Writing a novel? Some thoughts from James A. Michener

By Dennis Mellersh

If asked about how to learn about writing novels, many masters of the craft would probably tell you:

If you want to learn how to write a novel; read a lot of novels.

And not just good and excellent novels; read some average ones, and even bad ones. At least that’s the way famed and prolific novelist James A. Michener (1907-1997) says he learned how to hone his art.

Some of the novels he read were deceptively simple and he had to re-read them to understand how they were constructed so effectively. Other novels that he read were bad or mediocre, but Michener says he learned from those what not to do in his writing.

The excellent, outstanding, and more difficult novels, the classics, were the ones that Michener studied the most carefully. From these, he not only learned about the techniques of writing a novel, he also acquired a great deal of knowledge about life.

Here is what he had to say in his book, Literary Reflections:

“Over the decades I analyzed hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of the literary masters, near masters, and never-to-be masters, dissecting their styles and probing their techniques. What did they do to make their writing sing? What mistakes did they make which doomed them to failure? By this means I discovered elements which I could adopt to form my own style and technique or [which to] avoid…”

Michener is one of the most modest artists in the pantheon of famous wordsmiths and considers his art to be a learned craft, rather than being mystical or something in which he was gifted and which just came to him intuitively. He doesn’t believe in describing his vocation as something grand:

He simply says, “I am not an author, I am a writer.”