What Makes a Book Great?
by Mary Kole | Former literary agent, now a freelance editor, writing teacher, and IP/story developer for major publishers and creators.
This article is about what makes a book great, and it focuses on how you can push your story premise to a more emotional level and capture reader attention. If your story premise has vast potential for emotion, you should make your protagonist suffer through your story pacing and feel all of those complex feelings.
Emotion Potential Is What Makes a Book Great
To put it another way, is your story living up to its potential? It might have an intriguing premise, but does it have that x-factor of making a reader care, which is actually what makes a book great?
The note that inspired this article was a manuscript I was working on that had the potential to be full of emotion, but the character drifted through the plot points as if nothing was happening. My advice in this case was simple: Go there! If you’ve set up a story with an intriguing element or the potential for high emotion, leverage that choice and design as many plot points as you can around it.
If it’s a grief story, allow the protagonist to experience the worst of it. If you’re writing a love story, provide that moment when he falls for her completely and becomes vulnerable. There are plenty of opportunities for characters to become emotionally exposed. That’s what makes a book great.
What Makes a Book Great? Diving In!
It's easy to sum up my advice to writers in two words: DIVE IN. If a story premise has something unique and special, explore it to its fullest, and design the plot points around it. If the protagonist is experiencing grief, let them unravel completely. If you’re penning a romance, give the audience a moment when one character loses themselves in the other’s eyes and shares a part of themselves that they’ve long kept locked up. Without showing emotions in writing, these scenes would lie flat on the page, and that’s not what makes a book great.
Writers, like humans in general, might shy away from taking risks. We have our safe go-to techniques, tried-and-true plot twists, and easy physical interactions that we use as shortcuts to suggest emotion, instead of exploring the uncomfortable layers of emotions that make for unforgettable characters and stories. But playing it safe isn't the job of a writer: it is to seek out the truth by taking risks and bringing their audience with them, which, after all, is what makes a book great.
When You Play it Safe, You Cheat Your Readers
If you don’t dive in fully yourself, your readers’ ability to emote and relate to the character will suffer too. Too often I come across manuscripts which merely broach the surface in all of those moments which should be mined deeply.
That’s not to say that what makes a book great is a lot of melodrama and high emotion. You don’t need to show your character rending their clothes or tearing their hair. They can be composed on the inside, especially in moments of high drama, such as visiting Dad in hospice, but the turmoil inside of them—revealed with interiority—will lend a nice contrast and some dramatic tension.
To put it simply: if something in your manuscript feels empty, you should either delete it or take the plunge and bring out the full emotional range of what you’re trying to say. Let me give you an example from Kim Edward's best-selling novel The Memory Keeper's Daughter. (Warning: spoilers ahead!). In this story, a husband learns that one of his newborn twin children has Down syndrome and decides to keep it a secret from his wife, sending the child away with a nurse. (This is a historical novel set in a different era when attitudes like this, unfortunately, prevailed.)
When I was reading it, I expected a huge confrontation between husband and wife when the truth eventually came out. However, the husband dies unexpectedly before any such confrontation can take place. The wife finds out about her daughter another way and is left to express her rage towards her late husband's memory. Frustrating this emotion and not giving readers the payoff they expected might not be the most satisfying choice you could make here, but it’s a controversial idea and it got readers talking. What makes a book great? Sometimes that’s up to reader interpretation in the end.
Many people seemed to enjoy this work of fiction, but I would have liked to see the husband and wife bare their souls to one another. What I'm suggesting isn't a simple argument—it’s a far more vulnerable moment which requires each of them to be open and honest with their true selves and their innermost thoughts. I wouldn't dare call the author a coward, but I am curious as to why she didn't give us a scene with both characters facing the truth instead of just one. Those moments tend to be what makes a book great.
What Makes a Book Great? Simply Put: Emotion
Therefore, if your plot development allows for it, don’t be afraid to embrace emotion. Any kind of emotional work can be daunting, because you have an emotional stake in your characters and you have to do some emotional digging yourself. You have to demonstrate self-awareness to be able to channel the same on the page for your characters. And some writers might feel a need to protect your characters and be nice to them. Don’t hold back. What makes a book great is the writer’s ability to feel deeply, then write those same feelings with nuance and honesty. Go ahead and dive in. You won’t regret it.
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