Great Idea or Greatest Idea Ever?

I found someone on amazon who reviewed his or her (no hints, I’m not revealing who) own books and gave them all five stars, along with brief descriptions and promises of how happy people would be if they read. I admit, I’ve thought about it. I would like to attach a brief bio and personal description of my book to complement the one from my publisher in an amazon review. I wouldn’t be comfortable rating it, but if I had to rate it…yeah, I’d give it five stars. I love my book! Do I really think it could reach readers the way the great books I’ve read in my life have reached me? No. Do I kind of think that? Sure. I don’t think a writer can dedicate the time it takes to write a book, edit it, rewrite parts and edit again etc. without the thought that it has the potential to be great. A love story between a dominant woman and a submissive man isn’t going to win the Nobel prize, but for what it is, I think it’s a five star book. Otherwise, I’d have spent more time on it before I sent it to a publisher. I realize my opinion is extremely biased and I would stop short of promising anyone else would think the same. Everyone is entitled to form his or her opinion, just as the writer is entitled to his…or hers.  

Can Writers be Self-Indulgent?

I’m leery of reading books about writing, since the first time I opened one and read that you shouldn’t read books where the narrator has a strong voice because it might affect your writing style. Say what?? I hope so! I returned that book to the shelf and bought Catcher in the Rye.

Self Indulgence is the ultimate sin of a writer. I found this recently and thought it was an equally irresponsible line to put in a book beginning writers might be using for guidance. I indulge myself every time I sit down to write. I am embedded in every one of my characters. They think a lot of the things I think. In Courting Her, Alex drinks the same coffee I drink. Alex is different from me in numerous ways, but not in how we drink coffee! When I go back through my old fiction, I love that it reflects who I was then and who I am now. It is extremely self-indulgent, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad fiction. Writers who force details about themselves in at the expense of their fiction are self-indulgent to a fault. Writers who are self-indulgent are just writers. Only the writer can decide where that line is. A reader is welcome to make that decision, as well, and stop reading, but that’s where personal taste comes into play. A writer who loves food might describe tastes and smells for pages every time characters sit down to eat. A reader who only eats when hungry and otherwise never thinks about food might find this self-indulgent. A reader who also loves food might read everything this author writes for the food descriptions that happen to lead to a story. No one is wrong here.

To make a statement like the one above is, at best, a useless generalization, and, at worst, an arrogant dismissal of the creative energy new writers bring to the act of writing. I am still writing today, after over ten years, largely because I found advice to counter the above like this from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writing instructor as well as popular writer: “There’s little I can do but tell people to read a lot and write a lot and figure it out for themselves”