Don’t Waste Time Writing or Reading Novels You Don’t Love

THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS TO READ AND TO WRITE. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON ALL OF THEM.

According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics and Dean Talbot, somewhere between 2.2 and 4 million books are published every year (including both self-published and traditionally published books). The traditionally published books number stands somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million. In 2010, Google's estimate for total unique books: 129,864,880. Fifteen years have passed since that estimate, so if you do the math, there’s well over 130MM unique books out there right now across the world, many translated into other languages. How many of those books are novels is unknown. What is known: there are plenty of novels out there not worth reading. My advice: Don’t Waste Time Writing or Reading Novels You Don’t Love.

Now, I don’t say that lightly. I know (and you know) that the enjoyment of a novel is subjective. I’ve written about ten novels, nine of them unpublished (I’ve been editing most of them for years and years), and I know some of them (most?) will probably never make see the light of publication. And that’s okay. Some of them are practice novels, or novels that I’m writing in preparation for other novels, or, more likely, novels that just don’t make the cut. This is what writing’s about—sitting at the table, writing, dreaming, revising, researching, and, at the end of it, likely tossing the completed manuscript into a drawer or a flaming bonfire and forgetting you ever wrote it. C’est la vie. But the same holds true for the books on your bookshelf. Not every Pulitzer Prize winner is going to be for you. Not every National Book Award finalist is going to make you jealous with envy for the writer’s capabilities or storytelling prowess. Some of those books are going to be books you read three pages of and wonder why you wasted four bucks on Amazon. Others you may give a hundred pages to only to realize it’s just never going meet your expectations. The one thing I can tell you? Don’t sweat it. Move on. There’s nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about.

Here's a short list of books I’ve started and never finished:

• Ulysses – James Joyce

• War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

• The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie (although I’ve pulled this one out to read again)

• The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner

• The Great Believers – Rebecca Makkai

• Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward

• The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

• Z – Vassilis Vassilikos

• Moby Dick – Herman Melville

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe

• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

• The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

• Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

• Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO CUT YOUR LOSSES. YOUR TIME IN THIS LIFE IS LIMITED. BE SELECTIVE.

All “great” novels, right? Universally accepted as some of the giants of literature, and I’m sure for good reason. But I just couldn’t get into them. Maybe it’s when I first started reading them—some in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now 50s. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for the specific style at the time I picked them up. It’s possible I’ll never be in the mood for one or more of them. Either way, whether or not I’ll ever finish any of them or all of them, it has no bearing on the value of their authors’ work. Sometimes, fiction isn’t my thing. I mean, I write fiction pretty much every day. I read fiction pretty much every day. But I also have months where I don’t read fiction (I do, however write year-round). When I can’t read fiction, I go to nonfiction. Sometimes it’s for research. Other times it’s just for pleasure—books about sociopaths and the universe. Tomes about history or terrorist organizations or, on occasion, biographies of famous or historical people. And that’s okay. There are millions of books published every year, and I’ll never get to the majority of them. Not even close.

Say I read one book a day every day of the year for my entire life. Impossible, but say I did. That’d be 365 books. It would take me a hundred years to read just 36,500 books. Having imbibed the number of bottles I’ve imbibed over the years and having beaten up my body with judo and boxing and street fights and car accidents and dozens of other things detrimental to my physical health, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make it to a hundred. That tells me this: I have to be very, very selective when it comes to what I’m reading. Which means this: I need to cull a LOT of books if I’m going to be able to read books that I truly enjoy rather than every single book I pick up (not without a little guilt) at Amazon or at the little everything store at the hospital that sells books on a rolling rack sitting outside the entryway.  

So, what’s the fastest way to not waste your time when it comes to reading books? Don’t read the ones that don’t pull you in after a page or two. Or twenty. Your time is valuable, and there’s no sense in completing a novel if you aren’t enjoying it. Yeah, I know, I get it. Lolita is great! Never finished it, though I’ve started it probably thirty times. You haven’t read Vanity Fair by Thackeray? Nope. Doctor Zhivago? Sorry. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy? Well, I did read that one all the way through, but I had to: It was assigned to me during grad school. But it was rough! These days, I have entire boxes of books I’ll probably never even crack open. I won’t give them away—I’m saving all my books for my daughters, who read twice as fast as I do, to have their own library. Maybe they’ll enjoy some of the books I haven’t been able to.

YOUR NOVEL IDEA NOT WORKING? MAYBE IT'S TIME TO MOVE ON TO SOMETHING THAT DOES.

And the same goes for writing novels. I’ve started dozens upon dozens of novels. Not all make the cut. And you shouldn’t waste your time on something that’s not working. I’m not saying you should give up the idea of the novel, only that what you start out with isn’t always the way that’s going to get you across the finish line. Hemingway famously wrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times (some say forty-seven times). Walt Whitman apparently revised and expanded Leaves of Grass over his lifetime to where he ended up with seven editions by the time of his demise. The previously mentioned War and Peace was allegedly rewritten eight times by Tolstoy, with some scenes being rewritten twenty-six times. As an author, I know I’ve changed completed first and second drafts from third-person to first-person and then back again. Or at least sections of my novels. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles if you want to write something that you’re happy with and that, ideally, your readers and potential readers are happy with. As writers, these are the sacrifices we must make to put out the best books we can put out.

So, don’t feel guilty if you abandon a novel you’re reading that the world says you should like or writing a novel you want to be the next Count of Monte Cristo. If clay was your medium, you’d have zero guilt smashing your piece of clay back onto itself if your sculpture wasn’t turning out the way you imagined it would, and you should have no compunction doing the same thing to your fictional world, whether you write on paper, in crayon, or type your novels on an old Smith Corona. Your life isn’t going to be as long as you want it to be, and you’re never going to be able to read all the books you want to read. So, choose wisely. And if something isn’t working for you, have the courage to abandon it. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

The Author, Cully Perlman

Cully Perlman is author of the novel The Losses. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com