Q) Why do I lose my way in the middle of a novel?
A) Because you’ve been ignoring the need for ‘the story so far’ breaks. Should you be in the middle of writing a novel it’s a good idea to stop every now and then and devote a hundred words or so to writing down ‘the story so far’. It focuses the mind on what you’re doing and where you need to go next. It’s all too easy to get lost in one’s own verbiage, and the drive forward is lost.
‘The story so far’ at the beginning of each chapter serves as a reminder of where you are going and whence you have come. I know it’s a counsel of perfection and the writer tends to resist – it seems a vulgar reduction to whittle down what you have been saying to mere plot, but it does help to keep you on track. Delete before delivering.
But careful – if you look back at what you have done so far and it feels like rubbish, resist the urge to delete and then empty the recycling bin. You may be wrong. You are Freud’s toddler who looks at the poo in the pot, their own creation, and either cries out in disgust, ‘Yuk, revolting!’ Or else, marvelling, ‘Did I create that out of nothing? Good Lord, I’m so wonderful!’ So don’t trust your own judgement, wait a day or two and look again, or you can always ask a friend.
The trouble with ‘friends’ is that they usually don’t want to be asked, and if they do answer it’s with any old thing the better to keep you quiet. Spouses are even less trustworthy. You may well have been censoring your work so as not to aggravate them, and supposing you failed? (I’m only half joking: it’s a nervy job for a spouse, being married to a novelist who for all you know is spilling the beans about your private life, and keeps staring into space when you talk to them. Have pity, but don’t necessarily trust their judgement.)
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Q) Why do I have such trouble keeping to my synopsis?
A) Probably because your synopsis isn’t worth keeping to. Your story has leaped beyond the bounds of its original ‘and then, and then, and then’ scenario. It’s outgrown your initial ‘he did this and she did that’. The plot you were so proud of has been overwhelmed by the story. Rewrite your synopsis, and not your novel.
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Q) Why do you make this distinction between a plot and a story?
A) Because the plot – ‘he’s done this’ and ‘she’s done that’ – is just the mechanism by which you tell your story. The story is what you’re trying to say, your plot the means of doing it.
By ‘plot’ I mean the events which move the story along: the ‘story so far’ rather like what you’re shown at the beginning of an episode in a TV serial on Netflix. It brings you up to date with what’s gone before, mood, characters, events and all. TV is heavy on plots, but in a good novel they’re just the thread running through the whole: important, because it’s what keeps the reader turning the page and wanting to find out what happens next. But other things are important too – characters have to change and develop as time goes along. It’s not just ‘and then, and then, and then’. You will be paying proper attention to your initial idea (the ‘story’ as opposed to just the ‘plot’) and remembering to keep to its point – and what your reader knows and doesn’t know. You will be conscious too of form and structure; you will be using the resonance of language and grace of expression to heighten the impact of the story you are telling, the plot which illustrates it.
See your plot as what enables you to best express – by using event and character – what you are trying to say, the point you’re trying to make. Which you can probably boil down into a single sentence. Such as ‘All men are wicked’, or ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’, or ‘Because someone’s a victim doesn’t make them nice’, or ‘Stepmothers are more to be pitied than stepchildren’, or ‘Having children is a real pain’, or some other example of a cosmic statement. You need to make sure before you begin that your plot and your cosmic statement are not pulling in different directions. It’s when they do that the task of writing gets laborious. All good novels have good plots, but a good plot alone does not necessarily ensure a good novel, for other factors intervene.
Be glad to be writing when you are. There are fashions in what makes a good novel. In ‘literary’ novels of the past plots were kept obscured: what happened to characters wasn’t as important as what they thought and felt. ‘Genre’ novels – romance, sci-fi, thrillers – have only lately begun to get critical attention, more so perhaps due to the rise of the e-book, but all that’s another story.
Of the novels in the canon that have come down to us from past centuries, many were written as serials. Perforce the reader had to remember them from month to month, even quarter to quarter. Plots had to be really evident. Characters had to be memorable. Each episode had to finish with a cliff hanger. Put the episodes together as a novel and you get Dickens, Thackeray, Conrad, Flaubert, Dumas, greatly respected now but at the time rather dismissed as commercial fiction, written with sales in mind.
Once upon a time, back in 1988, I was asked to write a serial for a leading women’s weekly at the time – not a glossy, the opposite, with middle-market recipes, knitting patterns, advice on how to line the curtains and how to catch your man. Every week they’d carry two or three romantic short stories of a Mills and Boon flavour. Readers would check the end first to make sure it ended happily. Now the editor had the bright idea of a serial to fit the space in between the ads, either 1,000 words or 2,000, depending, to be delivered each week, to be published in the next weekly issue. He envisaged perhaps twelve episodes, starting as soon as possible. I said yes. And as it happened it ran for fifty weeks or so before the editor said, ‘That’s enough – my other writers are complaining you’re taking up too much space.’ It turned out to be a great training for me.
On a Thursday I’d get the early train up to London where my typist would be waiting (it was the days before the computer, let alone the internet), a two-hour journey – and write the episode by hand. The motorcycle messenger would call to collect at lunchtime. I allowed myself no time for editing or rewriting, let alone for second thoughts. A deadline is a deadline and has to be met. That was a year of no holidays, no illnesses, just all the discipline – and the fun, I must say – of The Hearts and Lives of Men, the title I gave it.
I think the editor must have thought the novel was already written and that I was doling it out meanly week by week, not that I was making it up as I went along. He would have been horrified if he’d thought about the mechanics of it. (So am I, in retrospect.) Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all. But he never asked and I never told. Necessity, indeed, is the mother of invention, and we were all braver in those days.
It was only when I started to write that I realised the full structural implications of what I had committed myself to. I would have to start in the past or else I would end up writing in the future. It made sense to start with a child’s adventures and grow the child up through the episodes. Dickens came to mind, of course. And the first sentence became ‘Reader, I’m going to tell you the story of Clifford, Helen and little Nell.’ It’s what I would call a Dear Reader novel; they’re easier and simpler to write. The Victorians did it a lot. The Dear Writer becomes another character in the book – you can give her a personality which has nothing to do with you the real writer; you can digress at will and make comments on the way your characters behave. You can comment on the day’s news or tell your heroine how to behave to win her man or how to improve her cucumber salad, all on the way to your cliff hanger ending. Which in an emergency, and I can tell you this piece of writing was full of emergencies – air crashes and kidnappings and so on – were very useful. You could use up a whole 1,000 words in Nell’s recollection of what had gone before, and then do a new cliff hanger ending in one line.
And every week there’d be a ‘story so far’ in the magazine to remind readers, and myself, what had gone before – just as in a TV serial you get the same developing intro every week using some old shots, some new ones. When you’re writing, do think of ways of making things easy for yourself. Don’t give yourself too many characters to deal with, too many subplots: solve the world’s problems one at a time, not all at once. Remember you have a whole lifetime’s writing ahead of you, leave some material in reserve for later on. And do bear in mind, especially in a course environment, that it’s no use writing a series of 1,000-word pieces, no matter how brilliant, if they have no relationship with what went before. Writing ‘the story so far’ compels you to bear it in mind.
A ‘McGuffin’ was what Hitchcock called the mysterious object in a film that sets the whole chain of events into motion and can be used to bring it to an end. I had stipulated four weeks’ notice before I got told to bring The Hearts and Lives of Men to an end, and had had the forethought to bring in my McGuffin at the beginning. I used a locket, worn by little Nell, kidnapped at the age of three, whose fortunes I was to follow until she was reunited with her parents some twenty years on. I could then, no matter what the circumstances were, prove her identity by producing the locket. These days you could simply use DNA, but not then. I had my cosmic statement buried in the second sentence: ‘Helen and Clifford wanted everything for Nell, and wanted it so much and so badly their daughter was in great danger of ending up with nothing at all, not even life.’ So I had to keep putting Nell’s life in danger as a result of her parents’ inability to get on together, and ‘the story so far’ kept me on the straight and narrow. When it was finished I simply left out ‘the story so far’s and it was published by Heinemann like any other novel. It is still in print, and very good reading it proves for patients in hospital whose lives are constantly being interrupted by X-rays, throat swabs and so forth.
All novels are written in different ways and all writers use different means to bring them about. The beginning and the end support a novel as the abutments support a bridge. Make sure they’re firm and solid enough to support the structure. The bridge can come in all shapes; it just needs to get you across the water. See it as a structure, and don’t let it get too thin in the middle. The Hearts and Lives of Men went on for so unexpectedly long I had to get Clifford and Helen to divorce and remarry in order to keep my McGuffin intact. An extra stanchion was required. But ingenuity will usually provide an answer.
In New Zealand in the thirties my father wrote a detective serial for a magazine that went on for two hundred episodes before the editor asked him to bring it to an end. He had no idea by then who the murderer was. So he placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering a reward for anyone who came up with the answer. Someone did. Ingenuity pays.
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Q) I’m still confused about structure. Tell me more?
A) All art forms have a structure. Basic rules apply. A novel’s just two or three hundred pages covered with words unless it has a shape, a form. It can be full of characters and events, and people changing their minds (and so their fortunes), but without a structure it has nothing. Structure is different from plot and from theme, but is master of them both. It is the way you weave all the strands of your novel together to bring them to a satisfactory knot at the end. You don’t have to feel oppressed: there are no right or wrong ways, there are no fixed rules, it’s just that the audience, your readers, needs to feel you know what you’re doing: if they lose faith in you they will close the book. Equally your novel cannot be full of spelling mistakes or obvious errors: the reader has to trust you.
A novel is like a house: it can be built in all kinds of fashions and styles, but it has to have a roof to keep the rain out and windows to look out of. If the reader fears the roof is going to fall down she’s going to get out of there as soon as possible. You’ve taken her money on false pretences. It may be a his, of course, not a her, but not so likely. There are twice as many female novel readers as there are male ones, and four out of five novel writers are women.
If you are writing within a genre, the rules of structure are tighter. You have to acknowledge them before you break them, in the same way a painter needs to know how to paint before he starts on abstraction. If you fail to solve a mystery in a detective story, it is only courteous to tell your reader near the beginning that there is no solution; if you are to make your romance end as tragedy, explain to the reader that this love affair is never going to work: if you are writing traditional sci-fi, apologise for bringing in human emotion.
Look up structure/novel writing on Google and a wealth of information is open to you. There are all kinds of interesting sites, offering advice. Take your pick. One writer describes the novels he writes as ‘three disasters plus an ending’. Well, that’s simple.
Someone else offers the suspension bridge image. Two pillars and a rope in between. At the first pillar you introduce your characters and their situation: one fifth of the way along you reverse the situation, two fifths the journey to a different destination begins – and so on. But you begin at the beginning and go on to the end: a simple ‘and then, and then, and then’ progression, providing a series of crises, bumps and humps along the way. This is the system favoured by writers of serials: Dickens, Thackeray, who start with their protagonists as children and then chart their adventures. If you are writing in a serial which is published as you go along, there is little alternative. You can’t change your mind about anything. These writers use fiction to make their point – Dickens, the vitality of the working classes and the respect due to them; Thackeray, the vulnerability of the male to the ploys and foibles of the female.
The contemporary writer plays about with the timeline, tending to use any variation of the basic three-act structure. Act 1, Beginning – character and situation; Act 2, Middle – diversions along the way; and Act 3, End – climax and denouement. You can start your novel at any point, but must bring in the Act 1 material as soon as possible, and in Act 2, some foreshadowing from Act 3.
In a novel the beginning must be included in the end, the end in the beginning. That at least is fairly basic. Conceive your novel as a whole: not in detail but understand where you are driving. A novel, certainly one which has any ambition, needs to do a little more than just serve the genre; it needs to have a purpose as well as a plot. It may be useful to look at these websites and see what it is you’re doing, less useful to use them as a guide to writing your novel.
Or there’s ‘Write your novel in 30 days’, which seems too much like hard work to me. I rather favour the article method. You see your novel as a fictionalised article. You tell the reader what you’re going to do (Act 1), do it (Act 2) and then (Act 3) tell them you’ve done it. You choose your characters and their conflicts to prove your point.
As for me, I see the novel as an act of persuasion, bringing the reader round to my point of view; but not every author would agree with me.
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Q) Do agents prefer a happy or an unhappy end?
A) They don’t mind, but you should. In the happy end the good are to be properly rewarded and the bad punished. In the unhappy end it’s the other way round. Good idea to wait until almost the end to decide which seems most relevant. Do you want your reader to cry with sorrow or laugh with relief?
Either way a novel needs not just a shape, a beginning, a middle and a conclusion, but a purpose, a reason to write with which others will concur. You the writer – seen as more sensitive, more trained, more eloquent than ordinary mortals – have put your finger on something others have missed. You have ‘something to say’ and have said it, driving your point inexorably home, persuading others you are right to see the world the way you do. The more confident you are, the more eager the reader will be to read. (Do not deny an unhappy childhood – indeed the unhappier the better. ‘Misery memoir’ is a very saleable genre indeed, and Marketing people always like it.)
Readers interpret novels as confession and absolution rolled into one. Why else do any of us go round with this little rectangle of printed paper, this potted alternative universe as good as hung round their necks like a magic charm until exchanged for another, the better to get them through the day? ‘I’m reading such a good book!’ Can it be because increasingly, in a world without religion, when virtue must be its own reward, and we must live without a sense of divine retribution or heavenly compensation, when all experience is happenchance, and chaos and entropy rule, we look for certainties, for shape, for structure, for beginning, middle and some conclusion, however small, however brief – and this is the satisfaction the good novel brings us.
In our own lives, things happen without apparent reason or purpose, the good are not rewarded or the bad punished. Chaos rules. In the novel we witness a small patch of experience which makes sense, in which at least some kind of justice is apparent.
The child needs its bedtime story in just the same way, only simpler, not complicated by sexual desires. Bad snake gets punished, good rabbit gets rewarded. The craving for justice is the beginning of wisdom. (Heaven knows whence the child gets its ‘It isn’t fair’ wail: there has been precious little evidence of it in his life.)
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is all about just deserts. Who was the guilty one, who the innocent? The novel tore away the surface of an outwardly happy marriage to show nothing but a pattern of lies, deceit and malice beneath. In her novel Dark Places, the brother massacres his entire family. Herself the most pleasant and mild of women, one does wonder what the hidden strains were in Flynn’s own apparently happy childhood that still niggle so. We know her parents were academics – her father, a professor of film, took her to horror films when she was small, the better, no doubt, to discuss plot and structure; her mother taught literary comprehension at college level; and her elder brother, of whom she speaks affectionately, is by trade a ‘railroad engineer’, someone who works with diesel locomotives. As a childhood it can’t have been all that easy for either sibling, but one way and another it has stood her in good stead.
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Q) I still don’t understand this cosmic statement of yours. Can you be more specific?
A) I will try and make it clear. I apologise if I repeat myself. Picture yourself as halfway through your first novel. You meet a literary agent at a party, and she (usually a she) asks you, ‘And what is your novel about?’ You have a glass in your hand, it is a social occasion, she obviously needs a swift reply. What do you say? There’s no time for an elaborate narration of the plot – ‘There’s these two people and he thinks this and she thinks that, and they do this and they do that.’ She wants to know how your novel is positioned in the world of human affairs and in particular in that of book marketing: who is going to buy it?
She needs you to tell her what Elizabeth Bowen calls ‘the non-poetic statement of a poetic truth’. (Find the reference in her fine essay ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, written in 1945 and collected in The Mulberry Tree, Vintage, 1999.)
‘The poetic truth’, the heart of the matter, is the ‘cosmic statement’. It is the truth the writer has to arrive at and then describe to the agent at the party, and often finds difficulty doing so. It can seem too simple, almost naïve. But, again quoting my heroine Elizabeth Bowen, it is there to be found – ‘what is left after the whittling away of alternatives’, the essential, the ‘what is to be said’.
If the agent asked Dickens at a party, ‘What’s your new novel about, Charles?’ he would say, ‘Oh, it’s about how things can seem the best of times when they’re actually the worst of times. It plays out during the French Revolution. I’m calling it A Tale of Two Cities.’
Or the agent: ‘I hear you’re writing a book, E.L. What’s it about?’ And Ms James will reply: ‘Oh, it’s about how women love to be dominated. I reckon there’s a market out there. I’m calling it Fifty Shades of Grey because in this world things are so seldom black or white, good or bad.’
Once you’ve worked out what your novel is about – it’s surprisingly often about your own family situation, though you don’t realise it – and faced it, the writing gets surprisingly easier. Okay?
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Q) What do I do? I have writer’s block. I can’t write a thing.
A) There’s no such thing as writer’s block. You may be ill, or not have had breakfast, or be in some emotional turmoil. But most likely – if you haven’t just finished and said all you need to say, which is always a possibility to be considered – what you’ve done is somehow write yourself into a corner. In which case overcome your natural reluctance to read through what you’ve written, and do so. ‘Writer’s block’, like being ‘stuck’, doesn’t just happen by itself. There is a reason for it. You’ve somehow lost your way on the path that must lead inexorably through your novel from beginning to end. It can be little – you’ve made some character say something they wouldn’t say in a month of Sundays – or large – your story has taken a turn which will lead you into trouble. Look at it, fix it, and you’ll find yourself writing on. Whoever said it would be easy? The act of creation involves getting rid of what you don’t want, as a sculptor does with his block of stone.
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Q) I’ve written ‘The End’. But how can I be sure I’ve finished?
A) Good question. All your points made and all loose threads tied up; all ‘i’s dotted, all ‘t’s crossed? The pages are numbered? You’ve left space on the page for easy editing? Haven’t crammed your paragraphs together – you’re not trying to save paper; this is an electronic age! (Whenever you’ve changed time or place it needs to be reflected by space on the page.) Does the text look easy and confident? A crowded page never does, just old-fashioned. Can you stand by every word, argue for every sentence? No careless repetitions, no typos, no relying on some putative editor to sort your problems for you later on? (Editors, publishers, no longer have time or will to do it. You are in a buyers’ market.)
Now, take time to look at your first four pages. It’s remarkable how often you can simply do without these. You’d written them when you were working yourself in, waffling in sheer terror at the prospect before you – two hundred or more blank pages to be covered – explaining yourself to yourself, temporising, writing and rewriting far too often, anything but actually getting on with the novel. Why it’s usually four pages of waffle, not more, not less, I don’t know, but this jumping from foot to foot before the race gets going is endemic. Children’s books are worst – never judge one by its first four pages.
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Q) It took me only three months to write my novel. Does this mean it’s going to be bad?
A) Not necessarily, any more than a novel which took seven years to write is bound to be good. Indeed, taking a long time can be a bad thing. The writer will have changed their skin since they began. They will know more, have felt more and with any luck changed their view of the world. The reading world will have changed too. Nothing’s static. The beginning of any book is intrinsically linked to its end: the person the writer longed to murder seven years ago may now feel like your dearest friend. The horse you are flogging may not be dead, but it will certainly be rather tired after seven years. Don’t take too long about things.
I know people have to work and bring up children, and full-time writing is often not possible – don’t lament that too much: peace, quiet and spare time can make you languid and introspective – but do keep your end in sight. I’m afraid the whole thing is much like writing essays at school – the one you worked on so hard and long gets only a C, the one you tossed off when drunk and disorderly gets an A. There is no justice. But at least having worked so hard for so little apparent reward on one, the next thing you write will come easily. In my experience, one hard-to-write novel is followed by two which flow without effort. So one proceeds.
Hemingway rewrote the end of A Farewell to Arms seventeen times – nothing wrong with that – but the whole book was written within the year. Muriel Spark wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in a month. Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler in a week. Just because Flaubert took seven years or so to write Madame Bovary it doesn’t follow that there is intrinsic merit in a book simply because it took a long time to write.
And don’t try and get everything into the first novel you write. With any luck you have a writing life to come. Eke your material out: that was Kingsley Amis’s advice to me so I pass it on. A practical man. Eke out all your past excesses. He had plenty.
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Q) I am inspired by this idea for a novel. It came to me in a dream. Should I follow it through?
A) Inspiration’s all very well but it does need to be tempered by reason. Be careful you’re not writing a novel which makes sense to no-one but yourself. Dreams are as likely to come from hell as heaven, depending on the state of your unconscious. Of course you must take notice of your unconscious – it probably has more say in the writing of your novel than even you realise – but dreams? They may well be trying to tell you something but your reader is not you, and you will need to do a whole lot of dream interpretation and soul searching before passing them on. No matter how vivid and coherent and full of meaning, your dreams are not likely to strike the reader in the same way they do you. Writing is not a magic wand.
The same applies to thoughts you have waking up in the morning or drifting off to sleep. These can offer an apparently brilliant solution to some hole you wrote yourself into yesterday; on occasion you may indeed have found a way through – but mostly such ideas don’t stand up to the glare of morning light. Like dreams, they are creatures of the dark: succubi, leading you on. You can waste an awful lot of time pursuing false leads in this business. Sheer folly can pose as inspiration.
Or perhaps next you’ll say: ‘I’ve just had this great “what-if ” idea.’ That probably came to you in the night too. Another cause for alarm. What if a dead man walks, what if you wake up as a black beetle, what if you write a novel not using the letter ‘e’ (a lipogram)? If you’re Meyrink or Kafka or Perec the great idea may just about work. But you’re probably not a genius, and the trouble with what-if novels is that even though the idea can sound so good and so high-concept that gullible editors commission you – you then have to write the thing, and though the beginning’s brilliant what do you do for a middle and an end? It’s when writing what-if novels that students find themselves saying ‘I’ve written three chapters and I’m stuck’, to which the brutal answer from me is usually ‘You’re not stuck, you’re finished.’ It was a short story not a novel. You have said all you have to say.
On occasion all is not lost. There may be some ingenious way through, such as introducing some relevant subplot on the first page, and feeding that in throughout, or realising that the what-if concept was actually the end of the book, not its beginning. It was a really ‘so-that’s-how-it-turned out!’ novel all along. Ingenuity is the novelist’s best friend.
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Q) What age should I make my characters? Does it matter?
A) The answer, alas, matters very much to Marketing and PR people. You may choose to ignore this horrible fact and pursue your literary ambitions unmoved by the practicalities of publication, but you’ve asked so you might as well take notice.
It is any writer’s first and reasonable instinct to make their main protagonist the same age, roughly, as they are – but consider whether it is a sensible thing to do. Readers come in all sizes, sexes, shapes and ages, but all prefer their novels to feature young women rather than old. This applies particularly, alas, to older women, though they are by far the more prolific readers of fiction. (Men tend to prefer non-fiction – histories, biographies, science, car mechanics.) And older women, my theory is, prefer to identify with themselves when young, not as they are now, in the days when they were a leaping, bounding youngster, sexually active, agile of limb, and not afraid of adventure. It makes for livelier reading.
Publishers, who these days tend to turn away novels by middle-aged women about middle-aged women on the grounds that they are depressing, are probably wise to do so. We now have a sorry state of affairs in which older women, who tend to be the only ones with the time, energy, experience and patience to write novels at all, have an uphill struggle trying to get them published. Whereas a pretty young woman with her face on the back flap sells a lot of books, but has rather less wisdom to pass on than the older woman. What’s to be done?
My own answer is always to have a juvenile lead, someone running around in a state of sexual turmoil, while the older woman, keeping a low profile, passes on the wisdom of her more senior years. Get your juvenile lead on the front page: lure the reader in. Twenty-five works better than thirty-five, thirty-five better than forty-five – after fifty, forget it. Theatre plays have been employing such tactics for a long, long time. Women past their nubile prime get fewer parts in films or jobs announcing on TV. It shouldn’t be so, and one hopes it’s changing, but alas it is so.
Having said all this someone like Roddy Doyle, who writes about women better than anyone I know, will prove me wrong, writing a book which sells like hot cakes about a woman of fifty-five. He got away with Paula being thirty-nine in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, but she feels even older to the reader – she’s taken to drink; but she wisely spends a long time on the page back as a young woman. And at thirty-nine women haven’t given up, as Paula seems to have done. If you’re a woman writer you need to bear these fearful things in mind, even if you take no notice. And by the way, do make your protagonist as little like you physically as you can. Otherwise your reader will assume the novel is about the person in the picture on the back flap. It may well be, but try not to let on.
If you’re a man you can safely make your male characters any age, while keeping your female characters young and sexy. Try and avoid too great an age gap, though. Readers get queasy if a male hero of pensionable age is loved by a twenty-year-old girl: the writer will quickly find himself under troll attack.
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Q) Supposing I don’t want to write a good novel, I just want to make money?
A) A good question, if seldom put so bluntly. In the popular novel the lowest common denominator rules: that is to say the plot. If you are writing a book and hope to get lots and lots of readers, you will not attempt to follow any instructions from me: rather you will do the opposite. You will eschew cosmic statements in case they lead to unnecessary contemplation and you the writer will keep right out of it. You will use lots and lots of adjectives and you will splash adverbs about – all the sins for which I chide the aspiring writer. Importantly, you will not use the word ‘said’ if you can possibly help it. Your characters will screech, whisper, yell, snarl, shout, gasp, yearn, argue, deny, or smile their words, but they will very rarely just say them. If they do, there will an adverb nearby so the reader knows that the words have been said with some strong revealing emotion. He or she will say whatever it is angrily, caressingly, sagely, nastily, kindly, scratchily, benignly, acidly, savagely or despairingly.
Interesting, though, how Lee Child, who is taken seriously as a writer as well as having hordes of readers, manages to avoid ‘said’ by seldom having more than two people in a room or confined space together, so you don’t have to specify which of them is talking. Make of that what you will.
It might be an interesting experiment, for those of you who have had a novel rejected time and time again, to change its title and rewrite, adding two or three extra adjectives to every one you used in the original, and strengthening every verb so your characters don’t walk but head for, don’t run but hurtle, don’t reach for but lunge, don’t cry out but scream or yell, don’t frown but rage, don’t bite but savage, and so on. Change title and names and re-send to a less lofty publisher than you tried first and see what happens. Let me know.
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Q) You’ve said very little about dialogue. More, please?
A) I try to have a snatch of dialogue on the first page of a novel. It suggests to the reader that this is a book in which something is going to happen; it isn’t just going to blether on and on. The very attempt, I find, helps the writer formulate the book so the opening pages are not all back story or description – probably better to avoid – but goes straight into an actual scene, no matter how brief. That said, I do not always manage it myself. I am nevertheless very conscious that large blocks of tightly packed unbroken print at the beginning of a book can put a reader off – especially if the novel comes in e-book form. Space on the page and typography are more and more the writer’s business.
Tutors of many creative writing classes will tell you that it is bad form to start a novel with dialogue, but I’ve done it often enough. It depends what the dialogue is. No good if it’s: ‘Hello, Betty,’ smiled Joan, opening the door to her friend next door. ‘Do come in. Can I offer you a cup of tea?’
‘Hello Joan,’ chuckled Betty. ‘Yes thank you, that’s very kind of you.’
If on the other hand you start with: ‘Please put the gun down, Betty,’ said Joan. ‘You can’t shoot me because we made a non-aggression pact when we were young. Surely you remember?’
‘A pact’s a pact,’ said Betty. ‘But I’ll be doing you a favour. I promised to put you out of your misery if ever you lost your marbles. Now you’re marrying this creep it’s obvious the time has come…’ – you might get away with it.
Cut out the hellos, the goodbyes, anything boring, anything the reader can fill in for themselves. Just as a film editor leaves out the obvious bits, and cuts to mid scene, so the novelist must treat his or her dialogue. Nothing boring or obvious. Cut to the chase. When they’re reading dialogue your readers stop watching characters and listen to them instead. Keep it lively. When characters are being active, keep spoken dialogue, direct speech, short and sporadic. When they’re reflecting, you can afford to make their sentences longer.
Don’t try and replicate real speech, complete with ‘um’s and ‘ah’s and ‘I mean’ – a novel is a written document and speech is formalised to a degree – leave them out. Be sparing with a literal translation of regional accents. One dropped ‘g’ or missed ‘h’, one ‘ee bah goom’ in every twelve is about right. Suggest but don’t insist – readers get the gist; don’t tire them with detail.
If you ask the question, you’re probably dissatisfied with what you’re writing. Go through a section of dialogue, and make yourself read it aloud. Put as much of it as you can into reported speech. Cut it to the bone. Make sure the women aren’t asking all the questions and the men giving all the answers. (That’s arrant old-fashioned sexism.) Make sure you’re not using it to further the plot. (Dialogue is for revealing personality.) If the reader isn’t told who’s speaking, they should be able to work it out from the rhythm of the language and what is being said. (But don’t rely on it: tell them!) It should be better now.
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Q) Please, more about that cosmic statement?
A) Okay. I know it’s tricky. Perhaps some more examples would help? The ultimate cutting exercise – the novel in a sentence, before it’s even written. (The synopsis is bad enough. In a perfect world one would write the novel before the synopsis, anyway. I once lost a publisher because the novel I submitted had nothing to do with the synopsis and they’d already done the jacket drawing. They were ever so cross. So was I. The world is not perfect.)
By a ‘cosmic statement’ I mean a sentence that sums up some universal truth, and applies to what you mean to write about. It also suggests the presence, otherwise unspoken, of an all-knowing writer whom the reader can safely trust to be interesting and thoughtful. It can be light and ironic or sombre and philosophical. It will set the tone and ensure you keep to the point for the whole book, so your last few pages are not so very different from the first.
Some writers manage to get the elusive sentence into their first line, and can then spend the next 80,000 words happily developing the theme, going back at moments of doubt – which always come – to that first sentence to be reminded of what their novel is about in the first place.
Take as examples these famous beginnings, cosmic sentences, statements of the writer’s intent.
‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
‘All this happened, more or less.’
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.’
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
And then proceed to write on, as this lot did. But these particular hints are for writers of literary novels: those in which the writer’s ambition is more than just to make money, not just to entertain but to offer up an opinion as to the nature of the universe and the people in it. You can get to it young – Jane Austen wrote her Pride and Prejudice first line when she was twenty-two, an age when she wouldn’t have had much experience of life, but at least she knew her own family. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina’s opening when he was fifty and had form in wretched marriages (I think he was wrong about them, but never mind). All of the first lines listed above come from what I would call opinionated writers. I would not call Dan Brown an opinionated writer, just a very, very successful one.
‘Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery,’ is the Da Vinci Code’s opening sentence, thus breaking every possible rule, but he does cut to the chase, getting into fourteen words what many another writer would take as many sentences to achieve.
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Q) I’m lost for a subject. Please help?
A) If you know you want to write a novel and still have no knowledge of what you want to write it about – it can happen – you could do worse than look up Latin tags on the internet. Latin tags – usually phrases written by ancient Romans, and used by well-educated generations of Europeans for centuries since – were known to contain the concentrated wisdom of the ages, and they are more than likely to still apply to us today. Great civilisations rise and fall; human nature does not change. A Latin tag can be a good way of getting to your cosmic statement, on which you are to base the entirety of your novel. Here are a few examples:
Exitus probat acta – ‘The end justifies the means.’ A mystery, perhaps, about a jealous elder sister who sleeps with her brother-in-law out of malice, only to discover the younger sister is even wickeder than she is. Title: A Justified Girl, bearing in mind how popular titles with ‘girl’ in them currently are on Amazon.
Video et taceo – Elizabeth I’s motto: ‘I see but stay silent.’ A CIA thriller perhaps, the fate of the man who sees too much. Title: The Witness.
Ovid’s Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor – ‘I see the better way, but I follow the worse.’ An inveterate gambler marries an alcoholic – a moral tale. Title: My Life in a Country and Western Song.
Eheu fugaces labuntur anni – ‘Alas, the fleeting years slip away.’ Title: Remembrance of Things Past.
Fallaces sunt rerum species – ‘Appearances are deceptive.’ People pretend to be what they are not. Title: Gone Girl.
Fiat justitia ruat coelum – ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ A paranoiac detective follows a charming criminal. Title: Let’s Get Out of Here.
Other sentiments that might inspire you, cosmic statements all:
Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus – ‘We are slaves of the law so we can be free.’
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis – ‘All things change, and we change with them.’
Pessimum genus inimicorum laudantes – ‘Flatterers are the worst type of enemy.’
Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris – ‘It is human nature to hate a person whom you have injured.’
Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas – ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’
Struit insidias lacrimis cum femina plorat – ‘When a woman weeps, you can be sure she is plotting.’
And so forth and so on. If all else fails, go to your local newspaper, find a story which fascinates you, attach a Latin tag, and see how the story can be first universalised, then novelised. Hardy worked from press cuttings for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Flaubert for Madame Bovary; don’t be sniffy.
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Q) How do you yourself set about writing a novel?
A) The beginning of a pure, non-meta novel is always the most difficult, a once a year event for me. The first three months is spent in guilty idleness, the next three months with a lot of unconscious rumblings, three months or so of speculation and no actual writing, then panic and necessity set in and I write the title first (which, like the cosmic statement, I will have decided upon at some time in the last six months) and then the novel itself.
‘What’s your next book about?’ someone will have asked me, and I will have had to answer, or ‘What’s it called?’ and I have time to work it out, though often, like naming characters, it comes on the instant.
I have learned to write my own first page six, seven or more times, changing tenses, voices and mood each time until I arrive at the version in which all the ingredients seem to meld together properly and the novel seems simple and obvious and something I look forward to writing. I will have come to various decisions over the last months (well, put it more truthfully, they have been flickering and flittering through my mind for ages, but if it helps you, use this as a check list):
♦How am I best going to deliver this story, make my point, persuade others to my point of view?
♦Do I know more or less what and who I am writing about?
♦Would this work best as a Dear Reader novel (in which I as the writer show my presence, talk to the reader conversationally, seemingly taking them into my confidence), and if it would, to what extent will the ‘I’ be fictional or my real self?
♦Do I have the stamina, and does the story have enough depth, to sustain a third-person omniscient narrator – who has to make moral judgements? Or should I keep out of it and just tell the story out of a character’s head? Or more than one head to make it easier? How many heads can I get away with?
♦Out of whose eyes, and how many, do I intend to look?
♦Is enough going to be happening to get away with the present tense: or perhaps anyway I need the objectivity which comes with third-person past tense.
♦How do I envisage my reader: looking at an e-book or turning pages?
♦Am I taking this lightly or dead seriously?
♦Do I know more or less how it is going to end, because the end must be closely linked with the beginning?
Only when I have briefed myself properly on what and how I intend to write will I carry on – referring to my first page from time to time to reassure myself I am still on track. It will be my bible. I may tell myself and others I make it up as I go along, and have the sensation that the novel unfolds before me – but most of the work, I realise, consists in getting the first page right. And it can take a couple of days of conscious thought or a few months of unconscious brooding. Make it up as you go along, but know what you are doing before you begin.
I tell you this story as a warning. Once, back in the eighties, I had a brilliant what-if idea. It was about cloning and its reverse: one shared personality spread out between too many bodies, or too many personalities crammed into one body. I had ’flu at the time, but not, alas, badly enough to stop me covering sheets of paper with words – in those days handwritten. I posted off the idea in four different directions – novel, stage, TV and radio. All were commissioned. It was four whole years by the time I’d worked through to the end of all of them. All those middles waiting to be found, all those conclusions waiting to be reached, ingenuity stretched to its furthest limits. Aarrgghh…