It is often easier to take note of the things I don’t like about a book than to understand what constituent elements come together to form something I do like. This is why people’s rants on goodreads are often longer than their raves.
This is partly because good writing–good storytelling–is rather seamless. And since you don’t see the seams, you don’t notice how incredibly fine the stitching is, how deft the handiwork, until you have given it the close examination that a slooooow read, or a second read, would entail. So you simply enjoy it for what it is and then, grasping for words, try to convince someone else that they will enjoy it too.
Sometimes I’ll read a book and encounter a character that graces the page but briefly, yet already I know and love them. And I’ll think, how? How did the author do that? How did they endear me to this random side character so quickly, so perfectly. How, with so little apparent effort, did this person come alive before my very eyes.
Well I don’t know. I still don’t know. It’s a gift. A marvelously cultivated skill. But it reads like magic.
Or perhaps it is a matter of action. My heart is pounding. I am riveted. I feel the danger, the smart of the blow, the heat of the fire, the breathlessness of it all. It’s all so real.
How did the author make that happen? I literally have no idea.
Or, I read a book and find a confluence of prose and emotion and theme so powerful, so perfectly intertwined, so exquisitely wrought, that I want to march across many miles, pound on the author’s door and demand they answer me
“How did you do this? What elven magic did you find? What divine spark? What ancient fire? What holy touch? HOW DID YOU DO IT?”
My guess is they will shrug their shoulders and say “You know? I don’t know.” They know they worked hard, of course. They know they labored, at times, in starvation and drought, and at other times in rains and floods and delicious breezes of inspiration. They took care. They crafted thoughtfully. But we all try to do that and it doesn’t always have that mysterious je ne se quois.
I cannot speak to some secret elixir, nor to the perfect craft. In any case, I am far more a student than a master and I don’t know that my opinion holds much weight. But before I give up and call it all hopeless, there are a few things I DO know.
First: A good author does not protect their characters from the reader’s bad opinion. They do not shield them from their failings, from their natural consequences, nor from the possibility of not being liked and not being trusted. In that strange and inexplicable way, they give their characters free will. They do not contrive circumstances, nor misshape side characters, to serve the protagonist. Like God to his people, or a father to his child, the author must sometimes give a character over to their folly and failings. They might disappoint the reader. Just as a real person might disappoint a friend.
Second: A good story might have many threads and many themes, but they cohere. The themes may even argue with one another, but it is, as the rabbis said, “an argument for the sake of heaven”…the themes argue in the pursuit of truth, always in the pursuit of saying something beyond a platitude, or which coats the bones of the platitude with flesh and blood so it can breathe and live. You don’t have to say something grand, something for the ages. But you have to know what you’re about.
Third: Your prose may be stark and simple. Or it may be florid and dramatic. But it must be strong. It ought not “merely serve.” The book Wind, Sand, and Stars is supremely eloquent, and moved me deeply. Chaim Potok’s The Promise battered me heart and soul, but his prose–on the surface–is pragmatic and plain. Both had muscle and power. Both caught hold of the soul and intent of their work. The prose is the vehicle for the story, and whether it is a beat-up old truck, or a sleek sports car, it had better have an engine that’s properly put together and can bring the story over the rough roads.
Fourth: You better mean it. Oh, don’t deceive yourself. You had really better mean it.
There’s certainly more than that. But it’s a start.
J. L. Odom 