The Power of the Novel

I can carefully craft an email and nonetheless find that its recipient reads into the note something that was not intended. Such is the danger of short messages as personal communication. More recently I have found that when I am not careful about making my facebook posts either entirely self-reflective and about me (which is generally boring for others) or arbitrary and objective (posting funny or "interesting" content in 420 characters or less), I can leave a message open to interpretation by others in a manner that they can take personally and find offensive. Worse (though I am not aware of committing this particular offense), it is clearly possible to cause considerable unintended hurt. How much worse is Twitter: clearly in this medium I must focus on simply writing links to content, and not creating 140-character commentary in its own right. So how can one convey a truly personal message and create intimacy through social media? It is a problem I have not really solved.

But this is where the power of the novel comes in. In a novel one writes from the heart, and the deepest personal truths come out. A reader of the novel really gets to know the author, and if they find something they don't like, it will be based on a lot of evidence! I love writing novels, not because I have any particular conceit that they are any good, or even that anyone will read them, but because they are a way for me to take off the manacles of most of today's communications and simply write unfettered. It is a wonderfully liberating experience. Remember, when you read a novel, that no matter what the external form, the author has just spent approximately one hundred thousand words writing intimately about themselves.