The Novel is Who You Are

I’ve written on this site, many times I believe, that you cannot control how readers react to your work. All you can do is tell a story that really excites you and do your best to get it “out there,” whether through social media or library lectures (which I like to give). How readers respond, whether they notice your efforts at all, is in the hands of luck, fortune, the Gods, timing, elements beyond your control.

Another discovery I’ve made recently, which perhaps only applies to myself, is that your novel cannot be all things to all readers, unless you are. The more you work on a novel, the more care you put into the writing, the more that the work will resemble you, with all your strengths and limitations. If you have the right stuff, the stuff of a great and enduring novelist in you, then perhaps your work will too.

But even great works have their faults, and so will anything that you write. Whether these faults and limitations sink your novel, making it so unpalatable that readers don’t connect with it, depends on who you are. If you have things to say, or if you have a person inside you that you must be, and those things and that person do not resonate with readers, so be it. Perhaps your next novel will work and play better with others. Perhaps not.

But whatever you write has to reflect who you are. The trumpeter Miles Davis expressed it well when he said, “It takes a lifetime to learn how to play like yourself.” No matter what other people think, if you can learn how to play like yourself, you’ve done all you can do. And you’ve accomplished a lot.