shalanna

You don't WANT to know how I write a novel.

Do you want to know how a failed songwriter writes songs? Do you want to know how those people on "American Idol" who get mocked and thrown off learned their trade? Didn't think so.

Unless and until I have some success getting someone in New York to publish one of them, they must be considered failures. As it's as tough to write a bad novel as it is a good one (pretty much, it IS just as tough), you might as well go see how the people who are successful do this thing. Four-and-twenty ways, or however many Kipling says there are.

Besides, I've already covered the subject in various posts. You remember. . . .

A character comes to me. I get the first line (which usually stays in the book, often as the first line) and the first scene dissolves in with that character in the spotlight. I start typing*. I typically get twenty to thirty pages, if I'm on a roll (call me butter.) There may be an infodump or some stuff that comes along that won't stay in the scene later, but I keep typing because I'll use it later or I'll need to know it (iceberg stuff.) Then I suddenly know the story, the bones of it, and the character's journey. I know the ending. I type out the ending. The last line sometimes stays the same. It often refers back to the first line or answers the ultimate story question.

* [Or writing in longhand on the back of an envelope. It doesn't matter that much. But typing makes the result more legible, so I typically try to get to my computer or my AlphaSmart or *somebody's* computer. I carry a StickDrive just in case. Anyway, that part doesn't matter to me. I don't usually have any noise on in the background, but I suspect I could do this in an office, or in a coffee shoppe, or wherever, as long as people didn't keep talking to me and trying to interrupt. THAT doesn't work for me. Otherwise, I'm fairly unaware of the outside world while in the flowstate.]

So now I have a goodly number of paragraphs that purport to be the book's opening (or an important scene). It's all about a character who wants something, or has some problem (or is ABOUT to have one), or who is deep in a situation, or who just needs to talk. (If the latter, something's bound to happen soon that'll become the opening scene.)

Then I stop to regroup. If the book speaks to me, I already have what

matociquala calls the "mode"--the voice, the POV, the psychic distance, whether it's funny or dark or both, etc. That comes with the first line and first few paragraphs. By this time, I'm thinking about the foils to my main character. There may be a romantic interest, a spouse, a sister, a parent, children, a boss, a group of friends . . . these other people are players in our masque, as well, and I need to know about them. I sometimes will listen for their voices and will open up a "Scraps" or "Misc" or "Use This" file to hold some of the stuff they say.

I also open a "Deletia" file. I keep the stuff I delete. You never know if you'll want to use it later. Besides, sometimes that first turn of phrase worked better than the revision.

I don't worry about word count, target market, and all that stuff. I just go into the flowstate and write the story.

Sometimes the flow of words slows down. What happens next? Well, if this book is a mystery, I have to stop and do some left-brain plotting. But typically it isn't, and that means I call on the archetypes and the Hero's Journey (Heroine's Wanderings). If you'll look at the list of events in the classic Hero's Journey, you'll see the typical outline of most narrative-based stories. There's also the three-act or five-act structure to look at. (I should cover that in a post sometimes.) What will your character's arc be? He or she must change during the story and in reaction to the events of the story and how they affect him or her. You can often figure out the arc of each character once you know the ending, and from there you can line that up with the events of the Journey.

But that's all very left-brained. Typically, the Girls in the Basement [TM] have been cogitating on this as it percolated through the gray matter, and they've got ideas of their own about this story. It is told to me by my main character, basically. That doesn't mean I always know where we're going.

When in limbo and nothing seems to be happening:

1. Let a new character walk into the scene. That'll make trouble.
2. Scene break! "# # #" covers a multitude of sins. You can always go back later and fix it. Then skip down to whatever it is that you think you know happens next. Or what you want to write next.

If I'm not in the mood to write scenes in sequence, but I think I know the plot, sort of, I'll open an "outline" file and start putting in the events of the book. I also include the emotional landscape of the main character(s) and their backstories and what is happening around them. I can usually identify up to five scenes that I'll need in the book, and at least one of those sounds as if it'll be fun to write, so I could go on and write THAT scene. It could need to be revised later, but it's interesting to jump ahead and write the murder, or the party, or the wedding . . . it keeps your butt in the chair and off the Internet, after all.

But usually I know what's going to happen, and my character starts talking again, so we flow. You can try interviewing your character or doing some freewriting about the events of the book. That'll usually jumpstart you.

Are you familiar with the "scene and sequel" terminology developed by Dwight Swain and championed by his protege Jack Bickham? Basically, it says that first comes a scene--that's action. We don't stop to reminisce, think deeply, have analysis, etc., right then. We may have a line or two stating that we're stunned, that we're in disbelief, that we're getting angry, that we see red, that this guy must be crazy . . . whatever. But we're not having our reaction to the action yet.

That comes next, in sequel. Sequel is the character thinking or having internal monologue that's in response to the events. We give him a breather. The character is thinking, "What just HAPPENED here? Why didn't I slug him? I shoulda said, 'What do you mean by that?'" and so forth. The character thinks about what these events mean and what they'll trigger. The character may plan what to do next. Or the character may do a bit of philosophizing or make a comparison to an event in the past that is pertinent. (Boy, do mine ever do that.)

That's sequel. Be sure that you have action-->reaction. Have the action first, and then let the character take a moment to think about what his or her response to this outrage (or happy event) is or will be. Don't slow down the narrative with a lot of thinkin' about what's happening WHILE it's happening, such as between karate chops or blows with the flyswatter; just hint at the emotional stuff (see "Implication" and "Incluing") and then explain it more during sequel.

Be careful of that "As You Know, Bob" syndrome (also called maid-and-butler dialogue, after Moliere and the way he started most of his plays, such as _The Imaginary Invalid_). But also don't retreat into indirect dialogue too often. ("We discussed the deal, then went our separate ways." That's OK sometimes, but other times it's not enough.) Don't get crazy about it, though, because you're going to call this a first draft. If you do it "wrong" the first time, you get to go back and fix it after your critique group mocks you and six of them circle your typos in red and make fun of any misplaced metaphors. ("If his beard is dressed like Laura Ingalls Wilder, I don't want to know what kind of costume he has on his HAIR!" *derisive laughter*) This is normal.

Some of you organized types will use index cards to write each scene up. (Put down who is in the scene, scene goals of each character, function of the scene in the book, time of day and date or season, who has the most to lose/gain from the events, the major event, or whatever--you'll end up with a stack of portable scene cards. Play Toss and Pick-Up to restructure the book.) Or you'll use Post-It notes on a storyboard like Pooks. Whatever works for you. But I don't really do any of that, not so much. If you gave me a complete outline like that, I could write a book to spec, but the book probably wouldn't be anything like what you intended it to be because I'd give it a spin and it would take on an ironic mode or go out of control. I might make it deadly serious and full of literary allusions to Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, and Herman Wouk, or it could turn into the embarrassingly fey equivalent of Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs" (surely his worst effort ever.) My Muses must be the muses of Comedy and Crazymaking.

But what's driving all of this, for me, is the character or characters who are on the stage or about to appear (working in the background). I may know nothing about the character's appearance at first--whether they're blonde, wear skirts or kilts instead of jeans, like hats, etc., really doesn't mean that much until I know more about them on the inside. Sometimes, though, I'll open the Misc or a new CharactersNotes file and type in a logline about each character. When I come up with an appearance detail, it's good to paste it into that file. (I make these textfiles so they can be opened in Notepad or in Word.) For example, Fred might be "the kind of guy who is effortlessly good-looking and knows it," but he's also "friendly, tolerant, Episcopalian, a software guru, into the Beatles and the Kinks, plays bass, always wanted a Nash Metropolitan car because his dad had one when he was a kid, in love with Jacquidon but doesn't want to ruin friendship." If I come up with background on him ("court ordered him not to use computers for five years in a Kevin Mitnick-style hacking case; has ten outstanding parking tickets from in front of downtown library because he goes down there to distribute bags of Cheetos to the homeless who spend rainy days indoors; has one sister who has a daughter, Sarah, and Sarah is now a student in community college and works part-time in Fred's office at the reception desk"), that goes into this same file. Maybe all I know is "Josh is a redhead and is a Preacher's Kid [PK] in full-on rebellion, and has joined the Green Party as a candidate for city council," but that's quite a lot to make him different from the usual guy.

Names are fairly important, though. Sometimes I'll have a placeholder name, but generally when I meet a character, that character wants to be known by that name. ("You'll know me by no other name."--Joan Baez) I also have ways of not having to write bits that I need to research; you'd see many **ZAMMA** and **RESEARCH THIS** and **SOMETHING HAPPENS HERE** placeholders in a typical first flow draft. I'll go do the research later, when I am stuck and need a break.

Some people base their characters on real-life characters. Sometimes, their friends like that--one of my critique partners says that they're flattered and that people compete to be in her books. Lucky! My family would be lined up around the block with baseball bats to take a turn at me if I actually based people on them, because they'd think it was unflattering even if I made them Mother Teresa-like saints. I have NO idea where my characters come from. God only knows*. "They come from the Archetypes," I tell people, because I once heard that in a Tom Roed workshop and I thought it sounded as likely as anything. But I think it's the Girls in the Basement collecting stuff from the Ether. Sometimes I use a trait of someone I know, but it's never that much like the person I know. I never had a sister, but I've had a number of best friends who were as close as a sister might be (and a cousin who used to be that close to me), and that's where my sister teams in the mysteries come from, I think--wish-fulfillment, the sisters I wish I'd had, and I'm giving them to my main characters. Their banter is a lot of fun to "hear" and write down.

* [But thank God for them--without my characters, there'd be no books.]

Because I have two mystery series, I have a "Jacquidon VS Ari" file that's specific to those books. It's meant to keep me straight about the differences. For example, Jacquidon is the older sister, while Ari is the younger. One is tall, the other short. This is continuity stuff that's good to keep on file if you're going to do a series. Especially in fantasy when you have different cultures!

Once the book is sort of finished, I let it sit for at least two weeks. Then I go back to re-read. I send it (or portions of it) to my beta readers. I revise. I work over passages. I rewrite some more and run the spelling checker to catch typos. I change the names of places and characters sometimes. I take out the really DUMB jokes or lines that don't make sense any more. Then we have a first draft.

And that's how I do it.

But anyway, I'm not going to do the meme because I want you to be successful. Go imitate somebody who's famous and talked-about (talked about in a NICE way, I mean.)
# # #
(See what I mean about the usefulness of a scene break?)

Go read what matociquala, Justine, and jaylake have written on the topic. I've even figured out how to pop those open in new windows so you won't abandon this window. Aren't you proud? Well, you should be.