time will come.

The benchmark of a great book is this: Did it make you feel, think, or take action? Did it challenge, change, or codify your beliefs? Did you get transported to another place or tome or person’s shoes? Did you feel inspired to change something, someone, society or your self? Did you educate others on history, help others reevaluate the present, and freshly imagine the future?

Every writer deserves an opportunity to pursue his craft to its logical conclusion, and society demands it have access to all texts and choice of content. But we are overrun by mediocrity and a flood of books that generally fall into two categories: bad/boring/errant or simply average and substitutable for any of another thousand books. Sure, some are useful, inspiring, informative, enlightening, and entertaining. Some are downright great and genius-quality. But to get to the top-shelf one percent, we need to wade through massive piles of leftovers, stale dishes, and rotted concoctions.

What shall novelists write about? What they have experienced, imagined, felt, believe, and desire. But it shouldn’t be published unless they feel it meets today’s litmus test of quality and the fulfillment of a need or desire that exists in society. Otherwise, the production and promotion of way too many so-so to bad books just grinds us to a halt and clutters the ecosystem of discovering and sharing the best books.

Perhaps this self-filtering honesty pledge for authors of books should also be applied to any transmission of content. We don’t need dull plays, sub-par TV shows, crappy movies, lousy music, or even ordinary blogs, poorly scripted podcasts, and dumb, mean, valueless social media posts.

America, for the good and great to stand out, we need to show restraint in the tsunami of creative content generated. You know, lawyers of corporations have a trick when an accused company receives a subpoena. They end up sending way more information than was asked for, hoping to bury the truth in an avalanche of stacks of meaningless documents. In other words, the best and most important parts are missed, drowned out by a sea of irrelevant bits and bytes. Sound familiar?

Novelists, save us!

 

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About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2024. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent.  This award-winning blog has generated over 3.9 million pageviews. With 5,000+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and director of publicity positions at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.