Great actors don't make great novelists.
Apologies for sort of spoiling the premise right up front, but that’s the answer. Great acting talent does not necessarily translate to literary excellence. But the reason this is true has nothing to do with acting and everything to do with novel-making. Constructing a complex narrative with tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of words is really, really—really—difficult; merely completing a draft of a novel is a major accomplishment. Then the revision process demands not only complete overhauls, but also infinitesimal tweaks that can sometimes cause reverberations throughout the rest of the story. A novelist must keep all of this in their head, balance the bewildering intricacies of one’s own novel with the endless possibilities available for improving it. The writing, revising, copyediting, marketing, publishing, and promotion of a single novel can take many years. Debuts are rarely a novelist’s best work, and often this is because many of the “rules” of fiction are notoriously difficult to articulate, let alone learn in practice and eventually wield with grace.
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