Most novels are not trying to tell you anything. Novelists are expressing themselves: the stories of their alternate personalities and inner worlds.

Novelists are not fools. They know that readers, inevitably, think novels are trying to say something. So, when doing publicity, novelists may agree that their books do say something, perhaps that evil is bad and love is good.

However, when writers are not doing publicity, but seriously describe how they start work on a new novel, their starting point is hardly ever an abstract idea. What usually happens is that something concrete—an event or person they encounter or read about; or it could be an image or feeling that just comes to them—acts like an irritant in an oyster to eventually produce a pearl.

The character in the novel is not the real person the novelist had met or read about. The actual person was only the concrete irritant that set the novelist’s personality-generating machinery in motion. And once these alternate personalities, called characters, come alive, they help to tell their own story.

As previously discussed in regard to Pirandello, the structure of a novel is not usually a matter of literary technique, but reflects how the novelist’s alternate personalities operate, and how the novelist’s inner world is structured. This is probably true even for ordinary story-telling structures, such as when chapters alternate between different eras or characters.

A novel, in addition to what literary criticism usually discusses, is a window on the novelist’s alternate personalities and their inner world.