Does the World Need Another Book?
Maybe you’ve thought of write down your story and it’s been something you’ve wanted to get down on paper for years. You’ve had this story about your life or one that you’d dreamed up, and you’ve thought others would really love it or benefit from it, and you’ve even sat in front of the computer and started writing it.
Then reality hit and you asked yourself why you’re wasting your time. Does the world need another book? Isn’t there something else, something more productive that I can be doing with my life?
Well, if this is you, I’m here to tell you that yes, the world does need another book and another story.
But There Are So Many Bad Books
Last weekend, I finished reading a book I didn’t like much. It was a story about a woman who gave up a son and was going to see him now that he was a grown man. At least that is what the back cover copy said the book was about. The author spends the entire book going over the woman (the mother’s) life.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, the main character gets pregnant because a man who was older than her, actually, he was an adult man, she was a teenager, has sex with her and gets her pregnant. Everyone in the book acts like this is okay! Then she has the baby and takes care of it for a few months. At this point, she’s living with her aunt and uncle who raised her. The baby’s father shows up and asks her to leave with him and . . . the story drags on, but she abandon’s the baby. She never goes back to take care of her child. Nothing really important happens.
I didn’t find that this book had any redeeming qualities. None of the characters were likable. The story was really about nothing except maybe about how random and sad life can be.
Did the world need this book?
I didn’t need it. But someone did.
In fact, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. So that means that many people liked it. Did I miss something? Maybe, but my partial summary was accurate. The writing itself was fine, but the story wasn’t, in my opinion.
And It Comes Down to That, An Opinion.
There are people out there that will love your story, who will want to read your story. There will also be others who will not be interested. But every book deserves to be written. The story that is in your heart that haunts you every not and then deserves to be released and shared with others.
At the very least, it will free you from holding on to this story, from keeping it buried inside you. I find that when I have an idea for a story, there is a reason. I don’t always know the reason. But if I keep the idea close and I let it keep growing and festering, it will eventually begin to irritate me so much, as if it’s poking at my brain asking to be released, that I have to sit down and begin writing something.
That something typically becomes a book.
There have been times when I started writing something and then decided that it was not going to become anything. It still felt good to write the idea down — a scene or short story, and to release it.
But when the story did grow into a book, I knew it was a book that the world did need. It was a book that I needed.
Next time you sit in front of your computer and you begin to ask yourself those unproductive questions, just tell that voice to shut up and that your story needs to be told. Because it really does.
Have a story to tell? Want to learn how to record personal experiences before they’re lost or write a novel? Sign up for Julia Amante’s beginning writing course.
