Writing a Novel
Five Suggestions
My son, Joseph, has started a writers' guild. Participants, mostly family members, are going to write 120-page novels during 2010 at a rate of 10 pages a month.
The plan is for us to share each month's writing with other guild members so they can offer encouragement and useful comments.
Since most of the participants are first-time novelists, I offer here five suggestions that may be helpful.
1. The job of the first draft is to tell the story. Don't let anything—particularly worries about the quality of the writing—get in the way of that.
2. The job of the second draft is to improve the writing and fix holes in the plot.
3. You can make notes for the second draft, but don't actually do any rewriting until a year from now when your first draft is completely done.
4. Don't tell anyone any part of your story before actually writing it.
5. You can outline your story and know ahead of time everything that is going to happen or you can just start writing and discover what happens as you go along. Both techniques have produced good novels.
The above are not rules, they are merely suggestions. But they are good suggestions.
Draft One, Draft Two
In the first draft, story telling is more important than good writing.
The best way to approach a first draft is to decide that it is going to be terrible. Really terrible. It is going to be the worst thing anyone has ever written. Let it be bad. The important thing is to get the story told.
Good writing is rewriting. But you can't rewrite until you've actually written something. The first draft is where you write something. The second draft is where you fix what you wrote.
By the time you get to the second draft, you are in position to know what holes and inconsistencies in the plot need to be mended. Sometimes stories are simply spruced up a bit in the second draft and sometimes the story line is changed dramatically.
Maybe, by then, you will have discovered that the bad guy is really the good guy or that the girl has fallen for the wrong character, or that someone you thought would live gets killed or vise versa. Major as those discoveries are, they are second draft concerns. You can't rewrite until you've written something and you can't write something if you try to fix everything as you go.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can think to say this: Let the first draft be the first draft. Let the second draft be the second draft.
If you never get around to doing a second draft, that's okay. Having written a complete first draft of a novel is a hugely satisfying and self-affirming experience.
Let your writing tell the story
Don't tell anyone about your story, about any part of your story, before you actually have written it.
Telling anyone about the story will maim or kill the writing of it.
Ernest Hemingway put it like this: "You lose it if you talk about it."
Angus Wilson put it like this: "I don’t care to talk about a novel I’m doing because if I communicate the magic spell, even in an abbreviated form, it loses its force for me. Once you have talked, the act of communication has been made."
Mario Puzo put it like this: "Never talk about what you are going to do until after you have written it."
So do not say to anyone, "My novel is about a guy named Greg who is angry all the time, but doesn't know why. He meets a girl named Mary who helps him discover the source of his anger—he was cheated out of an award as a child and now thinks everyone is trying to cheat him."
You have just told your story. You're done. Except instead of telling it in 120 pages, like you hoped, you told it in two sentences. The 120 pages will now, in all probability, be harder to produce, or maybe even impossible, because the first telling of the story, sparse as it was, has already happened.
You may want to read this and this.
Having said all that, we are part of a writing guild and we are here to help each other, so a certain amount of talking about our work will happen. Just try to talk more about what you've written then about what you plan to write.
How to deal with peer comments: The Story
Supposed in Chapter One you write, "This made Greg angry."
And supposed someone comments—after reading your first chapter—"I didn't understand why Greg was angry. The situation didn't seem that anger-provoking. I think an explanation should be given."
It could be that you don't know why Greg was angry. All you know is that he was.
Based on the comment above, suppose you decide to have Greg explain to Mary later on why he was angry.
Do not say to the commenter, "In Chapter Seven I'm going to have Greg explain to Mary that he was angry because he thought Aaron had cheated him."
Saying even that much will make the actual writing of Chapter Seven harder, maybe impossible, to do.
Rather, say this: "Good comment. Thanks. I now have a plan to fix this."
Let the commenter discover in Chapter Seven why Greg was angry in Chapter One.
How to deal with peer comments: The Writing
Suppose a commenter says, "You need to show us, not tell us, that Greg was angry. He should slam a book down or shout or do something to show he's angry."
This is a valid comment. But it's the sort of thing that is tackled in a second draft. "This made Greg angry," is fine for a first draft, if that's the sentence you wrote.
Suppose someone comments, "You keep using it's when you mean its."
Say, "Thanks. I'll make a note of that and will fix them all in the second draft."
Second Draft Notebook
You will want to write yourself some notes so you can remember to explain Greg's anger and remember about showing rather than telling and remember to check all the it's. Where do you write such notes so you can find them at rewrite time?
Get a notebook and label it Second Draft Notebook. Don't waste time and energy trying to divide the notebook into chapters so that notes for Chapter Six, for example, are all grouped together in a section called Chapter Six. Just do this: On the first line of the first page write: "1. Explain why Greg is angry. (Jackie)"
On the next line write: "1. Show, don't tell, that Greg is angry. (John)"
In each case, The 1 means Chapter One.
You may also want to write, "N. Check its and it's. (Mike)"
The N stands for Novel, meaning it's a note for the whole thing.
The names in parenthesis are who made the suggestions. Later on, you may want to ask someone a question about a comment or you may want to thank them. You don't want to spend an hour on Facebook trying to figure out who made what comments. Jot the names down as you go along.
If you get more ideas or suggestions about how to improve the writing in Chapter One, begin those notes with 1's as well.
Later, when your terrible, rotten, stinking, fetid first draft is done and you're ready to make improvements, it will be easy to go through the notebook and find all the notes that start with 1 when you begin rewriting Chapter One. And so on.
Perhaps you are writing the first draft of Chapter 26—by which time your Second Draft Notebook has pages and pages of notes—when you suddenly realize or understand why Greg was angry back in Chapter 1. Perhaps you write this note: "1/7 Greg was angry because he thought Aaron had cheated him. Don't explain this in Chapter 1. Explain it in Chapter 7 when Greg is talking to Mary."
The 1/7 at the beginning of the line mean this note applies to Chapter One and to Chapter Seven.
Because you are on Chapter 26 of your first draft, don't go back to Chapter Seven now and try to create the dialog between Greg and Mary explaining the anger. Just make the note in your Second Draft Notebook and keep on drafting Chapter 26. Your goal is to plow straight ahead and make it to the end of the first draft.
Outlining
If you decide to outline your story—be it novel or screenplay—a good way to go about it is to use 3x5 cards.
In your mind, picture your story—be it novel or screenplay—as if it were a movie. Write the idea for each scene of your mental movie on a card.
Include where, who, and what, like this:
Where: Greg's living room, Portland, Maine.
Who: Greg Watson, 26, and Mary Lisotti, 25.
What: Greg and Mary just met that evening. She has accepted an invitation to his apartment. The evening is pleasant, and there is good chemistry between them, until Greg suddenly becomes flaming mad and tells Mary to leave. She does so, confused.
Don't number this card, even though you picture it as the first scene of the novel. Things will change as you outline the story and you don't want to have to renumber a bunch of cards should you decide that the apartment scene happens later in the book.
Imagine what you think is the second scene. Make a card.
Where: Bookstore where Greg works.
Who: Greg, some customers, Mary.
What: Mary comes in. She is friendly, despite what happened at the apartment. Greg is embarrassed, apologizes, and asks her out to the movies. Mary tries to find out what Greg had been so angry about, but he won't or can't tell.
Get another card and write about the third scene.
Where: At the movies.
Who: Greg, Mary, and Aaron Jenkins, 26, a friend of Greg's who has tagged along.
What: Greg and Mary are awkward together because of Aaron's presence.
And so on and so on until you've written a card for every scene in your imagined novel.
Lay the cards out in order—or what you think the order is.
After a few days—or weeks!—of looking at the cards, maybe adding some, maybe combining some, maybe tossing some out, you will eventually have captured your story on a series of 3x5s.
Use the cards to guide your writing. Or perhaps type up an outline based on the cards.
No Outline
If you can't think of a story, or if you only have an inkling of who the characters are and how their tale begins, start writing with what you've got. Discover as you go along what the characters have to say to each other, what they feel, how they behave, what happens to them.
Many a novel has been written without the novelist knowing what's going to happen next and next and next, until the actual writing takes place.
Some who-dun-it authors honestly don't know who dun it until they get to the end of the first draft and the hero reveals who the killer was. Really.
Once the writer finally knows who dun it, she can use the second draft to sprinkle clues throughout the book and fix the plot, adding things she could not during the first draft, because back then, she, herself, didn't know who dun it.
So, outline or don't outline. It's up to you.
Hybrids
You can even combine the two techniques. Write a few chapters without knowing who or what is going on. Once you've invented a few characters and a situation, stop and imagine what's going to happen the rest of the way, then create an outline.
The opposite could also happen. You imagine your story. You carefully outline the whole thing. Then when you get to the actual writing, your characters defy your outline and say and do things you didn't imagine, taking your story in directions you didn't plan.
If this happens, probably the best thing to do is go where your characters lead instead of trying to force them back into your outline. Or maybe that's not the best thing. You decide.
All this happens differently for each writer. Whichever way it happens for you, enjoy the process, keep writing, and finish your first draft.
Plot Structure
As you outline, you may want to pay attention to the famous three-act plot structure. Or you may not. Good things have been written with and without it.
Info about the three-act structure can be found here and here. (These are talking about its use in film, but it applies to novels, as well.)
And, finally, let me say this:
In this writers' guild, Joe Governale is the guild master. He makes the rules. What I have written here are merely suggestions from a guild member. If Joe says something that contradicts what I said, follow Joe's direction.
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