Writing your novel: Avoid being overly “serious”

By Dennis Mellersh

As you begin the actual work of writing your novel, one common tendency to avoid is that of trying to be deadly serious in getting your “message” across to your potential readers.

Although the readers of your novel will initially be interested in what you have to say in your novel, they will be turned off quickly if your book is preachy, overly obvious, moralistic in tone, and full of stereotyped one-dimensional characters whose actions always appear to embody a “moral lesson.”

It’s fine to have serious intellectual and moral purposes in your writing, but remember that people will not be buying your book to be lectured at.

You need to keep your readers entertained from the perspective of them enjoying reading your book. Otherwise you will lose your readers. So, keep the ethical and moral lessons as subtle and as unobtrusive as possible, if you must use them at all.

Remember, you are writing a novel, not a book on ethics, philosophy, or moral behaviour.

In the words of the writer Frank O’Connor, “A novel is about people, it’s written for people, and the moment it starts getting so intellectual that it gets beyond the range of people and reduces them to academic formulae, I’m not interested in it any longer…you read [a novel] because you enjoy it. You don’t read it because of the serious moral responsibility to read, and you don’t write it because it’s a serious moral responsibility.”(1)

(1) Source: Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews