"To write a breakout novel is to run free of the pack. It is to delve deeper, think harder, and commit to creating characters and plot that surpass one's previous accomplishments. It is to say 'no' to merely being good enough to be published" --Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel

When I buy a novel, I don't want adequate because I find that boring. Maass expects first novels to often be merely adequate because handling larger themes, multiple plots and locations, digging deep into the characters' inner journeys often requires more experience, perhaps more confidence.

When I review books, I despair when people hand me first novels and expect that because they read fairly well, they deserve 5 stars on Amazon. They are good, often exciting in some places, but from where I sit, adequate is not good enough for 5 stars.

Basically, for most subjects, adequate has been done. Doing it over and over is tedious to consider, much less read. Sometimes I want to ask the author why they wrote 70,000 words of nothing but mundane, everyday conversations between boring people. While reading these books, I keep waiting to find the reason for the book--the "good part," so to speak, the hidden agenda, the complex theme I'm missing, the plot twist that was foreshadowed so carefully, I missed it. Suddenly, I reach the words "the end" and think we never really had a beginning here.

I don't expect everyone to read literary fiction, to marvel over Rushdie's dazzling use of words or Lahiri's understated precision. However, even if one is purposefully trying to write escapist fiction, they need to offer a real escape, and that's not going to be there if the dialogue sounds like the same random breakroom conversation most of us hear everyday and pretty much have memorized.

There needs to be an extra spark there to make me put down a novel when I reach the end and say "I'm glad I didn't miss this one."

Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell from Writer's Notebook