Thinking about greatness in books

What makes a book great?

Having read a lot of articles on the subject, I can say three things with considerably certainty:

• While there is some agreement about what books are great, there is very little agreement about why they are great. When asked what makes a particular book great, different readers pick different things, even when they’re talking about the same book.
• At least 98% of the articles I read picked different aspects of the writing craft when trying to describe what makes for a great book. Characters were mentioned more often than anything else – “compelling characters,” “believable characters,” “realistic characters,” “idiosyncratic characters,” “fascinating characters,” “consistent characters”… however they phrased it and whatever they chose as the “real key” to a book’s greatness, characters nearly always showed up on the list. Other things that were mentioned included various aspects of plotting, pacing, style, dialog, description … I think that every one of the technical aspects of writing was mentioned at least once. (There were also things like “content” that don’t fall under the elements of craft, and one gentleman who insisted that only experts could be trusted to judge correctly whether a book was “great,” a position that I think removes any useful meaning from the term “great book” as far as I am concerned, but that’s a whole ‘nother problem.)
• In all the articles I looked at, not one mentioned a lack of mistakes as making a book great … nor did anyone mention sales figures (though it could be argued that most of the specific books that were given as examples of “great books” have sold a lot of copies over the years, which could make sales a criterion by implication).

The first two aren’t all that surprising. Different people like different things, and everybody has a tendency to think that if they like something a whole lot, it must be good. There are exceptions – most of us have “guilty pleasures,” things that we like a like but don’t think are particularly good or good for us – but other things being equal, if I am faced with two flavors of ice cream, and I like one more than the other, I will usually say that the one I like is “better” than the one I don’t.

Putting some aspect of characterization on the list of things that make a book “great” is also unsurprising. Characters are what make a story into a story, rather than a description of a setting or a summary of some events. Even when the characters are a bit bland or stereotyped, the story is about them, more than it is about anything else. Which characters a story is about can shift and change – a murder mystery can be about the detective who is trying to solve the murder, or it can focus on the murderer’s motives and attempts to escape, or on all the people the victim has annoyed enough that they might be the killer. But if you take the characters out of the story, it becomes a non-specific recitation of facts that is, for most readers, much less interesting.

People are interested in other people – hence all the gossip columns, reality shows, and a big chunk of social media. It makes sense that people like reading about people who are interesting  or who are doing something interesting. It also makes sense that a book that portrays interesting people vividly and convincingly will likely appeal to more people – and thus be considered “great” – than a book that is less convincing or vivid.

What really interested me, though, was that last point. I’ve been talking about writing (and teaching some of it) for decades now, and it seems to me that many beginning writers start with a massive need to avoid making mistakes. I have never, not once, had a new student start by asking “What am I doing right?” It’s always “What am I doing wrong? Where should I focus first to fix my worst mistakes?”

I’ve been aware of this for a long time, ever since I talked to a room full of English teachers back in the 1980s and one of them asked what my high school English teacher could have done to help me. I hardly had to think about it at all; my immediate response was, “They should have told me what I was doing right.” Mind you, what they taught me was invaluable – really basic stuff like punctuation and grammar and syntax. But along with that, they should have pointed out the good sentences along with the bad ones, the places where an explanation or description was clear or vivid, not only the ones that were confusing or muddy.

I know why they did it. Explaining how to fix an obvious error is a lot more clear-cut than showing a student where their strengths are and how to improve them. Which is why a lot of us don’t need teachers to focus on our mistakes any more. We do it to ourselves.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over 60 years or so of reading, it’s that you can pick up any book and find problems. Books that everyone agrees are great are not considered great because they are free of mistakes and problems. They’re great in spite of the problems people can point at.

Playing to your writing strengths isn’t as easy as it sounds, which is, I think, why so many of us opt for the easier route of hunting down mistakes to fix. But nobody ever said writing was going to be easy, much less that writing a great book would be.