Category: Novel Writing

Building the Novel - Part 4

7/6/2015

I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!

Originally posted at Livejournal Oct. 20th, 2011

"Prologues sit on a reader's mental clipboard and some of their attention goes on wondering where it fits." - Emma Darwin

In the final session of Emma Darwin's Building the Novel course, we covered hooks and why you need them. A hook is needed in order to pitch the book to agents and publishers, and will tell you who is telling the story - the main character and main problem. This will then lead naturally into writing the blurb, should you be lucky enough to need one.

We also covered one of the eternal questions - how do you know where to end/begin a chapter? Sometimes (more common in literary fiction that genre, apparently) one scene equals one chapter. However, Emma's suggestion was to judge it by content, so that a change of theme would indicate a need for a new chapter, or by showing events linked by stages (either parallels across multiple storylines, or by the stages of a single storyline). If ending with a cliffhanger, Emma suggested it should involve a change of p.o.v. or location, to create a true break rather than the irritation "false" cliff-hanger.

Discussion of chapters naturally led to discussion of prologues. I've never been a big fan of them myself - I skipped every single prologue in David (and Leigh) Eddings' epic series, and agreed with Emma's opinion that if it's important enough to need a prologue it's important enough to be in the story. The best reason not to have one was, for me, the quote at the top of this entry - "Prologues sit on a reader's mental clipboard and some of their attention goes on wondering where it fits". Time the reader spends worrying about your prologue is time they're not focusing on the story.

Finally, drafts and synopses. Emma reiterated what most writers know and spend the whole of NaNoWriMo trying to convince themselves - the first draft is about getting it down. She suggested that the best was to do this is in the way you're most happy brainstorming. In my case this varies every five minutes, because while typing is fast notebooks (the paper sort) are more portable and don’t need recharging.

If you get stuck, writing a synopsis can help to expose problems like having no plot or a lack of connections between ideas. I guess that if combined with some sort of notecard/outlining idea it could also make rewriting a lot easier. Short stories are infinitely easier to hold the whole of in your head, at least that’s what I find.

Emma’s final thought was that any project has its outer limits, things and problems it won't ask of you. She suggested setting exercises to learn the rest. Myself, I think writing outside of your comfort zone would work quite well. If only it wasn’t so uncomfortable.

Building the Novel - Part 3

24/5/2015

I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!

Originally posted at Livejournal Oct. 5th, 2011

Who is telling the story and why? This affects the way they tell it. - Emma Darwin

Also in Emma Darwin's novel-writing course we went over the choices a writer makes in how to tell the story.

The first and most obvious choice is of narrator - are they in 1st or 3rd person (or, god forbid, 2nd)? If the novel is in (or partly in) 3rd person, is the narrator limited to one person's viewpoint or are they omniscient? This of course lead us to head-hopping, the bane of many a writer-reader's life (I know it certainly annoys me). Emma suggested that if you really have to, not to do it more than once a page, and to move to a different psychic distance so as not to confuse the reader. In general, move out to a more remote distance, move across, and zoom back in again.

There was one brief piece of advice about minor characters: don't spend ages describing them, or the reader will think they're more important than they are. I suppose it's different if you want them to be a red herring though....

We also had a discussion on tense. As present tense has no sense of time it can lose tension, but is useful for dreams or flashbacks where a sense of disconnection is needed. Sarah Monette used it to great effect in the first book of the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Melusine, to differentiate between a 1st person narrator, and the same narrator when he's batshit crazy. Tenses can also be combined to keep plot strands or timelines separate, although this can be quite difficult to do well.

The story itself doesn't have to be told in chronological order, but Emma cautioned against putting the "zingy stuff" at the beginning of a chapter and going back to explain as it breaks the momentum. Also, if you do this and the thing you're explaining turns out to all be a big misunderstanding the reader can feel cheated (I've come across this and yes, it did annoy me).

Whether you're hopping around between timelines or narrators, you should always make sure the reader know where they are. Do something to orient them, preferably within the first sentence. If you're chosing to disorient the reader on purpose, make sure to ground them afterwards - a confused reader can quickly become an irritated reader.

The last things I'm going to mention, because this is rapidly looking like it's going to be a four-part post, are subplots, and backstory. Subplots should be linked thematically to the main plot - difficult if, like me, you have no idea what the theme is when you start, but you can always go back and add things. That's where the handy chart comes in, I suppose. Emma also uses it to plot where significant pieces of backstory are revelaed, although she cautions against getting hung up on knowing all the backstory before you start. What will happen is more important than what has happened, as you write forwards the important backstory will rise to the surface. Hearing a published novelist advocating what is essentially pantsing was a relief to me, since this is how I work. Finding out the backstory as you go is half the fun.

Anyway, I'm going to leave it there and write up the last few bits and pieces in another post.

Building the Novel - Part 2

17/5/2015

I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!

Originally posted at Livejournal Sep. 14th, 2011

"Write what you want, and make me believe you know it." - Emma Darwin

During her novel-writing course and Swanwick Writers' Summer School, Emma Darwin offered the above quote as a remedy to the advice "write what you know" (and has an excellent blog post on it here). It's something I imagine writers of literary and mainstream fiction fall foul of more than speculative fiction writers, since very few of us have actually met a dragon.

Emma's alternate advice comes from the fact that the mind doesn't know the difference between a real thing and an imagined thing - if you can imagine it well enough, it seems real, and this is the effect we aim to create in the reader. Observation is important, as is engaing all six senses (the usual five and that sense of weight and presence we get of an object). As a demonstration we did a short exercise where we wrote a description of a real object, then followed it with a description of an imagined one. Emma suggested that in order to better imagine what isn't known, it should be treated as poets often treat their subject matter - with word associations, pursuing odd connections, and reading the work aloud.

Another thing Emma brought up, something I'd never heard of before, was the idea of psychic distance. It's something she discovered in John Garner's The Art of Fiction, and basically describes how close in the narration is to the character. She writes about it in her blog post here, and gives the following example (used in Gardner's book):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
Henry hated snowstorms.
God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

Obviously it's a scale of remote and impersonal to stream-of-consciousness. Emma set us an exercise of writing a snippet in each of the five, suggesting that it would be easier to start at three (as that's where most people write) and work our way out to the edges. I actually found it easier to start at five, with a nice cathartic rant about how much I hate answering the telephone on bad days at work, and working my way back. Somewhere in the middle I got stuck - it was quite difficult to tell sometimes whether something would be better for three or two. I suspect this is because I tend towards three/four in my own writing.

We moved on to the choice of who is telling the story and why they're telling it, and how this affects the choices the author makes in the way they tell the story - narrator, tense, order of telling.... But I think I'll leave that for another post, as it could fill an entry all on its own.

Building the Novel - Part 1

12/5/2015

I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!

Originally posted at Livejournal Aug. 31st, 2011

"Drama is character in Action" - Aristotle

One of the many writery things I did at Swanwick was attend a four-part course on building a novel, by Emma Darwin. She writes historical literary fiction, so some of what she said was counter to what I understand of writing genre (which is often not character-driven), but it was interesting to see things from a new perspective.

The first sessions were about characters and plot. We did a group exercise, and we created a character using a spider diagram. Emma put the name "Jan" in the centre of the board and people shouted out ideas. What we ended up with was a gay, transvestite, Polish, rapping, piano playing body-builder, with a tattoo, a chihuahua, and an unexplained wedding ring. (At this point I started to wonder if some of the more straight-laced attendees were shouting out all the things they didn't dare to put in their own fiction.)

When we meet a character in a novel we know nothing of them, just like in real life. We intuit what they're like by what they do, and what they do is driven by their needs - love, security, whatever. (In Jan's case it was to improve his English so he could get a job and feed his chihuahua.) The key to a character is what they do and why, and what they do drives the plot. Of course, it's never as simple as characters getting what they want. The stakes need to be raised - what gets in the way and what's the effect of it? If the character doesn't get what they want things should be different even if they're the same, if they do what's the price and is it worth it?

One suggestion Emma made was that if a scene won't work, try writing if from a different point of view, or switch from 3rd to 1st person or vice versa - if it still doesn't work it doesn't belong there. Looking back, I can see dozens of times when doing this would have helped - or I did it but was too stubborn to admit what the scene was trying to tell me.

Emma also mentioned "The Thirty Thousand Doldrums". Apparently it's very common, whether you write short novels or long ones, think in chapters or don't, to get stuck at around 30k. She also suggested that this is a good time to stop and produce some kind of outline, whether you're an outliner or not, to give you an overview of what you've got and where it's going. It could be that your novel's no longer doing quite what you thought it was.

She provided a handy example of the structure she used when writing The Mathematics of Love to keep everything organised, a grid with the chapters down the side and each element with its own column against them (also useful for keeping track of information you need to know but that doesn't necessarily appear in the book). She goes into more detail in her blog post here, and also how she thinks about novel structure in her post "Building the Bridge". Anyway, this post is getting be quite a bit longer than I expected, so I'll finish it in another sitting.

Learning to Plot

6/9/2014

I've always been a pantser, and love writing in that white-hot frenzy of inspiration that can come of this method of writing. However, it can result in a lot of words wasted as you end up excising scenes that aren't necessary, or cutting out waffle that was only needed to writ into the story in the first place. Case in point: the first draft of The Reflection of Memory came in a 17k. The printed version is a much more manageable 10k. That's a cut of around 40% of the original wordcount.

I've become a lot more risk averse as I've got older, and wasting time on unnecessary words is one of the things I'm trying to avoid. For a while this has manifested as a fear of writing anything at all, because there's not always a way to tell before you start if you're writing a dud. That's not healthy though, or productive if you actually want to write. So now I'm teaching myself how to plot. Trying to, anyway.

My first port of call is Evan Marshall's Novel Writing (called, I think, The Marshall Plan in the US). He has a handy breakdown of how many scenes and characters you should be thinking to put in a book of a particular length, how to structure the middle to keep it moving, and how to finish off. Some of what he writes makes perfect sense to me, for example where to add your "surprises" and plot twists to keep things interesting. However he thinks that there should be 5 viewpoint characters in a 120k novel (the length I'm provisionally aiming for), which seems like a lot to me. Especially since, in the 24 sections you get to start a novel at that length, the secondary characters come in at sections six, eight, ten, and twelve. That doesn't seem like a lot of space to get things moving. And you're supposed to plant the seeds of each one in the previous sections, but what if you're writing one of those novels with separate characters and plotlines that eventually come together?

It seems like this book is a good place to start, but I'm not convinced it will let me tell the story I want to. The next part is to dig into Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook, and all those random writing books I loaded onto my Kindle and haven't read yet. Maybe if I take the bits I like from each of them and shake I'll come up with a method of plotting that works for me.

Building the Novel - Part 4

Building the Novel - Part 3

Building the Novel - Part 2

Building the Novel - Part 1

Learning to Plot

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