Written by Carol Mason, Amazon Charts bestselling author
In 1989 a man phoned a writer out of the blue and said he had a story that he thought would be of interest to him. That author was Robert James Waller and the stranger’s story, about his mother, became The Bridges of Madison County. The truth is, if I had a dollar for every time someone has told me “my life would make a great novel” or “I should write a book” I’d probably be able to give them a wave of encouragement from my super-yacht in the middle of the Med. I used to feel a little insulted by the comment. After all, writing is hard. It takes something out of you that you didn’t know you had in you to give. An author generally has plenty ideas of his or her own, without needing anyone else’s. But knowing which ones have “legs” and being able to turn those rare gems into a novel that publishers will put their money behind, and hundreds of thousands of people will buy, is a different ball game altogether. Besides, I wouldn’t dream of going up to a neurosurgeon and saying I should really be performing craniotomies instead of writing fiction. So why do so many people think they can write a book, or feel their lives would make a story we’d all want to read?
My belief is that when we encounter profoundly moving novels, be they love stories, triumph-of-the-underdog stories, family sagas, historicals – just think of the novel that left the biggest impression on you, punched you in the solar plexis, simmered away inside you for days, years even – they awaken something in us that has lain dormant. They ever so slightly change how we think about ourselves and the things that matter to us. When we relate so powerfully to a fictional character’s struggle they are no longer people in books, they are us and we are them. Even if the parallels and similarities are subtle, they feel so huge in the moment.
That tremendous sense of connection – of a writer getting us – has something to do with the universality of certain themes in fiction. There are certain things that, no matter who we are or where we have come from, we all have in common. Everyone longs for an epic love. We’ve all suffered broken hearts, huge setbacks in the master plan of our life, dealt with complex families dynamics that bring us equal parts joy and pain, have a childhood we’ve either treasured or would like to forget… And when we read other people’s stories that address these monumental dilemmas and challenges, it makes us long to tell our own. We are all storytellers at heart. It’s our first inclination when our children learn language. It’s what we do with our friends over wine and cleared dinner plates. Certain stories travel with us through life; secret ones we may take with us to our grave. It’s natural to crave having a voice, to imagine there’s an audience who might one day like to hear it, to feel there must be an amazing catharsis that will come from committing to paper the thing you never want to be forgotten. So perhaps it’s normal to think that, because we’re all storytellers, writing a novel must therefore be easy.
So the next time someone tells me they have a book in them, instead of saying I’ve heard that comment many times before, I’m going to tell them this: write it. But not because you want everyone to know you’re an author. Or because you imagine the shift your story will bring to the hearts and minds of millions. Do it because it’s bursting out of you, it simply won’t be contained any longer. Do it because it’s profoundly meaningful to you. Tell it in as fine and as real a way as you know how, with a passion you’ve never known before. That might be a story we will all want to read one day.
Carol Mason is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of After You Left. Her new release, The Shadow Between Us is out March 21st and it is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
