Why Would Anyone Write a Novel?
I’ve been asked the question many times once I started jotting down stories to tell. I found there isn’t a simple answer, either for me personally, or in general for other novelists. Writing novels is a lot of hard work and involves a steep learning curve. So, why do it?
Like Stephen King wrote in On Writing, some need to write, are compelled to tell stories. Writers sometime referred to these as ‘books of the heart,’ even though there can be no deeper purpose than to provide some reader enjoyment. Lawrence Block, a prolific, well-known mystery writer titled a book on writing, Write for Your Life. It is hard to determine what makes a story so important to a person that they must write it down, but I won’t lie. I have felt it.
Then again, Lawrence Block also wrote Telling Lies for Fun and Profit in which he suggested fiction writers create fiction, falsehoods and make-believe for fun and what money can be made. I won’t lie about this either: writing is fun, or I’d find another way that might make money. You can feel the fun the author had reading novels like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series or Julia Quinn’s novels of the Bridgerton family. But you can also feel the author’s pleasure in writing throughout any one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s lyrical works of science fiction or Robert Warren Penn’s All the King’s Men. This is true, even though neither writer wrote to be humorous. (For a week after reading Penn’s novel, I found myself unconsciously speaking and writing in his prose style, it was that powerful.)
Even so, there are novels like Robert Warren Penn’s novel, written with a definite message in mind. Novelists want to instruct, communicate or reveal something important about life or society. It can be Lewis Sinclair’s The Jungle or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, novels written to expose societal wrongs or to dramatize a life philosophy. Kay Bratt revealed the lives of the Chinese during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in her novels of The Scavenger’s Daughters. Many writers will have a message embedded in a novel meant to principally entertain.
Me? I want to portray the experiences of women and men of the past in my novels, even though my main goal is to simply offer a good, engaging story. In some ways, historical fiction walks a fine line between fiction and past reality, but the balancing act can be a fun challenge in bringing the past to life.
However, I do write history books about real events to inform readers of what really happened. While those studies can be entertaining, they are not fiction.
That leads to another reason a person might take up the pen or pull out the laptop and write a novel: worldbuilding. There is something about creating another world on paper. It incorporates the delight of writing and the challenge of building a convincing reality on paper. It is a powerful act of creation, whether set in the present, two hundred years in the past or a millennium in the future. Azimov’s five books of the Foundation and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are examples as is Lee Child’s Reacher series set in the present. The world, in its detail, must be convincing. I will admit that creating the world my characters inhabit is a god-like experience. They are who I make them and the challenges they face are devised by me. It is omnipotent fun. (At this point, you might see me rubbing my hands together and laughing manically—at times, you wouldn’t be far wrong.)
All writers of fiction have something to share, and to some degree, their novel can embody any or all of the fore-mentioned goals. That seems to be true for me. I want to share engaging characters readers will fall in love with, laugh and cry with, while exploring past history, how it is and isn’t like our time. I want my novels to be the escape and entertainment readers crave at the end of a long day. A place to relax, to enter another world with me for a few hours of fun and enjoyment.