HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL
THE FOLLOWING is a synopsis of a lecture I have given dozens of times on how to put a novel together. I always deliver the lecture extemporaneously. It is never the same twice. And when I have tried to write it out, it goes dead at my fingertips. I’ve come to think of it as oral lore, not meant to be fixed on the page. But I have, over the years, managed to write a short summary of the lecture to send out to students when they need their memories refreshed. The disadvantage of this summary is that it is too concise and didactic, a bit of a sketch. It reads like a prescription: Take two of these, and a novel will pop out of you in a week. I wish it were that easy. The advantage of it is that I deal with structures the craft books and the literary critics never tell aspiring writers about. How to construct a point of view. How to construct a subplot. How to think up a theme. How to construct an image pattern. How characters in a novel think. How all these elements relate to one another.
In any case, readers should try to ignore the prescriptive language and imagine, first of all, that I am telling them how to read a novel. Then they should go to a novel they love and try to read it for the structures I have suggested are basic to the writing of novels. The beauty of form is its infinite variability. Experimental novels tend to take some of the structures I talk about and invert them or emphasize them differently than a conventional novel. But the structures remain roughly the same. Some novelists use very little image patterning. Sometimes the subplot gets confined to an amazingly tiny amount of text. Sometimes backfill expands to form a plot parallel to the main plot. Occasionally, an author will invent a device that does the job of, say, a subplot but isn’t exactly a subplot. Tim O’Brien does this in his novel In the Lake of the Woods, where, instead of a subplot, he writes multiple speculative versions of the main plot. Obviously, my model is based on a simplest-case scenario: single character first- or third-person narrative. But the reader won’t have to think too hard to figure out how what I say about point of view plays in a third-person multiple narrative or a first-person reminiscent narrative.
I break down the novel into six major structures: point of view, plot, novel thought, subplot, theme and image patterning. In any actual novel, these structures are intricately folded together to form an organic unity. Teasing them apart for the purpose of discussing them separately in this present context creates an artificial impression of distinctness. Also it is important to realize that a novel is an illusion. A narrative seems to flow through time when, in fact, it is made up of a number of static structures: scenes, events, event sequences, reflective devices, repetitions, all of which are nothing but words fixed on the page. The first time we read a novel we read to experience the flow of time; it is only on rereading the book over and over that we begin to see the static structures that give the illusion of life.

Point of View

Point of view is the mental modus operandi of the person who is telling or experiencing the story—most often this is the protagonist. This mental modus operandi is located in a fairly simple construct involving desire, significant history and language overlay. The writer generally tries to announce the desire, goal or need of the primary character as quickly as possible. The key here is to make this desire concrete and simple. In Anna Karenina , Anna wants to be with Vronsky. In Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Gulley Jimson wants to paint pictures. In Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Jim wants to keep his teaching job. Concrete simplicity at the outset can yield to generalization down the line if only because, with a thematic sentence here and there, any particular desire can be tweaked into standing for all human striving and aspiration. The important thing to remember: The novel is a machine of desire.
Significant history is background material that tells the story of how the main character arrives at the beginning of the novel wanting what he wants. Its significance derives from its relationship to the character’s concrete desire and current situation. History that does not relate directly to this desire is not always helpful. It often makes the narrative turn flabby or worse—boring (the reader yawns, loses concentration). The important thing to remember is that significant history can be kept brief but needs to be repeated (via references, expansions, variations). These repetitions begin to give the novel a rhythm and a memory. Unless you have a really good reason for doing so, make sure that the character is passionately engaged with his desire and current situation. Don’t give someone, say, a job that doesn’t mean anything—a job, social station and life circumstances should connect up with desire in a significant way. Keep things passionate (love, obviously, but don’t forget the negative passions—hatred and anger and fear). Once you have the desire and significant history in place, then you’ll have a fairly clear idea how your character will react as new situations arise—hence the modus operandi idea.
The device of language overlay involves diction, syntax and figurative language: Your character needs to talk and think in terms that reflect his passionate attachment to life (desire and significant history). For example, in my novel Precious the protagonist is a newspaperman; on the first page of the novel, a tavern hides across a street “like an overlooked misprint between jutting office towers.” At another point, the protagonist starts thinking in newspaper headlines. Conversely, it would have been a faux pas to have him start thinking in sailing metaphors. Here is Gulley Jimson, a passionate painter, describing the Thames in The Horse’s Mouth: “Sun all in a blaze. Lost its shape. Tide pouring up from London as bright as bottled ale. Full of bubbles and every bubble flashing its own electric torch. Mist breaking into round fat shapes, china white on Dresden blue. Dutch angels by Rubens della Robbia. Big one on top curled up with her knees to her nose like the little marble woman Dobson did for Courtauld. A beauty.” The diction and figurative language are drawn straight from the heart of the perceiving subject.

Plot

Plot is rather complicated and to discuss it we need to break it down into smaller issues. I like to draw what I call railroad track diagrams (an exercise that can be tried at any point in the writing process—at the beginning or after several drafts). By railroad track diagrams I mean train tracks as they are often represented on maps: a single line with perpendicular crossbars at regular intervals. If you draw this as a semi-circular arch, it brings to mind an “arc of action.” Later, as you develop scenes, events, sequences of events, and/or plot steps you can attach little balloons with text to the perpendicular crossbars and the train track becomes a plot diagram. But start by putting an A at one end andaB at the other. A needs to be a question. Generally this question relates to the concrete desire of the protagonist: Will he get what he wants? It’s very simple. The end of the novel then becomes equally simple. B will be an answer to the question: Yes or no. Answering yes or no doesn’t limit you as to tone or degree of closure. You can immediately add a structural but-construction to shade this simple answer. For example, Bill wants to marry Sue, Bill gets to marry Sue, but he discovers that he is gay and locked in a loveless marriage. In Lucky Jim, Jim wants to keep his job teaching at a third rate English university. By the end of the novel, he has lost his job but found a much better one. In Anna Karenina, Anna wants to be with Vronsky. By the end of the novel, she has gotten her wish, but the reality of life with Vronsky drives her to despair and suicide. In The Horse’s Mouth, Gulley finally gets to paint his masterpiece, but the wall he is painting it on is demolished and he ends up in hospital. But—this is a double but ending—he is happy. In any case, deciding how the question will be answered gives you the general direction of the book.
Next you begin to fill in between A and B with events, plot steps or scenes. (In a novel, scenes don’t always correspond to plot steps—at least to my way of thinking. An event or a plot step might involve a sequence of scenes and summary. I tend to use terms like “plot step” or “event” or “event sequence” so that students don’t jump straight to the idea of “scene.” Part of this is a question of level as well. At a certain level, a novel plot might consist of six large actions—call them events or event sequences or plot steps), but each of these might be broken down into a number of smaller events, sequences of events, plot steps, or scenes, and so on.) Sometimes you have a few events in your head or a collection of characters and an ending. Sometimes you have already have a whole novel draft to work with. In any case, you now begin to fill in those little balloons attached to the railroad tracks in the diagram with notes about events. You try to put them in order, arrange a rough sequence and a climax. Then you keep doing versions of this as you add more events and as you reconstruct events based on certain other structural principles that need to be taken into consideration.
For example, you need to think of the novel as a dramatic action: intention (desire, question)-resistance (conflict)-climax. The key here is to develop a consistent resistance, the force pushing against the achievement of the concrete desire. The novel as a whole will have a dramatic structure (you get to decide where on the railroad diagram you want to put your climax), but each event along the way to the climax needs also to have a dramatic structure which is a smaller version of the larger dramatic structure. The main character will go into each scene or event or plot step wanting something, usually something that will help him attain that concrete goal, and then he encounters resistance. You can think of every scene or event as a win-lose situation and you decide (and this is a decision of tone—light or dark—and a decision of structure—will the character achieve his goal?) how close or how far from winning the character comes in each scene.
Then, finally, you need to construct your sequence of events and scenes so that each leads logically into the next. I say “logically” where a lot of how-to writers say “causally”—both words evade the essential issue. In each scene, you have a situation and a conflict and a win or loss at the end; and at the end of each scene you need to get into the shoes of your primary character and “feel” what he wants to do next. The key here is to realize that what I call ordinary human motivation is the causal factor moving the plot from one event to another. Just keep asking yourself: Given what’s happened and what my character wants, what does he do next (this can be as simple as deciding where he points his feet when he takes his next step)? You then need to test your sequence of events on this what-would-he-do-next? line.
This should give you a fairly solid plot—and, of course, you’ll probably be writing the novel as your produce these successive train track models. It’s important to realize that this kind of experiment with scene and sequence is not exactly an outline. Rather it’s a process of thinking about plot. It’s not the sort of thing one does once and never has to return to again. It’s an evolving project. In every novel I have written, I have found sequences that needed to be re-plotted again and again, either taking out or putting in steps. This is partly because writing is driven by sentences; sentences you write at the beginning of a novel can have drastic effects, even at the level of plot, as the novel develops.

Novel Thought

In connection with plot, creating plot and plot continuity, novelists use what I call novel thought to sew the novel together. Novel thought is very stylized and systematic, unlike real thought. It functions by concentrating on time and motive. Characters are always doing three things:
 
1) Looking back, remembering where they have been and why they have come to where they are. This happens over and over, obsessively, as it were, so that the reader is forever being reminded of character’s past or earlier events in the novel as seen from the character’s perspective as well as the character’s current motivation. For example, here is Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth thinking at the end of a scene in which he has telephoned his old patron Hickson and tried to extract more money from him, this after just being released from jail for harassing the same man. Gulley suffers from what we now call poor impulse control.
In fact, I realized that I had been getting upset. I hadn’t meant to say anything about burning Hickson’s house down. Now, when I say anything like that, about shooting a man or cutting his tripes out, even in a joke, I often get angry with him. And anything like bad temper is bad for me. It spoils my equanimity. It blocks up my imagination. It makes me stupid so that I can’t see straight. But luckily I noticed it in time. Cool off, I said to myself. Don’t get rattled off your centre. Remember that Hickson is an old man. He’s nervous and tired of worry. That’s his trouble, worry. Poor old chap, it’s ruining any happiness he’s got left. He simply don’t know what to do. He sends you to jug and it makes him miserable, and as soon as you come out you start on him again. And he’s afraid that if he gives you any money, you’ll come after him more than ever and fairly worry him to death.
2) Assessing where they are now: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Why is that other character doing what he is doing? What does this look like? What does it remind me of? (Thought is action. Characters don’t necessarily have to be right in their assessments, they just have to be true to themselves in the context of what’s gone before.) Here is Jim Dixon thinking in Lucky Jim. He’s at a dance party with a set of awful phonies, but he is hoping to meet up with a girl who turns out to be his major love interest. He steps outside to wait. Note the run of rhetorical questions, a classic device of novel thought.
Feeling less hot, Dixon heard the band break into a tune he knew and liked; he had the notion that the tune was going to help out this scene and fix it permanently in his memory; he felt romantically excited. But he’d got no business to feel that, had he? What was he doing here, after all? Where was it all going to lead? Whatever it was leading towards, it was certainly leading away from the course his life had been pursuing for the last eight months, and this thought justified his excitement and filled him with reassurance and hope. All positive change was good; standing still, growing to the spot, was always bad. He remembered somebody once showing him a poem which ended something like “Accepting dearth, the shadow of death.” That was right, not “experiencing dearth,” which happened to everybody. The one indispensable answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad. The reason why Prometheus couldn’t get away from his vulture was that he was keen on it, and not the other way around.
3) Looking ahead: Given what’s just happened, what do I want to do next? What plan can I make? What do I think the other character(s) will do next? How will I react to that? Here is Jim Dixon again, planning for a lecture on which his academic career depends.
Avoiding thinking about Margaret, and for some reason not wanting to think about Christine, he found his thoughts turning toward his lecture. Early the previous evening he’d tried working his notes for it up into a script. The first page of notes had yielded a page and three lines of script. At that rate he’d be able to talk for eleven and a half minutes as his notes now stood. Some sort of pabulum for a further forty-eight and a half minutes was evidently required, with perhaps another minute off for being introduced to the audience, another minute for water-drinking, coughing, and page-turning, and nothing for applause or curtain calls. Where was he going to find this supplementary pabulum? The only answer to this question seemed to be . . . Yes, that’s right, where? Ah, wait a minute; he’d get Barclay to find him a book on medieval music. Twenty minutes at least on that, with an apology for “having let my interest run away with me.” Welch would absolutely eat that. He blew bubbles for a moment with the milk in his spoon at the thought of having to transcribe so many hateful facts, then cheered up at the thought of being able to do himself so much good without having to think at all. “It may perhaps be thought,” he muttered to himself, “that the character of an age, a nation, a class, would be but poorly revealed in anything so apparently divorced from ordinary habits of thought as its music, as its musical culture.” He leant forward impressively over the cruet. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
These various kinds of thought, their temporal modes (call them recapitulative, grounding and anticipatory), should be in the text continuously. Characters should always be connecting events in their own heads (so the reader can remember and see the connection). Every chapter, event, plot step or scene should have some memory of or reference to earlier events (that is, every movement forward in the text needs to include a glance back). And every chapter, event, plot step or scene should look ahead, that is, have reference to what’s coming up (in the form of a plan or an expression of desire or fear, etc.). All these references occur in the point-of-view character’s mind, in novel thought.
Over and over in novels you’ll find a pattern. The chapter opens, then there will be a tiny bit of backfill connecting this chapter to the last one, maybe a summary of events or plot steps leading to this point, and a clear sense of what the character plans to get out of the coming scene(s). Then, as the chapter closes, you will find a section of reflection on what has just happened and a moment of decision or planning—Where do I turn next? A novel is always making connections with itself in the form of novel thought; novel thought links events by reminding the reader of what’s already happened in the text, and, crucially, by establishing motivation for what’s to come. (A corollary of this principle is that if you can’t write a piece of novel thought that logically connects one event with the next, then you almost certainly have a plot problem.)
Finally, it’s important to see how novel thought connects with the device of point of view, the narrating consciousness of the novel, or the modus operandi of this narrating consciousness. I talked earlier about point of view in terms of concrete desire, significant history and language overlay. Now add to this the idea that novel thought must be an expression of the point of view complex. It’s important for any novelist to invent a point of view that can perceive the world of the novel adequately. By “adequately,” I mean the point of view needs to be able to filter for the reader all the facets, complications, interrelationships, histories, ironies and nuances the novelist wishes to get across. Many beginning novelists mistakenly limit themselves by faulty invention of point of view, that is, they invent a point of view too stupid or inarticulate or psychologically limited to see the world of the novel properly. Here is Henry James, in his preface to The Golden Bowl, writing about his point of view structure:
The Prince, in the first half of the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out, virtually represents to himself everything that concerns us . . . Having a consciousness highly susceptible of registration, he thus makes us see the things that may most interest us reflected in it . . . and yet after all never a whit to the prejudice of his being just as consistently a foredoomed, entangled, embarrassed agent in the general imbroglio, actor in the given play. The function of the Princess, in the remainder, matches exactly with his; the register of her consciousness is as closely kept—as closely, say, not only as his own, but as that (to cite examples) either of the intelligent but quite unindi-vidualised witness of the destruction of “The Aspern Papers,” or of the all-noting heroine of “The Spoils of Poynton,” highly individualised though highly intelligent; the Princess, in fine, in addition to feeling everything she has to, and to playing her part just in that proportion, duplicates, as it were, her value and becomes a compositional resource, and of the finest order, as well as a value intrinsic.

Subplot

You need to have a clear idea of your plot structure in order to construct an appropriate subplot. A subplot or subplot-like device is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel as opposed to the short story; you need at least one for a novel (of course, there are exceptions, but they are usually very short novels), whereas in short stories you can do without them. In its simplest and most direct form the subplot is another plot, involving another set of characters, weaving through the novel (obviously, characters can and do act on both plot and subplot lines). Sometimes a subplot expands to about the same amount of text as the main plot and becomes a parallel plot.
As I say, you have to know how the main plot works in order to construct the subplot because the subplot has to bear a particular relationship to the main plot: It has to be congruent or antithetical. In Anna Karenina, for example, the plot is about Anna’s adulterous and tragic affair with Vronsk. The subplot, bulked up in terms of the amount of text to a parallel plot, is about Levin’s dutiful and successful marriage. The plot and subplot are opposites (and there is a third plot—the Oblonsky plot, also a story of adultery—which is congruent with the main plot). I know I make this sound a bit geometrical. Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point has his novel-writing character describe it slightly differently: “A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems.”
If the subplot bears the proper relation to the main plot, then you get the resonating or echoing effect that you want. To my mind, this subplot resonance is the key to what we call the “aliveness” of a novel—contrary to popular opinion, which seems to hold that aliveness comes from verisimilitude. Subplot resonance is also one of the ways of giving a novel the sense of being about a world teeming with people, when it will most often be about a small group of characters. In a little essay on King Lear, W. B. Yeats called the effect of subplotting “the emotion of multitude.”
The Shakespearian drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the subplot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one’s body in the firelight . . . Lear’s shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children, and the mind goes on imagining shadows, shadow beyond shadow, till it has pictured the world. In Hamlet, one hardly notices, so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet’s father and the sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed.
Generally, subplots involve a second or third set of characters who are closely related to the main set of characters. Tolstoy, in his letters, said he always used other family members as subplot characters. In Anna Karenina, the main plot is between Anna and Vronsky, the parallel plot is between Levin and Kitty, and the smaller subplot is between Oblonsky (Anna’s brother) and his wife (Kitty’s sister). Anne Tyler also uses family members for subplot characters in her novel The Accidental Tourist (main plot—Macon and the dog trainer; subplot—Macon’s sister and his editor; lesser subplot—Macon’s brothers). But there is also the upstairs-downstairs novel where the plot and subplot are distributed among social classes (Don Quixote is a good example—Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza have parallel plots with divergent outcomes; Tobias Smollett followed Cervantes—see his novel Humphrey Clinker where the contrast is between Squire Bramble and his sister and their servants; a good modern instance is John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman). And a group of friends or schoolmates or army buddies can provide the same opportunities (e.g., Mary McCarthy’s The Group). The advantage of the near relations between characters on plot and subplot lines is that they can interact with and observe one another naturally. This mutual awareness creates opportunities for thematic commentary that cuts both ways.
There is one interesting variation on the subplot that gives some people trouble. This is the structure sometimes called first-person biographical narrative. Examples include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and John le Carre’s The Russia House. In these texts, the first-person narrator (Marlow, Nick Carraway, and George Smiley, respectively) is telling someone else’s story. But in each case, the first-person narrator, the point-of-view character, has a story also, and this story is related to the main plot as a subplot. But there is an interesting element of gradation here. The subplot characters are not as passionately given to their desires as their main plot counterparts, not as driven to extremes. Thus Nick Carraway admires Daisy but will never achieve Gatsby’s fatal obsessiveness (and seems diminished for it); Marlow follows Kurtz into the jungle but his common sense prevents him from falling for the seductions of power (at the end, having flown too close to the sun, Kurtz dies; Marlow almost dies); and while his agent risks his life in Soviet Russia to rescue the woman he loves, George Smiley, safe in England, can’t summon the passion to save his own marriage. The inner story and the outer story resonate with each other because they have similar structures. This element of gradation is a fairly common aspect of the relationship between plot and subplot.
In any case, writing a novel involves weaving back and forth between plot and subplot. You can invent more than one subplot. You can have more or less text devoted to a subplot. You can and should probably have direct contacts between people on the plot and people on the subplot, etc. For learning about subplot, I send people to Tolstoy, or to Wuthering Heights, or to The Accidental Tourist. It’s important when teaching yourself (by reading) how to handle subplots to find the exact points at which main plot text shifts to subplot text and back again. Only in this way will you become aware of the range of variation in the subplot structure.

Theme

I define theme as a general useable statement of the author’s belief about the world and human nature. A theme is useable if it incorporates a statement of human desire and a further statement about how the world works to thwart or interfere with that desire. A phrase like “the conflict between men and women” is not a thematic statement because it doesn’t talk about yearning and resistance. There is a sense in which talking about theme this way always takes me back to Freud and his mythic conception of the struggle between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle. In a sense, every novel, at its thematic base, is the story of a human infant encountering the grim reality of other wills, scarcity, work, choice, loss and evil. Every plot focuses on the disconnect between the self and the world.
There are many ways of arriving at a theme. You can buy one off the rack, which is basically what you do when you choose to write a genre novel. Or you can find something topical in the journalistic sociology of the day. Often authors who do this write novels without ever thinking about theme. But it seems to me the best themes evolve out of deeply held personal beliefs. One generally arrives at theme over a period of time and thought, usually focused on the material the author has chosen to work with, that is, the novel itself. Sometimes theme doesn’t become clear for several drafts. To arrive at your theme (if you’re not lucky enough to figure out what you are doing right away), you need to ask yourself over and over: What does this material illustrate to me about what I believe to be the way the world works? The key here is that you have to arrive at some rock-bottom belief of your own—it doesn’t have to be right, to agree with modern therapeutic or sociological theory or be politically or statistically correct or jibe with what your mother told you when you were three. It just has to be something you believe, rather than something you’ve been taught or told to believe.
You then enunciate your theme in the text of your novel and repeat it over and over—not verbatim but in various forms and from different points of view. Obviously, the plot/subplot structure of the novel gives plenty of opportunity for this in dialogue or in novel thought: characters thinking about their own situations, characters observing and commenting on characters on other plot lines. And obviously, it helps if you have invented a narrating consciousness that is capable of enunciating the theme without sounding out of voice. The passage of novel thought from Lucky Jim quoted above is a fair example of novel thought rising to the level of a thematic statement. Here is a lively thematic moment from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Notice the essential temporal plasticity of novel thought. Henderson is wandering among the tribes of Africa, but part of this moment is remembering and reinterpreting a much earlier scene in the novel with his wife.
I put my fist to my face and looked at the sky, giving a short laugh and thinking, Christ! What a person to meet at this distance from home. Yes, travel is advisable. And, believe me, the world is a mind. Travel is mental travel. I had always suspected this. What we call reality is nothing but pedantry. I need not have had that quarrel with Lily, standing over her in our matrimonial bed and shouting until Ricey took fright and escaped with the child. I proclaimed I was on better terms with the real than she was. Yes, yes, yes. The world of facts is real, all right, and not to be altered. The physical is all there, and it belongs to science. But then there is the noumenal department, and there we create and create and create. As we tread our anxious ways, we think we know what is real. And I was telling the truth to Lily after a fashion. I knew it better, all right, but I knew it because it was mine—filled, flowing, and floating with my resemblances; as hers was with her resemblances. Oh, what a revelation! Truth spoke to me. To me, Henderson!
The general human desire of the theme should be connected clearly with the specific concrete desire of the main character, that is, the concrete desire of the main character (who, in the simplest model, is also the point-of-view character) should be a particular instance of the general desire. The concrete desire defines the plot question that begins the novel and structures its plot arc. The structure of the plot arc is repeated or contrasted in the subplots. In this way, the novel, with its desire, question, plot, thought and subplot(s) in proper relation, will throughout reflect a consistent pattern of ideas or theme. It will have unity, coherence, focus and resonance.

Image Patterning

Now add to this some sense of how image patterning works. An image is something available to sensory apprehension which can be inserted into a piece of writing in the form of words. (The structure I describe also extends to idea patterning—e.g., the ideas of lightness and darkness in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—or word patterning in which the words refer to concepts instead of sensory—e.g., in her novel The Quest for Christa T., Christa Wolf constructs an elaborate pattern based on words such as “measure” and “sickness.”) An image pattern is a pattern of words and/or meanings created by the repetition of an image. The image can be manipulated or “loaded” to extend the pattern by: 1) the addition of a piece of significant history, 2) association and/or juxtaposition, and 3) ramification or “splintering” and “tying-in.” “Splintering” means splitting off some secondary image associated with the main or root image and repeating it as well. “Tying-in” means to write sentences in which you bring the root and the split-off image back together again.
Some authors get very good at this. I’ve managed to bring as many as three and even four patterns back together in the same sentence. For example, on the last page of The Life and Times of Captain N., my character Oskar writes: “Sometimes I dream there are only the Masks. I walk in a Forest of Trees carved with Masks, a Forest of Masks. Then a roaring, gibbering, whirling Wind comes & sweeps them away.” The running patterns are “mask,” “forest,” “whirl,” and “wind.” In my novel Elle, I wrote: “I pack meat in a rolled-up sealskin, along with Itslk’s stone knife, skin drum, lamp and bear statue, a tinder box and Leon’s tennis ball, throw on my feather bags, fasten the bearskin over my shoulders with a couple of bone pins, and strap two tennis racquets to my feet, for the snow is still deep among the trees.” This sentence ties in three major running patterns: bear, tennis ball, tennis racquets, as well as some a couple of lesser ones.
Image patterning gives a novel: 1) a sense of “strangeness” which works against verisimilitude and is a factor in the so-called “poetry” of the piece; 2) an echo effect, a repetitive quality which creates a kind of “story memory,” which, like the structural repetition in subplotting, helps give the reader the sense that the book is a coherent world; 3) a rhythm, and 4) a root that promotes organic unity (the threads connecting the pattern in the text are like the roots of a tree holding the soil together). A boss image is a species or subset of repeating image in which a single overarching image controls the meaning of the story. Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye is a good example of this. Elaine Risley’s cat’s-eye marble is the root image that controls the figurative meaning of the novel. Symbols are simply images that have been loaded with meaning. By loading, again, I mean the process by which a writer adds to and extends the meaning of the bare image. An image which is not repeated and/or loaded is mere incidental description. But in great writing, there is very little that can be classed as mere description. Image patterning, loading and repetition are basic principles in the generation and control of narrative material.
 
For a quick example of how point of view, plot, subplot, theme and image pattern function in a particular work look at my Revolutionary War novel The Life and Times of Captain N. It is constructed by weaving together three parallel plots (a variation of the plot/subplot structure), each with a different point of view: the Loyalist Captain Hendrick Nellis, his son Oskar, and a girl named Mary Hunsacker. The concrete desire of all three is to go home (they have been displaced from their homes by the American Revolution). The question of the novel is: Will they get home? The answer for Hendrick is no, but he’ll build a copy, an imitation home in Canada, which is what he’s doing when he dies. The answer for Oskar is no; he’ll reluctantly end up in Canada after the Revolution. The answer for Mary is that she’s adaptable; she makes a new home for herself among the Mississauga Indians in Canada, but then loses that as well.
The theme of the book is that contact with the Other (race, language, gender) creates a zone of marginality in which the rules by which we identify ourselves become confused—hence, it is a zone of freedom and loss. The natural human reaction is to want to retreat to identity (represented by the concrete image “home”). But there is also part of us that yearns for that zone of confusion, for difference and otherness, for love and freedom. The theme is conveyed through the actions of the characters as the war forces them out of their homes into the inter-zone of the forest where they live among Indians. In their thoughts (novel thought) the characters mull over what’s happened to them and what they plan to do, but the three points of view are quite distinct—each approaches the thematic material from a different angle. Angry at the betrayals of history, Hendrick finds he likes Indians better than his own people and embraces the painful passage into Otherness on his deathbed. Oskar, who wants to be a modern American and writes chatty letters to George Washington, registers panic and discomfort but is the primary narrator, the writer of all the words. And Mary falls in love with the Indian boy who tries to kill her with his death maul; becoming someone new is not so difficult for her. Novel thought also extends into a fourth narrative element, a series of essay fragments entitled “from Oskar’s Book about Indians” which are more or less lengthy aphorisms contrasting white European culture and Native American culture. (Once you understand the basic principles of novel thought, the structure can be expanded in all sorts of ways.)
Finally the theme is also bodied forth in a cluster of images and concepts—border, frontier, margin, translation—that spread throughout the book. The root image pattern of the novel is the Whirlwind Mask, an ancient Iroquois mask which is divided down the middle, one side painted black, the other red. A picture of the mask painted on a rock is the first thing Hendrick sees at the beginning of the novel. He recognizes it immediately as the image of the migraine headaches he suffers which he ties (in novel thought) directly to the multiplicity of languages (the otherness) in his head and the chaos of the war. Everyone in the novel ends up with some version of this split superimposed on his or her face. And the image splinters and ramifies into multiple ongoing lines: whirlwind, whirl, wind, mask, face (the Iroquois word for “death” is “without a face”), shadow, forest (when a character carves a series of masks into living trees), and split, among others.
The final picture of the novel, when all these devices are working together, is an organized unity, a kind of total awareness within the novel itself of its own agenda, its parts, its themes and structures and patterns which are woven back and forth through its fabric.