Category Archives: Starting a Novel

The Low Survival Rate of Early Chapters

01 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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My current project imagines itself will one day be a full-length novel. Today it is 3500 words of metawriting (writing about the writing—we’ll call it an outline) and 4000 words of manuscript. Both are, as they should be at this stage of the effort, a wholistic mess. 

The manuscript contains chapter stubs that are trying to keep up with outline (which has run ahead, already in its second draft). A few of these chapters will survive, in one form or another, but most will not. They will morph into each other. Some will split apart. They will be reordered. Others will be cut. New, unforeseen chapters will appear between them. At some point a shape will emerge, the contours of plot will be revealed, and the novel writing will be fully underway. 

If this sounds like a sloppy process with many wasted words, I’ve communicated well. It has been said ten pages of prose must be written for every one finished page of manuscript. In my experience this is spot on. 3000 pages to get to a 300 page novel is about right. When I think back on the first draft of The Confessions of Adam, I’m not at all sure even a sentence of it survived to greet the reader. I can say with certainty that the opening of the novel is altogether different. For all of this, the reader should be grateful. They have missed nothing. The goal is to work until the prose peaks and then stop. The reader takes it from there. We can all be grateful for the low survival rate of early chapters. Our stories are better for it.

Crush or Commitment?

02 Wednesday Jun 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel, Writing Discipline, Writing Life

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I have a long-form fiction project I’d like to discuss for a moment. Let’s call it Fabula. (Fabula is Latin for story.) When I’m working on Fabula I enjoy it very much. I enjoy the discoveries I make as I cobble it together and the connections inside the story that are generated. The characters, especially the protagonist, have me hooked. The writing really clicks. This could all be interpreted as a reason to stay with the project, evidence Fabula has legs.

But there’s an issue. A nagging, always present, issue.

I am missing an underlying motivation for Fabula. I don’t know why I’m writing it. I don’t know what question I’m seeking to answer, what curiosity I’m exploring.

Completing a novel is a great deal of work. The project must create fire-in-the-belly for the writer. The micro-delights I’m experiencing will occur with any project and can’t take the place of the story’s reason for existence. Any confusion on the author’s part of a crush (being enamored with the daily writing) and commitment (the depth of underlying, long-lasting, motivation for a project) will be sniffed out by the reader and impact their experience as well. A reader can tell when the author found this deeper purpose in creating a manuscript. They can also sense a missing core. Such energy (or lack of it) translates. As always, the reader’s experience comes of the author’s.

Percy’s Six Elements of Story: Establish A Clear Narrative Goal

02 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by in Benjamin Percy, Creative Process/Craft, Starting a Novel, Technicalities

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I am reading Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. In the second chapter, Percy lays out his list of the foundational elements of story. Revisiting a list like this now and again is important. It keeps writers grounded in our craft, it keeps us from getting carried away on the crests of the sentences and missing the rising tide of the story.

Over the next six posts, we’ll ruminate on each of them. 

Establish a Clear Narrative Goal

In Moby Dick it’s “kill the whale.” In Frankenstein it’s “define the true monster.” In Mrs. Bridge it’s “find purpose and meaning in the mundane.”

The narrative goal is why the story exists. It’s why there is ink on pulp. This is the story’s purpose for being and the one element that, once revealed, will call the narrative to an end. 

The narrative goal is why the story exists. It's why there is ink on pulp. This is the story's purpose for being and the one element that, once revealed, will call the narrative to an end. Click To Tweet

From a writer’s perspective this is the foundation, the starting point. Until it is known, work cannot begin. This is the story’s destination. Like a road trip, we know where we’re going, even as how we’ll get there and what we’ll encounter along the way remain mysteries. The narrative goal is first in Percy’s list, and for good reason. Without it we don’t have a story.

We’re Insecure and Lack Confidence

29 Wednesday Jul 2020

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“Yesterday evening, I started my novel. Now I begin to see stylistic difficulties that horrify me. To be simple is no small matter.” 

– Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, 20 September 1851

When Flaubert wrote the sentences above he had just started work on what would become the first novel of modern realism, a French classic, and a world literary masterwork, Madame Bovary. 

When starting a new project (and deep in the throes of one) an author will encounter feelings of inspiration and the sense he or she is on a mission, but just as quickly as these gifts of perception arrive, they will disintegrate into feelings of uncertainty—both in the conceit of the project itself and in one’s ability to pull it off.

Every author travels this terrain. And with every manuscript. Of course we cannot know what will be the fate of our work once it is out in the world, should it be so successful as to find readers. For this we can be grateful. If Flaubert had prophetically known what his new project would come to be, wouldn’t he have been further “horrified?” If I knew no one would ever read my novel-in-progress, how would I carry on?

It’s true, Flaubert was attempting to break with convention, to write in a new way, but such somersaults are attempted to some degree with every project. Every author is attempting the unknown, seeking to climb a mountain of her own invention, one he has never before seen.

So take comfort. You are in creative company with Flaubert, and every other writer of whom you’ve ever heard. And those you haven’t. We’re all walking our ridge, in search of footing with every step.

The Invention of Character

15 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Character in Fiction, Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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There are many examples for writing students of exercises and worksheets through which to create characters. Do a search in Google Images for “character creation worksheet.” 

Are you overwhelmed? Close your browser. Let’s talk about how working writers get this done.

People present themselves in what they say and what they do. These are a result of beliefs and experiences. And all of this is alive, complex, and full of contradictions. 

We know very little of people when we first meet. We learn through doing life with them, through conversations, through time spent together. It’s a slow process. But a rewarding one. It’s what gives much of our life meaning. A person’s hobbies or where they went to school? These are simple trivia. Their tics and idiosyncrasies, their moments of insight and magnificent blunders––these are what endear them to us.

Characters are people. They are dynamic, not static. Characters aren’t developed, they’re ever-developing. I knew nearly nothing about Oren when I began to write my novel The Confessions of Adam. I knew simply that he was from Susa, a master scribe, and a proud skeptic. All of these details came by necessity of the story. Oren walked onto the set. That is how we met.

As I wrote, I learned much more about Oren. I learned his father and he had a difficult relationship. I learned his son and he did as well. I learned about his tragic romantic life, his insecurities, and loneliness. These were dimensions of him I learned through the writing, through listening, in time spent with him––not ones I invented writing a character sketch. This is life, not a lab.

Oren became a friend. He was from a culture, time, and place unlike my own. He was at once ancient and modern. I listened to what he said, how he said it, and I came to better understand him as I wrote these down. I am convinced there are nooks and crannies of Oren I know nothing about, depths of his psyche and complexities of thought he intentionally holds back, ones he himself doesn’t yet understand, or doesn’t know how to share.

When you view a character in a story you’re writing just as you would a new acquaintance, and in time, an old friend (or enemy), you have a fully developing character.

For Beginning Writers – Conflict Creates Story

03 Wednesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Action in Fiction, Beginning, Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Starting a Novel, Technicalities

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Without conflict, there isn’t story. Conflict is when your characters are established and then bad things happen to them. The more bad things the better. Conflict drives action. Conflict molds characters. Simply having a character go about their routine isn’t action, isn’t story, and won’t generate conflict.

Write conflict into your story as early as you can. Write conflict into the first line if at all possible. Your reader will not be able to help but read the second sentence if there’s compelling conflict in the first.

Go re-read your favorite short stories or novels. Conflict is the engine. Sometimes it’s psychological and has physical results. Sometimes it’s physical and has psychological results. Regardless, the conflict is what drives the plot forward and alters the characters. And if the plot sags, conflict is what injects energy once again.

Working In Adam’s Shadow

23 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in Debut Novel, Starting a Novel, Writing Life

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There are several aspects of publishing the debut novel that I didn’t see coming. This is another of them. I imagine with time and distance such sensitivities may subside, but for now it seems any work I do, I do in the shadow of that one novel, that first novel.

I suppose it’s about expectations––mine and my readers’––the desire for continuity and patterns. It’s also about an imagined body of work and how the next project will fit with the first. 

This is the compare and contrast that we do with all we produce, whether it be this employer and the previous one, this year and last year, this house and our first. Each significant effort becomes a metric, an aesthetic data point, for those that come before and after. And with this we stare into an imagined future, how the next will look and what we can do to shape it. 

This is, creatively, a two-edged sword. Past work can motivate and push us to new innovation and higher effort; it can also hem us in and define our capabilities. We do best to see each project as different, as its own effort, independent of those that came before and after. The relationship between two projects may not be in form or function but in evolution, a recognition that to get to one we must have gone through the other, and we are creatively richer, more skilled for it.

I Can Do This

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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I remember the moment. I am standing in my study at my bookshelf. It is 1988 or 1989. I am in college, a sophomore. I have just pulled down a Hemingway novel – I don’t remember which one – and am leafing through it, reading a line here, a line there. And then I pause, look up and think to my naive experience-lacking self, “I can do this. I can write a novel. It can’t be that hard.”

Blink. 

Thirty years later I have a graduate degree in writing and my debut novel is about to be released.

I look back and I was right, I can write a novel.

I look back and I was wrong, it can and is hard.

But, this is how it always starts, with an unfounded idea. Whether it’s writing a novel, starting a business, or running a marathon, it always starts with simply pointing your nose in a specific direction. And it always starts with untethered, joyful ignorance of the difficulty ahead.

Along the way you will need to say again, a thousand times, that you can (still) do this. There may not be another living soul who has bought into your shenanigans. That’s fine. What you’re doing is personal. It’s yours alone.  And it will remain that way for a long time to come.

Until. 

Blink. 

Some years later when it’s no longer personal, it’s being turned out, into the wild, to fend for itself.

Pseudocode

23 Wednesday Aug 2017

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Pseudocode is a term that first showed up around 1960. One source defined it as “A notation resembling a simplified programming language, used in program design.” I have decided that this term is useful for our purposes, so I am stealing it for those of us writing fiction.
Here’s the new definition.

Pseudocode (noun)
Writing that resembles or summarizes story, used in first drafts and outlines.

No one produces fully functioning software from the first line on a blank screen. And no one produces fully functioning fiction from the first sentence. There is writing that must come first. Writing that no reader should see. Writing that is in service of the writer as the story is created.

Here’s an example of the use of pseudocode from my current project:

So I said to the messenger. Tell our king this: Who am I to be your kinsman? Who is my father’s clan that I should be the son of the king by marriage?
[Saul hears this and sees David as weak and gives Merab to another (ESV). Skip the next paragraph.]
[OR]
[Per Deane, there is an attack by the Philistines on the day of the wedding. I would add that Saul sees this as a sign that David is inept in beating back the Philistines – as he has commanded him to do – thus gives Merab away and sets David up for failure.]
Wedding, rushed, too rushed. It is not at the palace. We stand in the hall by the edge of the theatre. Mid-wonder there is a crush at the door. It takes too long for my men to rush in and thus too long to gain a sword, but this close work of the battlefield, even here, is what I have done and do again. My dagger from under my cloak.

The pseudocode is mixed in with research and with bits of prose that are leaning toward fiction. There is no story yet, but it is being drafted. The craft point here is that you should cut yourself a break, take the pressure off, and simply write the pseudocode. Not only will you then have something on the blank page, but you’ll be moving toward understanding what the story or scene is trying to accomplish. In the next draft you can write to unpack what is happening in the pseudocode. But for now, you have a first draft. A start. And that is very good news.

The Rush of the First Draft

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

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The first draft is about gathering all the basic materials you’ll need for the finished product and organizing them before you. Laying them out, taking inventory, making sure nothing significant is missing. If you can do this, you have a very successful first draft.

The first draft is about paragraphs and ideas. It is about laying the beams, not hanging the curtains. There will be time to tend to the sentences, to the language. The first draft is written from several yards away. Don’t look too close. There’s no point in it. Few of these words will survive. Look only close enough to ensure the bones are in place.

The first draft is ugly and unfit for a reader’s consumption. Show it to no one. It is a waste of their time. Its only purpose is to get you to the second draft. It is a fumbling start. It is full of holes. It is held together by chicken wire. And it is the only path to the “next”, and to “done.”

The first draft is horrifying and exhilarating. The rush of the first draft. It is always amazing to see what comes out. What inhabits the first draft is raw energy, hope, promise. A first draft is optimism incarnate. And it is a wonder how a thing that did not exist an hour before now is.

The first draft seeks a tone, a thing inherent in the first words that emerges. Listen for it. As you come to hear and feel it, and then see the hue or color – focus in and move toward it. Sneak up on it. Don’t rush. Creep in from behind and throw a net over its form and drag it onto the page. In a few drafts it will seem that it has always existed, that you simply heard it, honed in on it, and subdued it for all to see.