What’s the point?

It might not happen very often, but I imagine most of us can recall an occasion when we got to the end of a novel and thought: what was the point of that?

Naturally, this isn’t something we want to happen when readers get to the end of our own books. We don’t necessarily want to give them all of the answers and there is always room for a bit of intrigue, but we still want to leave them feeling satisfied with the book they have just read.

This is why purpose is so important. Not everything has to have deep and hidden meanings, but a little thought behind the intent of your novel will go a long way. For instance, what is the motivation for your characters? This is one of the most important questions to address, because what your characters want and how they go about getting it will form a large part of the driving force of your plot.

What is the purpose of your novel? Or, to put it another way, what is the story you are aiming to tell? What does that particular subplot add to it, and why is that character necessary? All of this links not just to the idea of intent, but also to editing.

Editing is where we really drill down into the story, cut out the bits we don’t need and make better the ones that we do. We can’t do this without knowing what the point of it all is, or else we wouldn’t know what we need to get rid of and what we need to call attention to.

Nor would we have anything to measure the final novel against: it’s worth knowing what we were hoping to achieve so we can see how close we eventually came to doing just that.