Hello everyone! So, finally we received all answers from our participants from MARSocial author network. Are you excited to read the answers yet? Question #7 is “What do you consider most important in a novel – literary value or story? by Neil McGowan.
Let’s check out the answers from all 11 author participants !
2) Viv Drewa
If you don’t have a good story your work won’t have literary value.
This is a difficult question to answer. Obviously, the story and the characters must be intriguing to hold the reader’s interest, BUT nothing annoys me more when an author makes obvious grammatical errors. I can accept the occasional ‘typo,’ this happens in any book, but I do think ‘Indie authors’, in particular, should ensure their spelling and use of English (or whatever language they write in) should be of a high standard.
4) Sam Reese
5) Neil McGowan
Story! It’s all very well doing clever things with language in the name of literature but if the story isn’t there then I’ll put the book down and move on to something else that does have a story.
7) Jaro Berce
I think we all read because of a story. Kafka has literary value but no story.
I think the story is more important, and this is why. Let’s say you read a book and you think, “Yeah, that was good.” A couple of hours later, you are imagining the scenes play out in your head and you just realized a message could be drawn from it. Did the author intend to convey that? Who knows? That’s the great fun about reading a book. You have no idea what the author “meant” to do. All you know is that there is something of value in any story, whether it’s a way to escape your worries for awhile or that you glean a message from it. I think that’s the best part, not knowing what you’re going to encounter. And maybe the author didn’t even intend to place a message or certain theme in the book, but inadvertently did. Every one of us comes from a different background, went through different experiences. What one person gleans from a text may be entirely separate from what the next person gets from it. That’s the beauty of it.
9) LaRae Parry
11) Annie Edmonds
The next question is “What are your reasons for writing?” by Marion Lovato. Stay tuned with us for the next post !
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