This Year You Write Your Novel (2 page)
Don’t let any feeling keep you from writing. Don’t let the world slow you down. Your story is the most important thing coming down the line this year. It’s your year—make the most of it.
avoidance, false starts, and dead-end thinking
Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer’s greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.
Straightforward procrastination is an author’s worst enemy, but there are others: the writer who suddenly has chores that have gone undone for months but that now seem urgent; the diarist who develops a keen wish to write about her experiences today instead of writing her book; the Good Samaritan who realizes that there’s a world out there that needs saving; the jack-of-all-trades who, when he begins one project, imagines ten others that are equally or even more important.
Forget all that. Don’t write in the journal unless you’re writing a chapter of your book. Save the world at 8:30 instead of 7:00. Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls.
For that time you have set aside to write your novel, don’t do anything else. Turn the ringer off on your phone. Don’t answer the doorbell. Tell your loved ones that you cannot be disturbed. And if they cannot bear to live without you, go write in a coffee shop or library. Rent a room if you have to—just make the time to write your book.
a final note about process
The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It’s not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.
The Elements of Fiction
the narrative voice
The voice that tells the story is the first thing the reader encounters. It carries us from the first page to the last. We, the readers, must believe in this narrative voice or, at least, we must feel strongly for that voice and have a definite and consistent opinion about it.
The first words and all the rest you encounter throughout the novel give information, images, and emotions all at once, much the way it happens on that street corner with the guy telling tales.
“Man come outta that burnin’ buildin’,” Joe Feller said, his voice straining and hoarse, “red as a lobster with smoke comin’ out of his clothes.”
This brief snippet of dialogue brings us immediately into an event that we know some things about while suspecting others. There was a building on fire, we are told. There’s a man who was in the fire for some reason. Maybe he was a victim or a hero. It is even possible that he set the fire—we don’t know. But Joe Feller’s voice has authority, and we’re ready to hear him out in order to find out more about this smoking red man.
This is narrative voice. Actually it is more than one voice. There’s the character (Joe Feller) speaking, but there’s another voice (the narrator) telling us what the speaker said and explaining the speaker’s emotional state by describing the strain in his voice.
There are many kinds and styles of narrative voices, and it is imperative that you decide which one you will use to tell your tale. Although there might be thousands of subtle differences in the narratives of the novels you’ve read, there are only three types that you need to be aware of. Actually there are four, but the last one is a voice you should never use: your own.
first-person narrative
The first-person narrative, put simply, is when the “I” voice is telling the story.
I met Josh Sanders on the first day of March 1963. He was a shy man with big hands and an earthy smell about him. He reminded me of my grandfather, whom I hated more than Judas.
We know from the first word that we have an intimate relationship with the narrator of this tale. He, or she, has a name, an age, and a history that we will learn about as we read. This narrator is our conduit to the novel. She might be a college graduate or an illiterate. She may be enchanting, cantankerous, or even untrustworthy. Every bit of information we learn about this narrator helps us understand more of the story being told.
This is the most familiar storytelling voice, the one with which we all naturally relate the stories of our days to those we know. In a first-person narrative, you are stuck with this one voice. Therefore this character, or at least her
point of view (POV),
must be engaging. Her story must evoke strong feelings in us. We are compelled to empathize with her experiences and care about the world she moves through. We have an emotional connection to this narrator, and because of this bond, we want to learn what happens in her story.
Not that every iota of information in the novel must come directly from that voice. Your narrator, let’s call her Sally, will meet people along the way, talk to them, overhear their conversations; she will read letters and newspaper articles; she will have dreams in which important events in her life may be revealed. You could even have Sally read parts of another novel or work of nonfiction that have a completely different narrative voice. There are dozens of ways to break up the narrative even in the first person. But everything flows through the consciousness of this narrator, so you must be true to that voice.
When I say that you must be true to this narrator’s voice, I mean, among other things, that you can’t change her personality to fit the story. She cannot read the minds of other characters; she can know only what she has experienced or learned. And she is limited by her circumstances (e.g., her physical location at any given moment, her education, her situation in life, her emotional state, etc.).
The first-person narrator is the doorway through which all the information of this story will pass; therefore the sense the reader has of this character must never be challenged. You can never undercut her authority. You cannot, for instance, insert a phrase such as “Sally never knew her mother because Nelda Smith had died in childbirth.” Who said that? Not Sally, of course. The writer said it. The writer’s voice has intruded into the story. This will destroy the reader’s faith in the words he or she is reading. The novel careens out of orbit and the story is lost. If you need to convey specific information, Sally must either think it, say it, read it, remember it, or hear someone else talking about it.
This example is extreme, but the writer can make other more subtle and yet equally disastrous intrusions.
Your main character, let’s say, is not very well educated. We know this because of her limited vocabulary, her simple sentence structures, and hints that have been dropped along the way. But somewhere someone asks her a question, to which she answers, “Indubitably, my good sir.” Say what? Who said that? The writer, not the character.
Or perhaps your narrator all of a sudden understands something behind another person’s actions in a way that strains the credulity of the reader. For the whole story up to this point, Sally hasn’t understood anything psychological, but suddenly she thinks, “He seemed to have issues with his mother. I could tell this because he would never look women directly in the eye.” This is perfectly fine to say if the reader believes from the book so far that Sally has this kind of insight into psychological motivations. But if she has not given any indication of having this sort of sensitivity in the first two hundred pages, and then magically manifests this ability, the reader will become confused and the story will miscarry.
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The first-person narrative is a powerful but also very difficult narrative form. It is powerful because you are intimate with the emotions and internal processes of the very real human being telling you the story; it is difficult because the rendering of that character has to be pitch-perfect for the reader to believe in her.
There is also the difficulty of making sure that the first-person narrator is interesting enough to want to listen to for hundreds of pages.
third-person narrative
The third-person narrator is the voice in which we naturally tell stories about things that happened to people other than ourselves. This narrative voice is not a full person. Picture the third-person narrator as a small, emotionless, but intelligent creature sitting on the shoulder of the character who is experiencing the story. This creature perceives events from the perspective of this character and every now and then has glimmers of what this character might be feeling or thinking.
Brent Farley entered the room, looking around for his mother.
Instead he saw Alice Norman standing near the buffet. She noticed him and smiled before he had the opportunity to flee.
“Hello, Alice,” Brent said, holding out his hand.
Her fingers were cold, and so, Brent noticed, were her eyes.
As with the first-person narrative, we are entering the story through the experiences of an individual. But in this case we aren’t so intimate with all the nuances of his character. Instead we are viewing the world through the prism of the intelligent eye perched on Brent’s shoulder, an intelligence without emotional response. It is important that the third-person narrator have a distance from the passions of the novel’s character. If you begin to give this narrative voice a personality, it can confuse the reader, giving them the feeling that they are being told how to feel about and see this world rather than spying on it from behind a one-way mirror.
The cooler third-person narrator allows us to see the world of this novel from a certain impartial remove. This gives a kind of balance to the fiction that permits a reader to more easily suspend their disbelief.
This, I believe, is a steadier voice than the first-person POV. You are given information by an even-tempered voice, which is good. At the same time, in this voice it can be harder to bring out the emotional depth of your characters than in the first person. You can give momentary glimpses into the mind of the shoulder you’re on, but you cannot, as a rule, get deeply into their heart.
One benefit of this form of narrative is that the dispassionate observer can, at times, leap from the shoulder of one character onto that of another.
Let us suppose that the meeting between Brent and Alice did not go very well. At the end of that chapter or section, Brent is left wondering if she suspects him of mishandling her affairs.
At the beginning of the next scene, we find our narrative eye on the shoulder of Alice as she walks down the street in the long, darkening shadows of buildings her family once owned. She meets an old friend, who tells her to watch out for Brent—he’s not in any way a trustworthy man and would take the rest of her dwindling fortune if he could.
“I just ran into him,” Alice said. “He seemed to want to get away from me as soon as possible. As a matter of fact, when I first saw him he was looking my way and I swear I thought he was about to bolt through the door.”
Nareen Padam’s eyes got tight, giving her a contemplative air, as if Alice had posed a riddle.
“Maybe,” dark-eyed Nareen said, “he was worried that you’d figured out one of his schemes against you and your family. Maybe he was afraid you’d make a scene.”
After this meeting, your narrator could jump to Nareen’s shoulder, but I wouldn’t suggest it. The third-person narrator should be picky about the experiences it uses to tell the story.
This form of narration can utilize the POVs of one, two, three, or more characters, but there has to be a reason for each narrative to exist. If your story is formed around a conflict, you should use a POV from each side of that discord. If the novel is about a corporate takeover, you might need eight or nine voices to cover all the subtle sides of the tale.
It is possible to use only one POV to tell your story. Why, you ask, would I use the third-person narrative for only one voice? Why wouldn’t I just use the first-person narrative instead? There might be many valid reasons for this decision. For instance, your character may be a cipher to himself. He’s not a reflective type who goes about articulating what he sees and feels. Or conversely, he might be too expressive and flamboyant and in need of the cool reserve of a slightly removed POV.
Narrative voice is a subtle thing. You have to decide what voice fits your task. But I will tell you that the third-person narrative will probably best serve your first novel—the one you are writing this year. This form is the most flexible and durable.
One more thing you should know about this form:
As I have said, the third-person narrator has
some
of the knowledge of the shoulder he’s on. So when Alice sees Nareen, the narrative voice might be aware of the fondness Alice has for this young woman and might even possess some additional specific knowledge.
Alice ran into Nareen turning the corner at Third and Barton Streets. A feeling of familiar warmth came over her when she saw her old friend. Alice observed that the dark-skinned young woman maintained only the broad facial features of her mother’s Swedish stock. Everything else was inherited from her father, whom Alice had heard was a criminal lawyer from Bombay who migrated to Michigan because his Scandinavian bride wanted him to meet her halfway.
the omniscient narrator
The omniscient narrator is the most powerful and most difficult narrative form. The omniscient narrator knows all. He could tell you the story about Brent and Alice and Nareen, but if he wanted to he could also tell you about what is going on at that moment in Cuba or relate the dialogue between fleas on a rat’s back beneath the street where Nareen and Alice are talking. The omniscient narrator doesn’t need any one person or some emotionless eye on the shoulder to tell the story. It is the all-seeing eye of God.