PREACH IN CHURCH...

...Not in your novel.

If someone were to ask me what I considered the biggest mistake new authors make, my answer would have nothing to do with format. To be sure there are usually plenty of those mistakes as well, but the biggest mistake so many make, in my opinion, is the desire to use a novel as a platform to spew their views to the world.

Now, before you scream that a good book with a solid concept of what’s wrong with society is a wonderful thing, hold off, I agree. It’s the way that it is carried out that’s important. It’s too easy to simply load your dialogues with a main character standing up and giving lengthy speeches concerning the ills of the world, and how he would solve them. I’ve seen it--it’s not a pretty thing.

Using that same concept and creating a plot line that ‘shows’ the ills of the world is a novel, taking that concept and giving long speeches is a political debate.

Take the movie ‘Enemy Of The State’, with Will Smith and Gene Hackman. In this movie the concern over the government’s ability to spy on average people in their homes and being connected to their lives through computers is the concept that connects to the fear that most people harbor in the new age of technology that we exist in. Rather than have Gene Hackman stand in front of the camera and give a long detailed speech about how it’s an unknown but common occurrence that everyone is spied on and how… they SHOW it by having a regular guy, Will Smith, have his life invaded without his knowledge, having to be saved by Gene Hackman.

Same thing with ‘The Matrix’, another movie about how the average person has the wool pulled over their eyes by a controlling government, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun if Lawrence Fishburne had stood up and told us rather than have Neo discover it, and how to defeat it.

Let the plot preach, then you can concentrate on simply telling the story.

Happy Writing.