A Novel Approach to Success
You May Be Severely Limiting Yourself by not….
Reading novels! This is a bone of contention I’ve had during over thirty years’ worth of discussions with fellow self-help authors, motivational speakers, success coaches, and others who think reading self-help and personal growth and other nonfiction books is the only key to enlightenment and a life of fulfillment. Wrong! Oh, all of those books make a valuable contribution to our knowledge and awareness of the way life works, but a good novel can do this just as effectively and sometimes more so.
Learning More From Novels
This may sound strange from someone who has written six books on success and self-development, seven if you count the free ebook offered here, but I think I have learned more from the literally thousands of novels, mainly mystery novels, I have read since first encountering Sherlock Holmes at the age of eight, not to mention the wonderful OZ books, Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and even Tarzan–much more adult in novel form than in the movies. My mother, a writer herself, though she only had a couple of short stories published prior to her marriage, read mysteries and suspense thrillers. E. Phillips Oppenheim was one of her favorites. My father read nonfiction books, and Dale Carnegie and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale were among his favorites. So I luckily was exposed and attracted to both forms.
A good novelist is also a good psychologist and philosopher, understanding much about human behavior and observing it as intensely as any social scientist. I was made keenly aware of this when I did a college term paper for a psychology course on the Travis McGee detective novels of John D. MacDonald. He was a master at summing up the emotional motivations of his characters, as well as an early and masterful proponent of environmental reform. I got an A+ for that paper.
Anne Perry, Novelist and Fellow Ex-Convict
This piece was inspired by something I just read today in a mystery titled A Breach of Promise, by the bestselling mystery novelist Anne Perry, who has two series featuring mysteries set in 19th Century England. I loved these when I was in prison, as they took me far out of my real physical world into a totally different time and place. And also, I felt a certain rapport as Anne Perry was actually Juiet Marion Hulme, who served five years in prison after committing perhaps the most notorious and brutal murder ever recorded in New Zealand in 1954. She and her best friend, Pauline Parker, conspired to bludgeon Pauline’s mother to death because she wanted to leave the country and thus separate the two inseparable friends. A movie based on the case, Heavenly Creatures, was made in 1994, starring Kate Winslet as the teenaged Juliet, aka Anne Perry. It was only when the movie was released that a reporter found out what happened to Anne Perry, who was living in a remote area of England and writing bestselling mystery novels. Though her crime was much more serious than mine, and as a teenager, she served less than half the time I served in prison, I felt a certain connection to Anne Perry and sought out her books. Ironically, one of my friends who doesn’t make a practice of reading novels, ordered those from Amazon.com and had them sent to me. That was Mark Victor Hansen, who provided dozens upon dozens of books during my incarceration, both fiction and nonfiction.
And what did she write that inspired me to write this? A brilliant statement, I think, about the nature of time–a favorite subject of mine:
Time was a peculiarly elastic measurement. It was an empty space, given meaning only by what it contained, and aferwards distorted in memory.
Tell me that can’t stir your thinking juices. One of the activities I started in prison was a composition book filled with lines that particularly moved or stimulated my imagination that were contained in the novels I read. These formed a large segment of the more than one thousand books I read in those twelve years.
I’ll share a couple of those quotes from my collection:
Most of us come from the past, and we re-create the present. Those who excel come from the future, their vision, their mission, and it pulls them forward.
J. F. Freedman, House of Smoke
We wouldn’t care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.
John Lanchester, Mr. Phillips
Of course, sometimes novelists will quote actual philosophers or other great thinkers:
Heidegger says that life is action and passion, and that a man fails to take part in the action and passion of his times at the peril of being judged not to have lived.
Jack Higgins, Day of Reckoning
And I’ll let Mark Twain have the final word on the subject:
The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
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