Tag: how to write a novel

Five lame excuses not to write

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How do you know you’re a writer? Simple. Writers write. They don’t spit out Chapter One on an ambitious weekend and then tell everyone they are writing a book even though they never pick it up again. Writing is all about BIC: butt in chair. Without regular, healthy doses of BIC, you’re not a writer.

Let’s discuss the unacceptable excuses not to write.

I don’t have time.

There are evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks. There’s riding the subway to work. Spend Sundays with family and friends, but make sure your loved ones know Saturdays are off-limits; writing days. Make sacrifices. If you don’t, you’re not a writer.

I don’t have a good writing environment.

You need silence. You need noise. You need a laptop. You need several hours to really get into it. Fill in the blank for whatever you “need” in order to write, but it’s all baloney sandwiches. All you need is pen and paper. Actually, if you were locked in a South American prison without pen and paper, you could probably still find something with which to prick your finger, and you’d have lots of blank wall space to fill up with blood letters. Bottom line, if you’re not writing before you buy an iPad, you’re not going to write after you buy one, either.

I’m not in the right mood.

I’ve got news for you: real writers are almost never in the mood to write. When sitting down to write, I’m accosted with a sudden desire to read a blog post, click on a YouTube video, or watch paint dry, but I must strive past this. It’s like the first swim of the summer. You don’t want to get in the pool – you know it’s going to be too cold; you’d rather just lie out in the sun. But once you swallow your inhibitions and lower yourself in completely, it feels amazing.

I have writer’s block.

Be honest – you sat in front of the computer for fifteen minutes, nothing came out, and now you think you have license to watch the Iron Chef marathon. If you really tried for a couple of hours and still can’t get anything out, try writing something else for a while. Write a scene from later on in the book, work on plot, or consider alternate first sentences. Just get something on paper. More on writer’s block in a later post.

I’m too tired.

Next to not having time, this is my biggest bane. I write 40-50 hours a week at my paying job, maintain this blog in the evenings, and read whenever I can. You probably have a similar schedule – or worse. It takes a lot of energy. But writing or not writing is a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils, because no matter how tired I am, if I don’t write, I will snap at people all weekend and shrivel up like a raisin until the following Saturday.

How to trick your readers into paying attention

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The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak, is one of the greatest books I have ever read. This was a big surprise, because it was published in 2005 by a thirty-something author, and I’m not often impressed by modern literature. But this book belongs among the classics.

What drives me nuts is that even though most people who read it love it, few seem to have a clue why – and thus cannot fully appreciate its awesomeness. Basically, it is a perfect example of one of the finer aspects of Show, Don’t Tell: trick your readers into paying attention.

The classic authors, the ones who evolved storytelling from folk art into fine art, found new ways to describe everyday things. They looked at the world with poet’s eyes and then wrote it in a way that hit their readers in the gut. New authors, however, generally just copy the old ones, and what was once creative has now become cliché.

Here’s an example:

Snow blanketed the ground like a great white sheet. Next to the train line, there was a trail of deep footprints. Trees were coated in ice.

There is nothing wrong with this. The imagery is really good – at least, it was the first time some writer looked at snow and said “hmm, that looks like a blanket.” But how many times have you seen “snow blanketed the ground/mountains/landscape” in a book? Chances are, you’ve seen it so many times, that you glaze over it. Consider instead Zusak’s version:

It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it had pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice.

Notice he uses the same concept as in the first excerpt – he even uses the word “blanket” – but he does it in a new way. He personalizes the simile (“the way you would pull on a sweater”), and compares snow with clothing in an active way that gives inanimate objects a human quality. The globe pulled on a sweater. Footprints sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets.

The plane was still spewing smoke. A black haze poured from the engines. When it crashed, it had made three deep gashes in the earth, and its wings had been ripped from its body.

Again, not bad. Terms like spewing, poured, gashes, and ripped from its body make it interesting. But all that has been done before. Let’s try Zusak:

The plane was still coughing. Smoke was leaking from both its lungs. When it crashed, three deep gashes were made in the earth. Its wings were now sawn-off arms. No more flapping. Not for this metallic little bird.

Notice again the human qualities he gives the plane, even though he goes on to compare it with a bird. Coughing. Lungs. Arms. It’s so strange, you have to slow down to decipher it; you have to pay attention. Which, in turn, makes you feel every word.

Writing this way is hard. You can’t just pour it out – you have to think about it. But it can mean the difference between great writing, and okay writing. I read somewhere that Zusak tried to put one great thing on every page. My advice is to do the same. Also, read The Book Thief.

How to write plot

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“I have a great book idea, but I have no plot.”

I hear this pretty frequently. Most new writers seem to think that plot lines are supposed to spring into their heads fully formed. Then they feel deficient when they come up dry. But plotlines rarely appear out of the blue – and never fully formed. More often an idea is nothing but a world, a character, a single scene, or a mere image. We must take these fragments and grow them into stories.

But how? Yes, some of it still has to be inspiration, and I can’t teach you how to be inspired, but here are some methods that will help:

Image – have nothing but a picture in your head? Don’t fret. C.S. Lewis started out with nothing but a mental picture of a faun carrying an umbrella, and got the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia out of it. Let yourself daydream about the image for a while. Once it has grown into a scene, read below.

Scene – Markus Zusak got the idea for I Am the Messenger when he noticed a 15-minute parking zone outside a bank and wondered what it would be like to be stuck lying on the floor of the bank during a robbery, worrying about a parking fine. So start by writing down everything you know about that scene. Is it a beginning scene, a middle scene, or the climax? Who is there? How did they get there? What will be the result of their actions ?

World – maybe your idea centers on a world that has some interesting little difference from ours (like it’s full of mutant humans with magical powers). How did the world get that way? (Are they mutating due to a nuclear explosion, or are they doing it to themselves intentionally?) What are the social, political, religious ramifications? (Are they suing a power plant? Are they fighting laws against genetic manipulation?) What are the real-life ramifications for an individual person? (Is the psychic teenager ostracized by his parents? Is the housewife fighting crime at night?)

Character – maybe you’ve invented Sherlock Holmes, Sydney Carton, or Margo Roth Spiegelman and this person is begging to have a story written about them. Again, write down everything you know. Pretty, plain, strong, smart, cowardly, kind, mean, funny? What is the most important thing in the world to this character? Maybe it’s his wife, maybe her son, maybe it’s getting into Harvard or on Broadway, or escaping prison. Then, threaten this thing. Take it away and make them rescue it. Endanger it and make them protect it. Entice them to pursue it, and throw obstacles in their path.

Moral – Stop. Rewind. I forbid you from writing a book based on a moral alone. It will come off as salesy, preachy or both. Come up with some other idea, follow the directions above, and if a moral happens to grow naturally out of the story you are already writing, more power to you.

Inspiration Monday

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Per Debra’s suggestion, I’ve decided to post some weekly writing prompts, here forward known as, “Inspiration Monday.” Of course, because I won’t get around to getting the post up until 8 or 9 pm CST Monday, most of you won’t see it until Tuesday. But I digress.

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

No really; I need rules!

If you work better with guidelines: write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

 

The Prompts

Leftover humans*

Our last kiss

When it looked at me, I screamed

I knew I shouldn’t have published that article

The invention of music

 

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post.

Happy writing!

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* Today’s first prompt is brought to you by The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.

Backpacks across the galaxy: how to personalize the epic

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Epic-ness is all well and good, but without a personal touch, it can fall flat. We wouldn’t care whether or not Middle Earth fell to Sauron if we didn’t get to know Frodo and Sam along the way. It’s the little, everyday details that make us care; that show us the relevance of the big picture by connecting it to a close-up of the character(s).

This concept really threw me the first time I read Out of the Silent Planet. A man is on a walking tour in England, when he loses his backpack and is kidnapped by two men who take him to an alien planet. He escapes, and spends the next several chapters living among the locals, learning their language and discovering fascinating things about the universe. Then, on page 96, he gets a chance to look through a telescope at a planet the locals call Thulcandra:

He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing—even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

This last sentence is so amazing it makes me dizzy. From the alienness of another planet, the hugeness of the universe, the awe of seeing Earth from space, the vastness of human history—to the ordinariness of a backpack left on a porch. This is why C.S. Lewis is my favorite writer; he turns my brain inside out.

Douglas Adams does something similar (but much more humorous) in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, when Arthur Dent is falling to his death and suddenly remembers he has a bottle of olive oil in his knapsack—possibly the last piece of the Earth left in the entire universe (this realization enabled him to learn how to fly…but that’s another post).

And I experienced something similar when I was driving home from visiting my grandparents last Christmas. We stopped at a Denny’s, and I happened to notice that the walls at this Denny’s had the exact same texture as the walls at home. And although I hadn’t been gone long enough to miss home, I suddenly got a lump in my stomach and felt homesick.

Moral of the post: the details make it meaningful. The next time you are writing a “big picture” scene, consider making your character notice or remember something that gives you a “close up.”