What's the Point?
T here are some things that an author should delay telling the reader for as long as possible. In a whodunit, the author shouldn’t tell the reader who committed the crime until late in the book, but that’s not what I’m talking about. As I was watching a video the other day, I found that I was enjoying the video, but in the back of my mind I kept asking, “what’s the point?” I was sure the creator of the video was going somewhere with it, but when I reached the end of the video, I got it. The whole point was to leave a heritage for those who come after us. Once I saw that, I could look back at what I remembered from the video and see how the creator had supported his theme. In a novel, one thing we don’t want to do is to come right out and tell the reader what we want them to learn from the book. If we can do that, we should be writing non-fiction. Fiction deals with topics that aren’t easy to talk about. You don’t just say, “leave something behind for the people who come after you.” I...