Novel Pro

The literary agent Donald Maass has written: “The number one mistake I see in manuscript submissions is a failure to put the main conflict in place quickly enough; In fact, it is the primary reason I reject over 90 percent of the material I receive. Why do so many writers fail on this point? It is such a simple flaw to fix!”

All novels have a goal statement and a subsequent story question. The goal statement sets out what the protagonist wants. It is the one big question of the novel. For example: I want revenge (The Count of Monte Cristo). I want to escape to my home (Cold Mountain). I want to reclaim my honor (Lord Jim). I want to find my way (I am Charlotte Simmons). I want to find the killer (most all detective fiction). I want to find romance (most all romance novels.) Good fiction is goal motivated. When the writer makes clear the story goal—often by the hero saying it or thinking it—your reader grabs onto that stated goal.

The goal statement is turned into a story question. “Will he get revenge?’” is the story question for The Count of Monte Cristo. “Will he get home?” is the story question for Cold Mountain. “Will he reclaim his honor?” is the story question for Lord Jim. Will the protagonist find happiness? Will the treasure be found? Will the battle be won? Will the doctors find a cure in time? Will he get her to love him?

The story question is the main source of structural tension in a novel. It is the “main conflict” that Donald Maass talks about. This tension needs to be in place early. Readers want to know the story question right away, and successful novels make the story question clear early in the novel. This story question looms over the entire novel—providing the main source of tension—and is answered at the end of the novel, in the story’s climax.
If in the early pages of the novel, if the protagonist’s goal is unclear, then the story question is unclear, and so main source of structural tension in the novel isn’t yet in place. This tension should be evident—the tension caused by the story goal and question– early in the novel.

Let the reader know earlier what your protagonist wants. If in your thinking about the plot, she doesn’t have a clear goal, then consider inventing one, and making it clear to the reader early in the story, within a few pages of the novel’s beginning. It is critical that the story goal be made clear early in the novel.

Here’s a wonderful dangling modifier from today’s New York Post online:

Sobbing uncontrollably as an Italian judge read the verdict, an appeals court threw out Amanda Knox’s murder conviction today and ordered her freed immediately.

As written the appeals court is sobbing uncontrollably.  The court is human, but they should show some dignity.

Nothing braces us to continue than to hear about a writer who overcame rejection to go on to success.  The Wall Street Journal reports that Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help was turned down by sixty literary agents.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg writes about how technology is affecting the book business:

“As bookstores disappear across America, some small operators are pursuing a novel survival strategy: The bookless bookshelf.

“Their vision was aided Thursday by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. which said it would make about 5,000 current paperbacks available to bookstores through On Demand Books LLC’s Espresso Book Machine.  The desk-sized device can custom print a book in just a few minutes.  That means even if a physical copy is not in stock, it’s still available almost immediately. . . .

“The hope is that the surviving bookstores will be able to boost revenue by selling titles that they might not have in stock. . . .

“It’s unclear whether other publishers will follow but the move represents a potential boost for retailers with limited shelf space competing with online retailers such as Amazone.com Inc., which offers millions of pirnt and digital books. . . .

“HarperCollins estimates 25% to 80% of its trade paperback titles aren’t available in bookstores because of space considerations. . . .

“Although On Demand Books once hoped to have more than 500 machines in use by the end of 2009, they have been slow to catche on.  Today there are 23 installed in the U.S., with another 30 sold and scheduled for installation . . . .

“One leading publisher who asked not to be identified said his company is unlikely to make more titles available, in part because they are concerned that bookstores with the machines might then order fewer titles.  Machines, this person said, don’t help market books. . . .

“In most cases, HarperCollins will receive about 70% of the revenue from an Espresso-printed title, with the retailer taking 30%.”

A reader, Brad, makes these excellent comments about scene placement:

“I have been reading exclusively Louis L’amour short stories this summer and enjoying them thoroughly.  I’m also learning a lot about creating bullies and creating worlds that are out of whack and sorely in need of some frontier justice.  The actions scenes are the payoff in L’amour stories:  the shootouts and barroom brawls, the shadowy chases through back alleys.  But what I’ve noticed in his storytelling, is that if he goes on too long without some action, the plot goes threadbare and I can see the mechanics of the building of suspense.  So that is where the rule of ten comes in.  I think if you go more than ten pages (let’s call it five for a novella) without some significant action scene: a chase, a fight, a theft, a moment of life thrilling suspense, then you’re going too long.  What doesn’t count:  introducing a new character, interesting back story, setup of suspense or injustice, the discovery of a new place or item.  Those don’t count, they are the story, but the actions scenes are the critical bits that keep us reading, they are the conflict (as you might say) in absolute form, not metaphorical conflict or dialogue conflict.  In other words the rule of ten, is every ten pages you need a scene that the reader can’t put the book down in the middle of.

In that sense, a novel of some 300 pages will have 20 of these scenes assuming 5 pages per action scene.  Twenty pearls to string that story together, each a close scrape for the hero or accomplice, maybe a few showing the bad guys being bad.  It shouldn’t be too hard to take a completed manuscript and determine if this goal is being met, and if not to fix-it.  The other thing about the rule of ten is that it needs to be followed in that pattern.  You can’t have five back to back action scenes, followed by five back to back non-action scenes, you need the scenes spaced out literally every ten pages.  Less or more ruins the effect, or tempo as you’d call it.

A metaphor and a simile compare one thing to another: her hair was a dark river is a metaphor.  Her hair was like a dark river is a simile.  A strong metaphor or simile creates a fresh and vivid image by the comparison.  Here is Alfred Lord Tennyson in The Eagle:

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

A mixed metaphor is one that jumps to a second comparison inconsistent with the first one, and is often laughable.  Today’s Wall Street Journal has this headline: Penny-Pinching Puts Recovery on Thin Ice.  Here are several more mixed metaphors:

To take arms against a sea of troubles;

The hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.

He stepped up to the plate and grabbed the bull by the horns.

A bird in the hand is worth dodging bullets.

Skulking like a shamed man, the great ship left the harbor, quiet as a mouse.

The negotiator played his cards to the hilt.

He’s a loose cannon who always goes off the deep end.

It was playing with fire in the belly.

Presidential candidates who’ve choked in the clutch often turn out to be plagued by their own doubts – prey, perhaps, to a political law of natural selection.

Sometimes these mixed metaphors spring unbidden onto the page, and the writer doesn’t see them until later editing.  They cause blushing and laughter in equal measure.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kathryn Stockett’s runaway bestseller The Help was turned down by 60 literary agents.  Then a fairly unknown director, Tate Taylor, bought film rights to the unpublished novel, which–after an initial rejection–was picked up by Dreamworks chief executive Stacey Snider and her business partner Steven Spielberg.  The novel now has 3,000,000 copies in print.  The movie will be released Wednesday, August 10.

What’s wrong with these first sentences of a novel?  A critical mistake is here.

Robey lowered the safety bar over the teens’ laps, then closed the Octopus’ cage door.  He stepped around the safety barrier to the controls.  He checked all the pods, sixteen of them on the cross bars, some of them high over his head.  The riders were already whooping. The air smelled of cotton candy.  He moved the control stick forward, the giant gears engaged, and  with a groan the Octopus began its first circle.

He had been working for Interstate Fairgrounds for four weeks, hired right out of Walla Walla State Prison, where he’d served two years for burglary.  He’d been sentenced to four years, but a federal judge had ordered a number of releases due to overcrowding.  Walla Walla was his third prison.  Robey didn’t mind.  It was part of his profession, and the food wasn’t bad.

Here’s the problem.  A novel is most interesting when the reader is in the story “now,”  that is, when events are spooling out in real time as the reader goes from page to page.  This story begins as Robey lowers the safety bar, and continues in the story “now” for the first paragraph.  But the second paragraph is no longer in real time because the events there occurred before the first paragraph.  The second paragraph is called backstory.

If a story begins at noon on February 5, 2012, anything that occurred before that moment is backstory.  Some backstory is usually important for all novels, but here are two cautions:

1) Do not put back at the beginning of the novel.  This is critical for a novel’s success because early backstory—such as that above regarding Robey’s burglary and prison sentences, in the novel’s second paragraph—are prospect killers.  To agents and editors, early backstory signals amateurism.  They think: if the author has made this mistake, there are probably plenty more.  And so the novel is put aside.

2)  Keep backstory short.  It’s usually more interesting to the writer than to the reader  For readers, almost nothing that happened in the past is as interesting as events occurring now.  Readers want to move forward, not look backward.

The urge for new writers to insert too much backstory far too early in their novels is almost overpowering.  The urge should be mightily resisted.

Novelist Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries, Overbite) makes a good point in the Wall Street Journal.  She is speaking of romance in movies, but the same lesson may apply to novels, too:

         For every lighter movies featuring women we have four Die Hards, four Terminators, four Pirates of the Caribbean, three Transformers and two Hangovers.  I have seen all 17 of these films, so I know that the real reason they were so successful isn’t because of the combat, explosions and talking robots.  At the heart of all these massively lucrative franchises is a hero who will do anything to protect (or get home to) the woman he loves.  They’re all romances in disguise.

         Almost all successful novels in all genres feature a romance.  It’s often the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets her back scenario.  The reason we see so much of this is because the market demands it.  Readers want romance in their reading.  If you are writing a novel that doesn’t contain a romance, you may be making a mistake.

Have a desire to write, but can’t choose a topic?  Don’t know where your strengths as a story teller might be?  Nancy Anderson is a career and life consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of the best selling career guide, Work with Passion, How to do What You Love For a Living. Her new book, Work with Passion in Midlife and Beyond, Reach Your Full Potential and Make the Money You Need is available in online and retail bookstores. Nancy’s website is Work with Passion.  Here is her excellent advice regarding what to write.

“My clients have a Niagara of emotions about their families to get off their chests before they can find their passion. This is why I ask them to write an autobiography that begins with the grandparents and parents’ beliefs about money, work and relationships. I also suggest they call their forbearers by their first names, and to think of family members as characters in a novel, rather than as authority figures they worship, hate or fear.

“The idea of a three generational autobiography occurred to me when I was trying to figure out why so many of my clients were unhappy, even after they got a new job, started a business or creative project. Since I’d been trained as a writer before I got into the career consulting business, I knew I had to go back two generations if I wanted to get to the bottom of my clients’ frustration. Taking a literary approach to a career dilemma was a daring idea in 1980, but doing what I was not supposed to do had always served me well, so I plunged into taboo territory.

“I was surprised when one of my clients asked me to write an outline to help him organize his thoughts and feelings about the past. When I read Jack’s autobiography, I realized my questions had surfaced the connection between career dissatisfaction and the fear of authority or, more accurately, Jack’s fear of being an authority, and the envy success provokes.

“Jack failed as a way to ward off criticism and envy from family members, particularly from his father. When Jack was happy and successful he felt guilty, since that did not fit the family script (you can’t be happy if I’m not happy). Self-sabotage turned out to be a pattern in subsequent client autobiographies, a theme that gave birth to my first book, although it would be another four years before Work with Passion was published.

“Writing a book that helped readers solve a problem they could not figure out on their own was an exciting adventure, with many setbacks and delays. The process taught me that we have to do what scares us if we are to fulfill our destiny. Destiny is rarely what we choose consciously, in fact, passion is so scary and so demanding it’s best we not know what we are getting into, otherwise we would not take the first step.

“Many people follow a path blazed by someone else and live unfulfilled lives. Rather than go through the agonizing effort it takes to bring something new into being, they copy others, live through someone else’s passion, or numb feelings with alcohol, food, socializing, and endless conflict with family members.

“The clients of mine who persevere through doubt and fear eventually become the authorities they once envied and feared. By the time they get there, passion has transformed them into individuals who handle others’ criticism and envy with maturity and grace.

“Be assured, whether your desire is to write fiction or non-fiction, if you write about the problem that fascinates you, that will also be the problem that fascinates your readers.”