Great Books for Everyone

Are you getting discouraged, reading wonderful books and thinking your own paltry effort could never be half as moving? One trick I use is to remind myself that I'm not supposed to compare my first or second book to someone else's fifteenth. Instead, I should look back and see how their early efforts showed the marks of a novice. Warning: this technique does not work for prodigies. When it comes to people who win major awards for their first books, I can't help you. But Michael Allen (aka The Grumpy Old Bookman) and Brenda Coulter may be able to.

Last year, Allen posted an excerpt from his book The Truth About Writing, provocatively titled There Are No Great Books:

According to the professors and opinion-setters of our time, the great novel somehow has a stature all of its own; it remains a great book whether you happen to enjoy it or not. In fact if you, as an individual, happen to consider the great novel excruciatingly dull and boring, then it is you, the moron, who is at fault. The novel in question allegedly remains a great novel, regardless of whether or not you – the individual reader – have the good taste and intellectual equipment to recognise it as such.

Nonsense, is my view. I know of no argument which constitutes grounds for believing these ideas to be true, and I can put forward a strong case for believing the opposite.

Consider what we know so far about the novel.

If the novel is anything at all, it is a machine for creating emotion in the reader. Reading a novel may, conceivably, leave you better informed about hotel management or fetishistic sex, but readers do not, on the whole, buy and borrow novels in order to enhance their stock of general knowledge; consciously or unconsciously, they read novels in order to be made to feel. The main function of a novel, therefore, any novel, may be said to be the generation of emotion in the reader. This is true whether the reader understands what is happening to her or not.

Brenda Coulter is a Christian romance writer. She responds to Allen in her entry Can I Be as Good as Jane Austen? (a repost from last year).

So I've been looking at this all wrong. I thought those effusive compliments were praising my talent and writing skills, and that was why I just couldn't take them seriously; because I know I am a competent but not a great writer. But I'm beginning to understand that when someone gushes about my book being hands-down The Best Novel Ever, she's not talking about my writing, she's telling me something about herself. She's telling me what rings her emotional bell. What makes her laugh and cry and feel good. She's telling me that the story I chose to tell and the way I told it touched her heart in a way no other novel ever has.

I like that a lot.

As I press on through the first draft of my novel, I'm very comforted to know that I don't have to write the best book in the whole world in order to touch readers. I just need to write the best book I'm capable of, and find the readers who will be touched by it. That's a much less daunting task.