Category Archives: Starting a Novel

A Writer Looking for a Story

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Ian McEwan, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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Ian McEwan recently told The Guardian his motivation for writing novels. “Ah, the dopamine moment is finishing them. It’s, you know, when you’re thinking you’ve got it to where you want it to be.”

You’ll never hear anyone say this about starting a novel. If finishing a novel is like reaching a blazing summit, then starting a novel is like groping about in the pitch dark of a cave.

My last post ended with the following phrase: Oh…and I’ve started writing my second novel.

That sounds easy, flippant even. I need to dispel that notion.

You know that feeling you have when you finish reading a novel you’ve loved? That feeling of melancholy, of waking from the dream knowing you’ll never again read those words for the first time?

Starting to write a novel is this on steroids – minus the sweet tang of melancholy.

A new project requires conjuring an existence in a new universe, new constructs – new approaches and outlines, new research into a foreign body of knowledge resounding with new voices and customs. It is like entering a room in a new city and beginning the long process of determining which of the characters milling about will form into your circle of friends, and which you should avoid.

At first it is only the other writers who have written about the worlds you wish to explore. They are your first guides in this place. You hope that characters will begin to form as you read (and write), and that those characters will be kind enough to show you the story in what, for now, looks like a barren, forsaken, and foreign land.

This is what it is to be a writer looking for a story.

Done? Begin Again.

24 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Starting a Novel, Writing Discipline

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Question: What should you do as soon as you finish your novel?
This is not a trick question.
I know you need to send query letters and do all the administrative stuff of your writing life – this question is not about all of that, it’s about the writing process.
While I have you…it is important to stop working. Recognize that no one ever finishes a novel; they simply stop working on it. It’s OK to say you’re done. Perfection is out of reach. The prose simply, as Dan Barden says, needs to be functioning at a high level.
Here are some wrong answers.
Take a vacation. Go on a reading marathon of all the novels you missed while you were writing yours. Go to grad school. Take up gardening. Take up genealogy. Get a new puppy. Open a bookstore. Build a rocking chair.
Of course you can do any one of these things if you’ve decided to quit writing. That is certainly your call.

Answer: Start the next one.
Here is how the last week of July went for me:
Monday, 25 July – I put the final edits into my first book-length manuscript, backed up the file, and closed my laptop.
Tuesday, 26 July – I sent query letters, which I’d prepared over the months of June and July, to 4 agents whom I’d selected and researched earlier this year.
Wednesday, 27 July – I started writing my next novel.

If you do take time off – stop writing – between novels, and you have not decided to quit writing permanently, be careful. Be very, very careful. The discipline of practicing your craft daily is fragile. Time away is momentum lost and energy evaporated.

No One Can Write That

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Starting a Novel, Writing Life

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Here’s a writer’s pitfall that Dan Barden warned us of recently.
But he’s too late. I’ve already seen the bottom.

We read books. We devour them and we walk away with the feeling of how great it was, how complex and moving the narrative was and how you felt like you were there – in that amazing world with those wonderful, crazy, convoluted characters. We are so in love.
And we want our books to do that to readers.
So as writers that is what we attempt to write. We attempt highly crafted, supremely well-wrought prose that will give the reader a complex and moving narrative…writing that will draw our reader in with its shear brawn.
But here’s the thing.
Look back at your favorite books. Just open them to the first page and start reading. What do you see? The prose is shockingly simple and straightforward, isn’t it? But wait…what about your memory of the story? What about…
The brutal fact is that your brain did that, not the author. This is what our brains do with story. Our brains fire all kinds of chemicals and jump all manner of synapse so that what we remember are not the words on the page, not the writing, but how we felt as we consumed them. What our brains did with the story. No one can write that.
So don’t try to. Don’t try to write the effect. Write the machinery that will produce the effect*.
Leave the rest to the reader’s brain. It will take it from there.

*See my post from 11 February 2015.