Appendix E
How to Write a Novel in Two Months

THE MODERN ERA, with its increased interconnectivity between pop culture, genre, and the literary mainstream, has forever scrambled the distinction between low and high art. As a result, it’s become more acceptable for a writer to take on the kinds of gigs that in the past might have weakened a “serious” reputation. In my case, my entry point to combining pop culture with my own vision came when I had the opportunity to write a novel in the Predator universe for Dark Horse Books. Taking on such a project confounded a few of my readers. Some thought that my background in “literary fantasy” meant I couldn’t pull it off. Others thought I just shouldn’t attempt it because of the debased reputation of tie-in novels. The fact is, though, that I accepted the assignment without a second thought for two reasons: (1) I’m a huge fan of the Predator movies and it’s one of the few movie franchises for which I’d already developed a couple of ideas and (2) my friend Brian Evenson, the creative writing director at Brown University, was writing an Aliens novel.

What I didn’t anticipate is that due to a variety of circumstances, including sickness and an unexpected trip to France, I would wind up with a deadline for the novel that seemed to preclude being able to produce anything of quality. The result is that I basically wrote Predator: South China Sea in two months. I had more than six months to work on it, but only spent about eight weeks at the computer and writing longhand.

This may seem like a short time period. That’s because it is a short time period. Some ideas, some novels, require a long gestation period and an equally long time in which to revise, revisit, re-envision. For example, it took a decade to put together the stories that comprise City of Saints & Madmen and eight years to work on Shriek: An Afterword on-and-off. In my twenties, I was known to spend six months on a single short story or novella. Factored into this time span, however, were all of the editing, publishing, nonfiction, and hours spent at a full-time job. You would also have to factor in that as a writer in your twenties and, to some extent your thirties, you are still getting comfortable with your writing. You don’t know how to do a lot of things and so some of your time is spent puzzling out how the pieces fit together, how this or that technique works, why this doesn’t, etc.

Now that I don’t have a full-time job and am over forty, two things have happened: (1) I can put more of the full force of my attention into a novel or short story more intensely over a short period of time and (2) I’m much more relaxed and as a result my rough drafts tend to be more complete than in the past; I still do a ton of rewriting, revision, and line editing, but I find that more of the initial vision in my head is in the draft right away.

These factors helped in writing a novel so quickly (for me). However, there were other little tricks and factors that allowed me to work this fast without sacrificing quality. (From the enthusiastic reaction to the novel, it would appear I’ve written something sea-worthy, but, of course, you can judge the results for yourself.)

So, here’s what I’ve learned. With the caveat that…I don’t know how Star Wars and Star Trek writers do it, because they have huge bibles of information to absorb while all I had was three sheets of info on the Predator, prior Predator novel tie-ins to read, and the two Predator movies. For this reason, what I learned really has less to do with writing a tie-in novel than just with having to quickly writing any novel while trying to make sure the quality control is still there.

Support

Before you can even entertain the idea of writing a novel in two months, you need to have adequate support. Support constitutes a form of strategic planning. Here are just a few elements that go into such planning.

ALLOCATE ENOUGH TIME DURING THE TWO MONTHS TO MAKE YOUR GOAL POSSIBLE. If you cannot find six to eight hours in a day to write, you may need to set yourself a different goal. If you can only find four hours a day to write, set a goal of four months and stick to that goal as strictly as if you were writing the novel in two months.

MAKE SURE YOUR PARTNER IS WILLING TO GIVE YOU THEIR FULL SUPPORT. My wife Ann made the experience of writing this novel an easy one. I rarely left the house and she did a lot of things I usually do for the household. I can’t thank her enough for that, and I still owe her some kind of reciprocal sacrifice.

ACQUIRE CONTACTS THAT YOU CAN USE FOR SPECIALIST INFORMATION SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO RESEARCH. This ranges from small stuff to huge stuff. For example, Dave Larsen (DAVIDLARSEN.COM) was my guns and heavy artillery guy, and he came through in a big way. I think his expertise probably saved me twenty to forty hours of work. In addition, because he’s fired guns before and also has made knives, he gave me invaluable personal experience that enhanced the reality of the novel. However, I also had sources for information on a small scale. The Australian writer K. J. Bishop was able to give me information on the rough parts of Bangkok. Russian immigrant Ekaterina Sedia was able to find just the right Russian word for “freedom,” which led in turn to a character coming to life that had not been as fully-fleshed out before that intervention.

MAKE SOUND LIFESTYLE CHOICES. I have to admit I exercised less and drank more during the two months than is normal for me. However, I still managed to do two-hour weightlifting sessions at least three times a week and limited the drinking to a couple of drinks a day. Eating healthy also helped keep my energy level up. This is important, because you’re doing a lot more typing and longhand writing per day than you normally would, and you have to make it count for more, as well. You can easily find your body beginning to break down — wrist sore, shoulders and back aching.

MAKE SOUND PROCESS DECISIONS. Most of the time, I wrote new scenes in the mornings, revised existing scenes in the afternoons, and spent my evenings on line-edits and rewrites of individual paragraphs here and there. By structuring my time this way, I made better progress than if I’d just focused on doing new scenes all day until the novel was done. By the time I’d finished writing the new scenes, most everything up to that point had already been through a second or even third revision.

HAVE A GOOD GROUP OF FIRST READERS WILLING TO READ THE NOVEL IN PIECES OR IN COMPLETED DRAFT FORM. These readers should be a mix of people who usually read the kind of novel you’re writing and people who don’t. They should not all be fellow writers. A good percentage of them should be pure readers, because you are not really looking for the kinds of things a writer may be more invested in than a reader.

Writing-Related

Here’s the scenario for my novel:

On a remote South China Sea island, a hunt is going on…but not the hunt the participants expected. Ex-Khmer Rouge Colonel and lodge owner Rath Preap knows something odd is happening — security fences have been cut and big game animals run amok, surveillance cameras reduced to white snow, members of his small private army disappearing…Is it a demon or one of his own men?

The hunters…

John Gustat, billionaire entrepreneur, haunted by a secret and the owner of a mysterious black box. Nikolai and Marikova, supposedly part of the new class of wealthy Russian oil aristocracy, but a little too proficient with a knife and a sniper’s rifle. A Romanian ex-professional wrestler turned mobster who knows Gustat is hiding something. A South African arms dealer. A Washington D.C. liquor baron. And a Thai pirate captain out to avenge the murder of her sister…

Full-on battles in old temple ruins. Deadly African crocodiles. A secret Thai military base. A strange alien virus. Double crosses and last stands. Love and death in the tropics.

Something is beginning to hunt the hunters. Something that has endured a thousand battles on a hundred worlds. Something entirely too familiar to the mysterious John Gustat…

That description masks an underlying strangeness in the novel, but at least gives you the general context. My task in setting down to the actual writing was to play on the tropes of traditional thriller/adventure fiction while adding my own unique point of view. I was not attempting to create something completely new, but to renovate an existing genre. On a general level, this also helped in speeding up the writing process as I was able to rely on the shorthand of the genre’s conventions — and then play off of them at will.

The completed novel was 85,000 words. In the two-month period I wrote several drafts of every scene. Here are the specific writing decisions I made that allowed me to finish the novel in such a short time without sacrificing quality.

CREATE A STRUCTURE THAT WILL ALLOW YOU FLEXIBILITY BUT ALSO MAKE SURE YOU DON’T LOSE FOCUS. Your initial synopsis should be detailed enough that you can divide it into chapters when you start the actual writing, and, if possible, make sure that you have a one- or two-line description of the action for a particular chapter or scene. Know going into the writing for a week exactly what each scene is supposed to do and why. If you know that, you will find it is still possible to be highly creative and surprise yourself in the individual scenes. If you don’t know that, you will spend most of your creative energy just trying to figure out what general action should be occurring in a particular scene. You may find the purpose and action of a scene changing as a result of other decisions you make, but it’s easier to manage such changes within an established structure.

MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT KIND OF NOVEL YOU’RE WRITING. I know this sounds basic, but be able to create a mission statement along the lines of “I’m writing a relatively fast-paced action-adventure story with a subplot involving espionage and a tragic love relationship.” You may vary from that description, but being able to on the macro level tell yourself what it is you’re trying to do is very useful. You’ll note my example did not read “I’m writing a multi-generational saga about a powerful crime family.” There are some kinds of novels you cannot write in two months.

MAKE SURE YOU ARE USING A RELATIVELY TRANSPARENT STYLE. I don’t believe it’s possible to write a good novel in this limited amount of time if you’re using a more baroque, layered style (and by that, I mean styles like those used by writers like Vladimir Nabokov or Isabelle Allende). This doesn’t mean that you can’t have complexity of character and complexity of style, but it has to be a more invisible complexity. Good examples of invisible complexity include Lawrence Block and Ken Bruen. The layering process, otherwise, will take too much time. In this case, writing a Predator novel, this would’ve been my approach anyway. Note that less layering usually means less subtext, but you can make up for that in the pacing, and by leveraging the hidden motivations and conflicts of the characters in different ways.

BASE AT LEAST SOME OF YOUR MAIN CHARACTERS ON PEOPLE YOU KNOW AND REALLY LIKE, BUT NOT PEOPLE YOU HAVE SPENT A LOT OF TIME WITH. I know this advice may sound paradoxical, but it turned out to be a very effective way for me to generate depth of character. It was almost like having some of the work done for me, but not all of it. The character “Horia Ursu” — named after my Romanian editor — provides a good example of this effect. Horia is a dear, dear friend who I correspond with via email and who my wife and I have met twice. We have spent perhaps a total of seven days together. I feel very close to him, I admire him greatly, but I don’t know him in the way I know Eric Schaller, for example, who illustrated City of Saints & Madmen. I’ve known Eric for more than a decade and we’ve spent a lot more time together. I could never use “Eric Schaller” as a name to animate a character quickly because I know too many details about his life. With Horia, there is a space there, a lack of knowledge, that allowed me to create a very entertaining character in the novel by riffing off of what I did know and then filling in and making up details. I used this technique with at least three characters in the novel and it worked extremely well. Usually, thinking about character would take a lot more than two months — it, along with structure, would be the biggest impediments to finishing a novel in such a short time. But, with the help of these real people who are my friends, by literally invoking them through using their names, I was able to find an effective shortcut.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO USE SEVERAL VIEWPOINT CHARACTERS. The quickest way to create drama in a scene is to make sure that the character with the most at stake is the viewpoint character. Early on, I had a very rigid view of this — I was going to have two or three viewpoint characters, and I would rotate them in a strict sequence. It soon became clear this would not work if I wanted to finish the novel within the allotted time. So I switched to the idea of shorter chapters, with several viewpoints threaded through the novel. Each time, the viewpoint was of the character with the greatest stake in the scene in some way. This is especially true in the last half of the novel, which rises to a crescendo of action. To avoid making the novel seem too fragmented, I anchored the novel with a simple formula: the longest chapters were all from the viewpoints of major characters. The effect is simple: it takes less time to write a scene because you already are in the head of someone who wants or needs something from what’s going on. Then it’s just a matter of making sure you have enough subplot and enough overarching plot (in terms of character scheming) that this approach doesn’t begin to seem repetitive.

CREATE TENSION BY CUTTING SCENES IN HALF. Every scene has a point of greatest dramatic potential, and every scene then falls away from that moment. In most novels, the writer decides where to cut away from a scene depending on what kind of effect he or she wants to create, within the greater context of the entire novel. Where you cut a scene also largely determines the pacing of the novel. But there is another way to actually create tension: cut the scene at a moment of confrontation, or right before a confrontation, and either leave the rest of the scene unwritten or provide it to the reader after another scene with other characters. Although this may seem artificial, it is less artificial than writing your way to a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter (as is the case with a popular but extremely manipulative novel like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). The advantage of using the approach is that it automatically creates tension because the reader wants to know what happens next, and can heighten the tension in almost any scenario. In writing the rough draft of my Predator novel, some scenes naturally ended at a moment of tension. If they didn’t, or seemed sluggish, I would cut them in one or two places and thread them through other narratives. In some cases after cutting apart scenes in this way I realized I didn’t even need the second half of the scene. Overall, this technique established a protocol for structural edits that meant I didn’t have to analyze each unique situation, which saved me time. When I cut a scene in half, it also allowed me to come back into the second part of the scene in the viewpoint of another character, which solved other potential problems.

REUSE ELEMENTS OF THE SAME SETTING. Managing your settings in any novel can be difficult — figuring out how to provide the right level of detail, for example. How much information do you give for a setting you only use once? In the case of my Predator novel, I decided to use an island setting because it meant I could describe the island once and then any time I wrote that the characters were, for example, near the ruined temple complex, readers would be anchored without me having to provide additional description. Although this meant that the beginning of my novel is slower because of fleshing out the setting, it also means I had fewer constraints later on than if I’d set my novel in several different locations.

MAKE SURE ANY EXOTIC SETTINGS ALLOW YOU TO FIND PARALLELS IN YOUR OWN IMMEDIATE SURROUNDINGS OR “IF YOU’RE GOING TO CHEAT, MAKE SURE MOST READERS WON’T NOTICE.” I didn’t do much research on South China Sea islands for the novel. I just made sure the island had a semitropical climate like Florida and then I riffed off of the Florida landscape, with a few altered details. Since I hike a lot in the wilderness of North Florida, this allowed me to add some nice description that had a specific, accurate quality to it. As a result, the novel had more authenticity than if I had tried to completely fake a setting. (I do admit that a reader from the South China Sea might find the setting unbelievable.)

DON’T ANIMATE WHAT DOESN’T NEED TO BE ANIMATED. This might apply to any novel, but it’s especially true when you’re under the gun deadlinewise. There’s a lodge in my novel and separate rooms for all of the guests, along with one common room. There are only two scenes in the separate rooms and lots in the common room. So I spent my time detailing the common room and really didn’t describe the other parts of the lodge at all. There was really no point. In a more leisurely kind of novel with a more leisurely time frame, this might’ve been something I’d have liked to explore, but it wasn’t necessary here.

PLAY AGAINST TYPE TO CORRECT A MISTAKE. Dave Larsen pointed out that his Cambodian friend says Cambodians who speak English drop their plurals. I’d already written my Cambodian main character’s dialogue. I was also afraid of making the character sound too much like a caricature, no matter how true Dave’s observation was. So, my character was raised by Western missionaries until he was ten and is proud of the fact he doesn’t drop his plurals when speaking English. Thus, I turned a possible lack of authenticity into a more unique detail, saved time rewriting the lines, and provided additional insight into a main character’s background.

LEAVE ROUGH WHAT SHOULD BE ROUGH ANYWAY. My novel features a few full-on battle scenes at night, inside an old temple complex. After mapping out the general dimensions of the temple, and the general flow of the fighting, I left the actual writing in those scenes a little raw, a little confused, because that’s what war is like; the film equivalent of a handheld camera. You don’t want some elements to be too polished because the prose should mimic the action. However, the other rationale for adopting this approach is that I didn’t have to spend as much time rewriting those sections.

STEAL FROM OTHER, MORE IMMEDIATE MEDIA. Mimicking the examples provided by other creators can help save time, but if you have to quickly steal a technique or idea from another writer you run the risk of not changing it enough when you use it in your book. Although not strictly plagiarism, it does mean you don’t transform the technique or idea enough for it to be effective for you. However, if you steal from other media, the act of placing the technique or idea in another context usually transforms it sufficiently. For a scene involving a fight between the Predator and an opponent, I stole a great idea from an Orson Welles movie. In the movie, Welles starts out showing a battle from overhead, far away, and then gets closer and closer in until the final scenes are so close all you see are arms and swords and blood. Then he cuts away abruptly to the scene from afar, and this time you see the battlefield filled with the bodies of dead men. In applying the mechanics of this scene to a novel, and changing the context further to a scene involving single combat, I made the technique completely new, and also added value and depth to the scene without having to spend a lot of time on it.

Conclusions

Although I had to write a novel in two months, I don’t actually recommend doing so if you have the choice. I was successful in my effort, but I could easily not have been — the demands of the novel could have been more complex, unexpected difficulties could have arisen, or my stamina could simply have given out. In fact, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)’s famous novel-in-a-month competition seems crazy to me, in how it condenses the inspiration/thinking-about-it aspect so severely. I, at least, had several months to contemplate my novel before I began to write it.

That said, I don’t regret producing a novel in such an abbreviated span of time. It made me humble. It made me think about audience in a different way, and it taught me techniques I now use in my original, more leisurely fiction.

Another, final, element that animates any such effort is passion. I had a passion for my characters and the situation while I was writing the novel. I welcomed the opportunity to engage with the text each and every day I was working on it. If you plan to write a novel in two months, try to bring that passion with you as well.