On Writing the Great Novel.

Back in the day when my writing endeavours were in full swing, I made the mistake of joining a couple of writers’ forums. I didn’t stay long. I felt there was an awful lot of point missing going on, and I kept encountering a strange obsession with targets and word counts. It wasn’t unusual, for example, for somebody to make an exultant post along the lines of:

‘I’ve been keeping to my target of 3,000 words a day for a whole month now, and my new novel, The Bride of Frankenfurter, has 150,000 words already!’

The replies would come in thick and fast:

‘Congratulations, Elspeth! (They were well into exclamation marks.) That’s really excellent!! Well done!!!’ (And cumulative exclamation marks are a laudable literary device, apparently.)

The best I could ever manage was:

‘But are they any good?’

My home town has a classical composer to boast of. He was called Havergal Brian, and he wrote over a hundred symphonies. Ever heard of him? Brahms, on the other hand, wrote four.

Meanwhile, I need a classic novel to mock over the winter. I have no hesitation in saying that last winter’s commentaries on Dracula and Frankenstein were some of the most enjoyable posts I’ve made. But therein lies the problem. I can’t go around mocking the real classics by really classic writers like Sartre, Kafka, Flann O’Brien, the Brontes and so on. I need to find a classic novel written by somebody who only thought they were a classic writer – like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. Surely there must be more than two, but I can’t think of another one off hand.