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.

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.

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.

Hilary Mantel is a British novelist who has won the Man Booker prize for her novel Wolf Hall.  Here are her ten rules for writing, among the best concise advice to be found:

1. Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.

2.   Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t ­really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

3.   Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.

4.   If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

5.   Be aware that anything that appears before “Chapter One” may be skipped. Don’t put your vital clue there.

6.   First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

7.   Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don’t notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they’re trying too hard to instruct the reader.

8.   Description must work for its place. It can’t be simply ornamental. It ­usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.

9.   If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.

10.   Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules. Except number one: you can’t give your soul to literature if you’re thinking about income tax.

When plotting our novel, an invaluable tool for writers is The Writer’s Journey; Mythic Structure for Writers (3rd ed.) by Christopher Vogler, who says that almost all plots are a journey:

At heart, despite its infinite variety, the hero’s story is always a journey.  A hero leaves her comfortable, ordinary surroundings to venture into a challenging, unfamiliar world.  It may be an outward journey to an actual place; a labyrinth, fores or cave, a strange city or country, a new locale that becomes the arena for her conflict with antagonistic, challengin forces.

But there are as many stories that take the hero on an inward journey, one of the mind, the heart, the spirit.  It any good story the hero grows and changes, making a journey from one way of being to the next; from despair to hope, weakness to strength, folly to wisdom, love to hate, and back again.  It’s these emotional journeys that hook an audience and make a story worth watching.

Vogler says that almost all successful plots involve stages along the hero’s journey:

ACT ONE:

Ordinary World

Call to Adventure

Refusal of the Call

Meeting with the Mentor

Crossing the First Threshold

ACT TWO

Tests, Allies, Enemies

Approach to the Inmost Cave

Ordeal

Reward

ACT THREE

The Road Back

Resurrection

Return with the Elixir

This list makes it sound as if The Writers Journey is designed for fantasy novels.  Not so: these stations on the hero’s journey apply to almost all fiction.  Stories have time-tested plot elements, and Vogler sets them out clearly.   I use the book in my class on novel writing, and strongly recommend it.

One of the best writers on writing is Jack Bickham, and his Scene & Structure (Writer’s Digest Books) is essential for writers who want to improve their craft.  Here is his game plan for writers.  For novelists about to begin their books, it may be the most succinct and important advice to be found:

1.  Consider your story materials as presently imagined.  Look for and identify, in terms of days, weeks or months, that briefer period of time when “the big stuff happens.”  Plan to eliminate virtually everything else.

2.  Think hard about your most major character and what makes him tick – what his self-concept is, and what kind of life he has built to protect and enhance it.  (Make sure that this character is the type who will struggle if threatened.  Wimps won’t form a story goal or strive toward it.)

3.  Identify or create a dramatic situation or event which will present your character (and your reader) with the significant, threatening moment of change.

4.  Plan your plot so that your novel will open with this event.

5.  Decide what intention or goal your most significant character will select to try to fix things after the threatening opening change.  Note what story question this goal will put in the reader’s mind.

6.  Devise the start of a plan formulated by your most significant character as he sets out to make things right again.

7.  Figure out how much later – and where and how – the story question finally will be answered.  You should strive to know this resolution before you start writing.  Granted, the precise time and even the place and details of the outcome may be changed by how your story works out in the first draft.  But – even recognizing that your plans for the resolution may change later – you should have more than a vague idea when you begin. . . .

8.  Plan to make the start and end as close together in time as you can, and still have room for a minimum of 50,000 words of dramatic development.

“The true test of whether you’re a real novelist isn’t that you’re working on a book,” Raymond Obstfeld says.  “It’s that you finished one.”  A plan, setting your time schedule for initiating the phases of your work, will organize and prod us.  It will increase the odds we complete our novels.

Some writers believe the more extensive the plan, the more likely it will aid you in getting started and moving along with your novel.

For others, a detailed plan is too easy to fall behind, and then discard in frustration.  A plan that works well is sparse and flexible, something like this:

Initial plotting: one or two weeks.

Research and further plotting: four to six weeks.

Drafting outline: two to three weeks.

Writing the novel: one page a day [presuming we are employed at other things—a job, school, house and family managing—most of the day], therefore one chapter every two weeks.   Finish the novel at the end of one year after starting the first manuscript word.

Editing completed manuscript: one chapter every day or two: about one month.

Not only will a schedule prompt us to steadily produce words, it will—when the undertaking at times seems overwhelming—offer a liberation date.

Michael Moorcock is a highly-regarded English writer of science fiction and fantasy; winner of the Nebula Award and the Bram Stoker lifetime achievement award.  Here are his rules of writing, courtesy of The Guardian:

1. My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.

2. Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

3. Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.

4. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.

5.  Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.

6. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

7. For a good melodrama study the famous “Lester Dent master plot formula” which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.

8. If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophizing. This helps retain dramatic tension.

9. Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).

10. Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.

George Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for fiction four times, and is a professor at Syracuse University.  Here is his advice on plotting, courtesy of Bomblog:

“Basically: steer towards the rapids. Say we’re writing “Little Red Riding Hood,” and we’ve just typed: “One day, Red’s mother handed her a picnic basket and told her to go see Granny, but not to talk to any strangers along the way.” So—should we have her meet a stranger? Yes. Should that stranger be potentially dangerous, like, say, a wolf? Sounds promising. Should Red engage with the wolf? (What a drag, if, at that point, she takes Mom’s advice and ignores the wolf: story over). Should the wolf she meets be evil, or a gentle, New Age wolf, who gives her some nice poems about daughter/granddaughter relations? Looking at a familiar story like that one, it’s pretty clear: a story is a thing that is full of dozens of crossroads moments, and if we make a habit of first, noticing these, and, second, steering toward the choice that gives off incrementally more power (or light, or heat, or throws open other interesting doors, etc.), this will, over the long haul, make the story more unique, more like itself, more incendiary. (Although even as I type this, I find myself intrigued by the poem-giving wolf. . . . )”