If I were your teacher I’d tell you to overserve your audience. According to the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, the books that become classics are the books that bring people together in community. The Tolkien books, for instance, are famous for uniting like-minded readers who love them. To create this community, give readers more than they can handle alone. Give them so much humor or pathos or idea or profundity that they’re compelled to push the book on others if only to have peers with whom they can discuss it. Give them a book so strong, or a performance so big, that it
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