Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a wide range of courses for writers, including Story Medicine: Better Stories for a Better World, enrolling now for July 10–August 4.
There’s a lot of excellent advice on this blog for getting over the finish line with publishing a novel (and a lot of less excellent advice on the same subject elsewhere!).
But to my mind, there’s something critical to that conversation that rarely gets discussed.
I think because it’s so hard to actually talk about.
A solid story, compelling characters, and strong writing are a great start (especially when you combine that with an accurate understanding of the business of publishing).
But if you want your novel to stand out from the competition, in my experience, it has to have something extra.
It has to have a sense of meaning.
Meaning is subjective, of course. But even so, there are story elements that intersect directly with issues that we as human beings tend to find important, moving, and compelling: Moral questions, and the way they stir strong emotion. Characterization, and what it reveals about human nature. The way the story reflects the truths of our own reality—and the sense that this story actually has something to say.
This is not to say that superficial stories don’t get published all the time, especially in genres that privilege plot over character—and there will always be stories that fit this mold that get published, simply because their “something extra” is something else: a sparkly new speculative conceit, or a mind-blowing plot twist that’s going to get everyone talking.
But debut novels like that are the exception. And as I see it, increasingly endangered—not only because readers are hungry for meaning, but because superficial stories are the type that are most amenable to reproduction by AI.
And in fact I see this as one of the great challenges of our day, as writers: To write at a level of depth that only a real human being can. To write the type of stories that another human being will immediately recognize as one that could only have been written by another real human.
Not only are these the sort of stories that stand out in the slush pile, I think these are the types of stories that make for a better world, period.
Here are four things that I believe distinguish stories that have a real sense of meaning from those that don’t.
1. They touch on moral issues.
In his book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall goes so far as to speak of story as a tool of moral education, intrinsically—not in the simplistic way that Aesop’s Fables are (“and the moral of the story is”) but in a complex way that allows us to fine-tune our sense of right and wrong and really think through what we ourselves would do in similar circumstances.
Donald Maass touches on this in The Emotional Craft of Fiction when he notes that fiction that touches on moral issues stirs “the high human emotions”: compassion, moral outrage, righteous indignation, and even joy when oppressive forces fail in their aims and goodness wins the day.
Some novels are built around moral issues, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (the oppression of Black people by white ones) or Richard Powers’s The Overstory (the clear-cutting of forests by corporations). Some novels just touch on such issues, like Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (the ostracization of the poor by the middle class) and Sarah Penner’s The Lost Apothecary (the oppression of women by men). Nevertheless, the moral issues at the heart of these novels are a big part of what give them their sense of depth.
Bestseller lists may be dominated by relatively superficial fiction written by authors with ten plus novels under their belts. But breakout debuts tend to have moral issues at their heart, in a way that’s either direct or implied—and this is part of why I always encourage my clients to dig deeper in their final draft, to highlight the moral issues their story touches upon.
2. They reflect the truth of our reality.
Fantasy is great, and I’m all for escapism—in fact, I consider it one of the core powers of fiction, and part of why it survives each new technological innovation in our culture: It provides us with one of the most reliable, long-lasting ways to step out of the daily mess of our lives.
Nevertheless, fiction that feels like a tasty, nutritious meal, rather than like junk food for the mind, has its roots in reality.
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series isn’t just a horrific story of adults forcing teenagers to compete against each other, it’s a story about reality TV. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War isn’t just a fantastical bit of time-travel espionage between some random forces, it’s a fantastical bit of time-travel espionage between the forces of nature and the forces of technology.
And that’s not even touching on the wide range of powerful novels that take on issues like climate change, AI, social media addiction, the vaccine wars, and conspiracy theories.
Really, there’s no stronger way to create a sense of your work being vital and relevant to the reader than to touch on real issues in the real world—and that’s part of why I work with my clients to find the connections between real-world issues and the story unfolding within the pages of their novel.
3. They feature complex characters.
Cardboard cutout characters may work in certain types of books (see my note above, on superficial fiction), just the way they do in certain types of movies.
But I’d go so far as to say that the majority of readers are looking for something deeper and more nuanced when it comes to fictional characters (which isn’t hard to see when you read the excoriating reader reviews of novels that fail to meet the mark).
Complex characterization is the opposite of black-and-white. It means that your protagonist is not just a “good guy,” with maybe some little (completely understandable, and really quite sympathetic) flaw, but rather, someone who has some real problem inside that they’re wrestling with, some way in which they are being pushed by the story to do better, and to be better.
And it means that antagonists are not just immoral monsters who delight in creating wreckage, heartbreak, and ruin, but rather, people who have managed to convince themselves that they are entirely justified in their actions—that they are actually the hero of the story.
If writing complex characters comes naturally to you, great! But if not, know that this absolutely is something that you can layer in, in revision—and doing so is a crucial final step in preparing your manuscript for submission.
4. They have something to say.
Finally, novels that have a deeper sense of meaning don’t just touch on moral issues, connect to the real world, and portray characters in a way that’s convincing and complex—they actually have something to say about what the events of the story bring up.
Again, though, I don’t mean this in an on-the-nose, moralizing sort of way—a way that’s going to come right out and hit the reader on the head with the author’s opinion on these things.
What I mean is that the story is conscious of the way it uses themes to make a complex point, whether that has something to do with the importance of gritty realism over pie-in-the-sky idealism (Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things), the impossibility of living as a queer woman under conservative gender norms (Megan Giddings’s The Women Could Fly), or the ways that secrets corrupt us from within (Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch).
And this, I find, is one of the crucial final steps with a novel that otherwise great writers often fail to take: Looking back over the novel in this way and tightening up those themes, on the various levels on which a story operates, to make sure that the novel actually feels cohesive in this way—like it has something to say.
Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, check out Susan’s wide range of courses for writers, including Story Medicine: Better Stories for a Better World, enrolling now for July 10–August 4.
Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. An independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing.
Always timely, always to the point. Yesterday I started redrafting the whole thing with exactly this in mind. Thank you Susan, thank you Jane.
You’re so welcome, Beatrice!
It’s sad and disheartening to see this list of what makes for great fiction. I agree with the one about complex characters — that’s a given since fiction with stereotypes or two-dimensional characters is obviously not coming from a source of creativity in the writer.
But the other points about morality and reality and especially that old canard “having something to say” are, to put it simply (admittedly a tad too simply), irrelevant to the literary quality of fiction. Having something to say is for essayists and writers of non-fiction. A novelist should be amoral in their writing. They should be concerned with the words and the aesthetics and the art and craft of what those full-fledged characters do.
Later this month I am interviewing one of the best American literary novelists, the great Lorrie Moore, whose first novel in 14 years is within weeks of publication. It’s called “I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home” and I’ve been reading an advance copy for the past few weeks. It is excellent and stunning, but I’m happy to report that it has nothing to “say.”
It’s the same for two other great stylists I’d compare her too. One is Raymond Carver, whose short fiction also is outstanding without needing to be moral. The other is a novelist whom it’s hard to compare anyone to: Vladimir Nabokov, who with the publication of “Lolita” had to spend a lot of time afterwards explaining to critics and readers that novels shouldn’t be didactic or (as he puts it) have a “moral in tow.”
If you want your novel to stand out, concentrate on the words and the style. Leave the lessons to the philosophers.
Yes, that is the conventional wisdom of the American MFA program, and I simply don’t agree.
I too consider Lorrie Moore one of our greatest. I loved her last novel, A GATE AT THE STAIRS.
It’s a coming-of-age story set in the post-9/11 era where American troops were being sent off to fight in the second Iraq War (the protagonist’s brother among them). The protagonist is a young woman who’s nannying for a rich white couple who has adopted a mixed-race child; the dad seems as if he could care less about the child, and the mom isn’t all that competent as a parent. (Also: it’s made plain to the reader that this couple is kidding themselves about being able to provide this child with the cultural resources she will need in order to thrive in their all-white town.)
It’s eventually revealed (spoiler alert!) that the couple had previously adopted a child who died due to the adoptive father’s negligence. And there were a lot of people all along the way to the adoption of child #2 who could probably have figured that out, and probably should have known that this couple should not have been allowed to adopt another child, but it really wasn’t their problem, or it would have been too hard to stop, or it was not worth protesting all that strenuously…
Which is, pretty clearly, a lot like the second Iraq War itself.
But of course A GATE AT THE STAIRS doesn’t intersect with any moral issues whatsoever. Nor does it reflect reality. Nor does it have anything to say!
I don’t know anything about the conventional wisdom of the MFA program, so that has nothing to do with my comment. I’ve also read and loved “A Gate at the Stairs.” Yes, of course, the book has “reality” in it. My comment was trying to get at the fact that it doesn’t matter what the reality is that is portrayed in a novel. It is an irrelevant criterion on which to judge it. The weighty subject matter of “A Gate at the Stairs” is not what makes it a great book, just as the substantially lighter subject matter of Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine” (a man comes down an escalator on his lunch break to buy new shoelaces) doesn’t make it a lesser book.
As for “A Gate at the Stairs” and what it has to “say” … my point is that these things happen in the book but there is no sense of Lorrie Moore endorsing or supporting or anything’ing any of it. Like any novelist with a claim to be literary, she is like a descriptive dictionary and not a prescriptive one. Here are things as they are. Period.
You don’t mention anything about the quality of Lorrie Moore’s writing or her style or her humour or her punning or anything that has to do with the way she uses language. That seems like a lacuna to me.
I’d also argue that The Mezzanine, just by existing, makes an argument: that quotidian moments deserve the focus of fiction as much as moments of crisis do. But let’s be honest, does anyone really want to read a book like the Mezzanine? I love Nabokov’s criticism too, but in many cases, he’s just wrong (in my opinion). Style is easy, substance is hard.
10,000 smiles, stars, thumbs-up, or whatever is used here to say, “Great Comment.”
Not to mention the original posters one and only response was weak, and proved nothing refuting your point about ” having something to say.”
Also, these story animal, wired for story, fiction writing and hacking brain science books have been utterly destroyed and refuted by real brain scientists as junk science.
Great article! Timely to me as I’m planning a new WIP. Thanks, as always, for sharing this!
Glad you found it helpful, Danielle!
Good tips to make a novel! Thank you for sharing these good tips to make a novel stand out on submission. I appreciate your insight and experience as a published author. I have been working on my own novel for a while and I was feeling stuck on how to polish it and make it more appealing to agents and editors. Your post gave me some valuable advice and motivation to keep going.
This article gives me so much to think about, both as a writer and an editor. I love this line: “Nevertheless, fiction that feels like a tasty, nutritious meal, rather than like junk food for the mind, has its roots in reality.”
It reminds me that the books I’ve really enjoyed over the years—fantasy or not—have strong messages about our society.
And that’s the point, right? Storytelling pulls on our emotions to help us understand our world and ourselves.
It’s time to dig deeper.
“Storytelling pulls on our emotions to help us understand our world and ourselves.” So well put!
As always, Susan, an incredibly thoughtful and rich discussion.
Thanks for these kind words, Janet!