February 3: So you want to write a novel

This is the transcript of my most recent podcast, a solo one by me.  

Welcome to this early February 2025 episode of Dialogues with Creators. Over the last three years I have talked with over fifty fascianting people from all walks of life. On this show, I’m going solo to talk about one of my favorite subject, fiction and fiction writing. Please keep listening for “So you want to write a novel.”

The first thing I want to say is that I feel like I’m something of an expert for three reasons. I have a master’s degree in English—which a lot of folks who even know me well don’t know. Second, I have read a lot of novels over the years. I most recently read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a masterpiece but in its own way raw and brutal. Third, I have published ten novels and ten more planned, with at least four in some draft form. So, I know a little about this subject.

I want to start with the question: why?

1. Not for money.

2. Not for glory.

3. Incredibly time consuming.

4. Do you read novels?

5. They are not movies in a book. Study screenwriting

6. Has to have enough to sustain 60K plus; or 50K, according to English novelist E M Forster. He lived 100 years ago. .

7. Have to know the genres. Do you know what makes something a romance v. literary fiction, detective v cozy?

If I haven’t changed your mind, maybe you should think about it, but not before…..

Can you answer the question, What is a novel?

A novel is a long, fictional narrative. The novel in the modern era usually makes use of a literary prose style. The development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing, and the introduction of cheap paper in the 15th century. Some characteristics are intimacy and literary prose.

Some points here: what is long? At least 50K, we’ll say, although most publishers are going to want more. What I would suggest is shorter chapters, not necessarily shorter books.

What is prose? No poetry, not verse. For hundreds of years “romances” were long stories in verse. We moderns have a totally different view of the length we are willng to put up with in poetry.

Intimacy in this context means it’s a private experience of the reader rather than public. Novels aren’t perfomed in public. You sit in a chair and read them alone, unlike theatre or the ancient listening to epics like Homer’s Odyssey.

And would novels have existed without cheap paper and printing? No. Technology controls art, whether we like it or not. Just look into the history of paint products. Tubes of paint in the 1800s revolutionized painting, took it outdoors. Before that painters had to make their own.

What is fictional?

Typically, the fictionality of a work is publicly expressed, so the audience expects the work to deviate to a greater or lesser degree from the real world rather than presenting, for instance, only factually accurate portrayals or characters who are actual people.[6] Because fiction is generally understood as not adhering to the real world, the themes and context of a work, such as if and how it relates to real-world issues or events, are open to interpretation.[7] Aside from real-world connections, some fictional works may depict characters and events within their own context, entirely separate from the known physical universe: an independent fictional universe. The creative art of constructing such an imaginary world is known as worldbuilding.

I find this fascinating. Speculative fiction—not based on real world—like sci fi or fantasy, still has to adhere to rules the writer creates. The world you build must hold together logically.

I like the world verisimilitude. Modern fiction can’t get too far beyond the world we live in. There is a genre called magical realism, where there is a real world but magical elements intervene so to speak but in a limited way: substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality

I think many people want to write their own stories, but don’t want to reveal too much. I have too suggestions in those cases.

It might be Creative nonfiction. That is telling your story with literary techniques such as dialogue, plot, well drawn characters, but telling the truth. https://creativenonfiction.org/ The most common creative nonfiction is memoir. A memoir is about the author not other people, so you have to choose how much of those other people you include. There are ways to get around it. You can write about one family member as a villain, but what about the rest of your family. Tread carefully. No one wants to read about a total victim anyway, we want to read about overcoming problems.. You can write it for your own healing and then publish it when it won’t hurt people. This becomes a matter of motive. Do you want to write it to help other people, to pay back someone, to draw attention to yourself, or what?

They want to write the story of their families because there are some intersting characters and situations. Good; I would fictionalize it because there has to be a long narrative arc. That means that the character starts one way and goes through circumstances where they have to make choices and those two things together change them. They grow. They are not just a piece of floss that gets tossed around by life.

Or it might be short fiction is what you want to write. 1000, 2000, up to maybe 10K words. Your story is about an incident, a moment. You can play with it. Short fiction is famously something that can be read in one sitting. You can take a family story and write it in a controlled fictional way without having to plan a 70,000 opus.

Another value of short fiction is that you can later use it for a longer work when you are ready to tackle it. I have been writing stories about my husband’s family for years that will eventually make it into a full novel. An example I will give is a story I recently sent to a literary magazine and workshopped with my writers group. My husband tells a story of his grandfather killing a stray dog who wandered onto the property. His grandfather raised fighting cocks and he didn’t want the dog near them. I took that story, put it in the same town my husband spent some of his childhood, changed the names, readjusted the family structure, and turned that into the same basic idea of kids bringing a stray onto their grandfather’s property and the narrator, the oldest child, hearing a gun shot and thinking for years that his grandfather had killed the dog. This bothers him for years and he holds it agianst his grandfather, but ….. well, you’d have to read it. Honestly, I had three endings to the story. My writers group was so upset about the possibility of the dog being shot that I took that into account. The story is really about conclusions we draw and how they control us.

I often say my life is boring, but it’s not. None of our lives are, if we have a fictional, storytelling lens. There are many stories we can tell.

Tell them. A mug I have is “Your story is too beautiful not to tell.” I have a lot of coffee mugs, but that one is just about my favorite.

So, tell your stories. Tell them joyfully and widely. There are lots of ways to tell them. You don’t have to lock yourself into a novel.