So You Want to Write a Novel, Part 2

On February 2 I put out the solo podcast episode that was part 1 of this series. If I didn’t anger you or totally discourage you, I’m going solo again to continue my take on “So you want to write a novel.” Today, preparing yourself, your work environment, and your story.

In the first episode in this series, I said a lot of things being truthful about the novel-writing process. Mainly, I wanted to make the point that if you don’t read a lot of novels, starting to write a novel is probably not the best place to start writing a novel. That sounds circular, yes I know. I suggested writing a memoir or a short story, for instance, or even short creative nonfiction.

I am not going to jump into a discussion of plot structure, character development and world building just yet. I want to start with preparing yourself.

1. You need to read a few good books on writing, but not all at once and not necessarily the ones people tell you to, even me. Therein lies the problem. If you haven’t read a lot of fiction, those books can be misleading. So I say, start with the novels you like. You might learn more from a serious reading of those than most of the novel-writing books, and let me tell you there are a lot of them.

Even so, I don’t say read more novels so you can copy them, but so you can find what about them works. I read a lot of fiction by people trying to write fiction, and I can sometimes tell that an emergent novelist is deeply influenced by another writer. And that may be necessary, but what made that more well known author who they are is their own voice. The voice of Toni Morrison is very different from Cormac McCarthy. Not that any of us are at that level or probably will be. You are on a journey to find your voice, which I can define by referring to textbooks and websites. However, I can just call voice “the uniqueness of the writer’s expression, coming from word choice, sentence structure (usually called style), tone, themes, settings, and point of view usage” 

 It’s more than just that William Faulkner has long sentences and Hemingway has short ones. It’s more than what’s on the surface. Is the text essentially one of hope or one of perplexity? Notice I did not say despair as the opposite of hope, although there is some fiction that does seem to get trapped in despair of one kind or another. That's a subject for another podcast. And it’s not just first person point of view vs. third person point of view, but how that POV is used—to distance the writer from the reader, or to allow a larger experience of the setting and plot for the reader.

So let’s step back on those two points: the point of view and the tone. It’s very common for novelists today to use first person. From the very beginning the reader knows it - I is probably in the first sentence. And the tone will be clear—the outlook and mood of the narrator, who is not the author, but a character in the story telling the story. That story might be his/her story or it might be someone else’s. 

In the book I consider the third most important American novel, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, the narrator Jack Burden is not the main character, supposedly—that is the politician Willie Stark—but Jack Burden changes the most. There is a similar connection in The Great Gatsby between the supposed main character and the narrator character, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway.

Sorry ,I don’t want to make this a literature class, but there’s a point here. Even if you don’t want to write those kinds of books, you have to know some of “those kinds of books” to write a good novel if for no other reason than they are used as examples to explain craft. And they are the best, even if unattainable for the beginner. If you prefer Jane Eyre or Jane Austen, there’s probably a reason—those books end happy, and the two I mentioned above don’t. They have darker themes—politics, greed, corruption, and what the so-called American ethos or culture does to one’s identity. 

At the same time, for me to compare them on the basis of “happy ending” is very superficial. Jane Eyre gets her Mr. Rochester, but can she really be happy with a man who deceived her so badly and cruelly? And Jane Austen’s novels are comedies of manners—satires about the social class and convention, and parodies about novel writings—as well as fun love stories. Her last novel is probably the closest to our modern ideas. It is Persuasion, and it is my favorite because the heroine is older, wiser, and more realistic. She doesn’t end up married to wealth and because she is searching for wealth, and the characters are more complex and human.

So back to point of view and tone. Let me read the beginnings of two novels.

One that starts with

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn't? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right."

You will recognize this as the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the top five novels in American lit. It’s obviously first person, with I, our, we, etc. But that’s not the totality of the voice. Harper Lee does not use the words of a six-year-old girl. Apothecary and assuaged and four years my senior are beyond even smart ones, but then she brings up fist-fight. She seems to switch between the vocabulary of a thirty-year-old and a little kid. 

But I think the key line is: When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. Here she shows her hand. She is not remembering the events directly, but she is remembering her memories. Memory isn’t straight—it is reinforced and affected by the memory process and the retelling of stories. Just like the fish gets bigger as the fisherman tells about it.

Another thing about her opening is that there is self-deprecation and irony and mocking in it, even more as she gets into the story of their ancestor, Simon Finch, a very religious man who ignored “his master’s dictum about slavery.”

There are other famous books that begin with first person narration: Call me Ishmael, from Moby Dick, which I haven’t read but I have heard is in the top five as well. I will probably never read it, sorry. Huckleberry Finn, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.” We know a lot immediately from this sentence. David Copperfield starts:  "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night."

These set the whole feel of the book from the very beginning, the mood, the hopefulness/perplexity, the motivational sense of the character. Huck Finn wants to tell a story; David C shows a moral purpose.

I’ll get off this detour, which really isn’t. Even if you prefer to stay away from anything before 1950 or even later, you need to read novels before you start to read books on novel writing.

As to those, be selective and don’t waste your money. You can find a lot of what you need on the internet. I am reluctant to make recommendations. A lot of people say Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and she has a funny voice, but by the time I read it (late 2024) I didn’t need her advice and it seemed old hat to me. Anyway, she grew up the daughter of a writer, and most of us don’t. Save the Cat Writes a Novel oversells itself but it can be helpful; just know that her take on the novels she uses as examples is questionable. She makes them fit her plot pattern, but it’s a pretty useful plot pattern, in general. Plus, the reason behind the title makes no sense to me—leave the cat in the tree, it will come down. There are lots of others and I’m sure there are places on the Internet that will tell you which ones are best.

Anyway, you are going to learn to write by writing.

All this is about preparing yourself. In short, read novels intelligently, even if mostly what you read is James Patterson or David Baldacci.

Then prepare your environment. Here I am a hypocrite. We all think of novelists as having interesting desks. I applaud that concept, but I don’t. I like to write in a comfortable chair, or not. I write where the mood hits me, upright, reclined, standing, at Panera bread, outside,inside. I use a pen, I use a laptop. I do think the pen is more direct from the brain; the laptop is faster and easier to read, as I have atrocious handwriting and literally have lost ideas because I cannot read my scrawl.

I think it’s reasonable to say that most people are productive at writing earlier in the day, OR not. If you can get up at the wonderful hour of 5:00 am. and write before the rest of your household gets up, it’s great. Whatever, you need solitude, and long periods of it. I know folks who can write 15 or 20 minutes every day and produce a novel. I can’t. I need hours to get lost in my book. At my age and after ten novels, I’m not likely to change that.

My advice is you have to find what works for you, but if you are not writing, you are not a writer.  

Folks who write will ask “Are you a pantser or a planner” That is a false dichotomy. There’s going to be both, with some spontaneity and some outlining for everyone. Try both. What you don’t have to do is write your book in order. That’s a huge myth. But for the beginner, you do need an organizational tool. Like the books on novel-writing, there are plenty of people to take your money. There is software and there are post – it notes. Lots of paper will do the same. But you need a system. A novel is too much to not have an organizational system.

There are many things I have not begun to address here—that is for later podcasts. Just remember, the order in which you write is not the order in which the novel will be eventually be read. Because you are going to rewrite and rewrite. Nothing you put down at first is permanent. Nothing is permanent until you publish. Don’t get stuck on anything you write. It can, and probably should, be reconsidered or discarded. My first draft of a novel was 150,000 words, and it was terrible. The published version was 100,000 and not too bad.

Don’t take yourself too seriously at this point. Or ever. You are trying to tell a story, and that is important work, storytelling. It is one of our human essentials. If you lose track of storytelling, you will get into those gray areas of rhetoric and making a point and self-aggrandizement that ruin story and what you are doing.

Be realistic about the sacrifice this will take. If you can pound out a chapter of 1000 words in an afternoon, super. Multiple that time and energy commitment by about 100, and you’ll have the idea, and that’s the first draft, not the final one.

But enjoy it because it’s your world you are bringing out of nothing but your own soul.

I’ll close now.