This Year You Write Your Novel (8 page)

Repetition, as any poet can tell you, is employed to bring attention to the word or phrase being used. Maybe the word has more than one meaning (e.g., “Love” as a name and an emotion). Maybe it echoes a deep emotional state. “Death all around me—Death, with its sightless eyes and mirthless grins; Death, with its silent tales and broken promises; Death, that eternal visitor, who came to my mother and father and theirs and theirs and theirs.”

If you’re going to repeat a word or phrase, have a reason for it. Maybe it’s used to create a mood or to underline deep desire. Maybe your use of repetition will show you something about the story; if not, get rid of it. If the repeated word seems necessary, open a thesaurus and find a synonym. If there is no appropriate equivalent, rewrite the sentence. And if the sentence refuses to be rewritten. . . well, okay, you can use the repetition—but just this once.

descriptions and condensation

Any simple act or situation in life is comprised of hundreds of actions and circumstances. Just look around the room you’re in—the number of chairs, tables, and paintings on the wall; the subject of those paintings; the color of the wall or carpet; the aberrations inside those colors. There might be a fly buzzing overhead or a dead mosquito amid clumps of dust in the corner behind the couch. What is the temperature of the room? How many people are there? Are the ceilings high? Low? Is it a large room? Are there sounds other than the fly in the room? Are there sounds from the outside? The people might be talking. Do you understand them? No? Why not? Is it because they are murmuring or because they are speaking a foreign language? (Maybe you don’t hear as well as you once did.) What kind of clothes are they wearing?

These are more or less objective observations of the place one might be in. But now that person takes an action. Let’s say that he picks up a cup of coffee (by the handle or the body?) and drinks from it. Is the coffee hot? Tepid? Cold?

The character is sitting across from someone, a woman he’s interested in. What is she wearing? How old is she? What is her expression? What irregularities are there in her skin?

You could go on forever. Details are endless, and they will overwhelm your story unless you master them. Even the most interesting acts cannot bear the weight of too much detail.

Let’s say that the man and the woman leave the public hall and go upstairs to the bedroom. They begin to make love. Their progress in this will seem endless if you record every action taken. He puts a hand on her shoulder. She looks away. He touches her forearm and notices a dark cloud out the north-facing window. She caresses his right cheek with the palm of her left hand. They stare into each other’s eyes.. . . Sixteen pages later, they’re getting ready for their second kiss.

Details will devour your story unless you find the words that want saying.

The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character. The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character. (You see—repetition works.) So when the main character, Van, walks into the room, he’s nervous about talking to Rena, the woman he’s interested in. Maybe the fly manifests Van’s anxiety. He notices its lonely buzzing in the big empty space of the ceiling, by the pastoral scenes of the paintings on the wall, and onto the wedding ring, which glints like an amber fog light from his finger.

You might use other details, but here again they should be used only to further story or plot, character development, or the mood of the scene.

The room is warm. Van knows this even though he’s feeling chilled. He knows because of the three beads of sweat on Rena’s forehead. The murmuring of the men sitting two tables away makes Van nervous. He wonders what they’re saying. He tries so hard to make out their words that he misses what Rena has just said.

The awareness of details comes into the novel via the experiences and emotional responses of your characters. Using this as your rule of thumb, you can cut out most extraneous facets in any scene.

But there’s another level of description and condensation that you must be aware of—you should not confuse the reader’s understanding of character responses with overly ornate and ambivalent detail.

Van was irate, angry, furious, out of his mind with rage.

Here the fledgling writer is trying to build a mood by using three different words and one phrase that convey similar meanings. Each word is more powerful than its predecessor until we come upon a six-word saying to cap off the sentence.

The problems with using this kind of language and structure to explain Van’s feeling are threefold. First, the words are at odds with one another. Is Van angry or out of his mind with rage? Is he furious or irate? Second, even if we accept all the words as a buildup to a kind of personified explosion, we still have to wonder at those aspects of the definition of each word that make what is being said a kind of repetition. It’s always best to give the reader one emotional state at a time to deal with.
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The third problem with this description of Van’s fury is the question of who it is that’s giving us the information—even an omniscient narrator wouldn’t be so removed from the character’s heart as to use this objective, albeit strong, language. The description of Van’s anger feels like an out-of-kilter definition rather than a closely felt experience.

So how do we fix this sentence? There are many ways. If the only thing that bothers you is the narrative voice, you might want to change the declarative sentence into a bit of dialogue. Maybe Rena, after seeing Van obliterate that annoying fly with the flat of his hand, tells a friend what she thought Van was feeling. Depending on her character, this sentence might work well. Dialogue can be sloppy, overly elaborate, inarticulate, and many other things that the novel’s narrative voice can never afford to be. If we believe that Rena communicates in this repetitious manner, we will accept the information and move on without question.

We could get rid of all the adjectives and simply show Van smashing the fly and then looking at the remains of the insect with grim satisfaction.

We might have Van say something over the top and inappropriate for this seduction scene.

“I hate that goddamned fly.”

The easiest thing to do is to get rid of the sentence and go on. Maybe his rage or anger or fury is not all that important to the story.

Always try to pare down the language of your novel. Is that word necessary? That sentence, that paragraph, that chapter? Most writers tend to overwrite. They either fall in love with their use of language or want to make sure that the reader understands everything.

But, as we saw above, you can never say everything. There are too many details in reality. Fiction is a collusion between the reader and the novel. If you have brought your characters into the story in such a way that their emotions both color and define their world, you will find that readers will go along with you—creating a much larger world as they do. It won’t be exactly the world you intended them to see, but it will be close enough—sometimes it will be better.

You must investigate each sentence, asking yourself, “Does it make sense? Does it convey the character properly? Does it generate the right mood? Is it too much? Does it get the narrative voice right?”

Every sentence.

Every sentence.

dialogue

How your characters express themselves is just as important as what they say.

“Man walk up to me,” Roger said, “an’ say he know my name. . . I told him he better get on outta here.”

We know a great deal about Roger from just this snippet of dialogue. He’s angry and confrontational. He might be afraid of something, and he identifies himself with a street sensibility. He probably isn’t well educated, but he has a subtle appreciation of language. We understand that Roger’s dialogue has the potential to tell us things he doesn’t say.

“What’s wrong?” Benny asked Minna.

“Nothing.”

“Come on,” he said, coaxing her by touching the side of her hand with a single finger.

“Um. . . #8221;

Here we appreciate an underlying disturbance in Minna. Benny sees it and tells us about it as he questions his friend and reaches out to her. He has seen beneath her subterfuge. It might be that these few words are intended to tell us about the relationship between these two rather than to lead us to some undisclosed personal problem.

Many new writers use dialogue to communicate information such as “My name is Frank. I come from California.” This is the simplest use of dialogue. It’s okay for a job interview or a chance meeting in a bar, but in the novel, dialogue is meant to be working overtime.

Every time characters in your novel speak, they should be: (1) telling us something about themselves; (2) conveying information that may well advance the story line and/or plot; (3) adding to the music or the mood of the scene, story, or novel; (4) giving us a scene from a different POV (especially if the character who is speaking is not connected directly to the narrative voice); and/or (5) giving the novel a pedestrian feel.

Most of these points are self-explanatory. The last two, however, are worth a closer look.

If your novel is written in the first or third person, you have a little extra work to do with those characters who are communicating most directly with the reader. A first-person narrator, for instance, might not be aware of certain aspects of her personality or the effect her presence has on others. The writer wants her to be humble in this way and therefore brings in another character to say what the narrator cannot say (or maybe even know) about herself.

“They all love you,” Leonard told me. “Everybody does. Markham said that the only way they’d let me come was if I brought you along.”

The narrator could deny what Leonard has told her. Later on we will be able to tell if he was right or wrong.

Making the dialogue pedestrian might seem counterproductive to the passionate writer. Here you are, telling us a story of profound feeling in which the main characters are going to experience deeply felt transitions, and I’m asking you for ordinary and prosaic dialogue.

Absolutely.

If you can get the reader to identify with the everydayness of the lives of these characters and
then
bring them—both reader and character—to these rapturous moments, you will have fulfilled the promise of fiction. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence. Dialogue is an essential tool to bring them there.

Among the five points, there isn’t anything all that challenging. I’m sure the new writer will have no difficulty getting a secondary character to interact with the first-person narrator, giving us much-needed information. It’s not that hard to put plot points into someone’s mouth.. . .

The problem is getting three or more of our five rules working at the same time. The problem is making sure that when Leonard is telling us something about the first-person narrator, he’s also telling us something about himself
and
advancing the plot.

“They all love you, not me,” Leonard said. “Markham didn’t care that I stole that money for him. He told me I could get lost if I didn’t bring you with me. You’re the only one him and his crowd want to see.”

Inside this dialogue there is jealousy, hints of self-deprecation, the fact that Leonard is a criminal,
and
the impact that the narrator has on others.

The information in this example might be too blunt. But I’m sure you see what I mean. Dialogue in your novel is not just characters talking. It is sophisticated fiction.

There are many different ways to get people to speak in novels. They can have conversations, write and read letters, and leave messages on answering machines; someone can tell one person something that someone else has said; one character can overhear someone else’s conversation. People shout, whisper, lie, seem to be saying one thing when they’re saying something else.

Dialogue is an endless pleasure, but you have to get it right.

Do not attempt to use slang or dialect unless you are 100 percent sure of the usage. If you get it wrong, it will taint the entire book. In relation to this admonition, remember that “less is more” when you’re dealing with accents, dialect, and colloquial speech.

“Yeah, I seen ’im.”

If you’re sure about this articulation, then use it, but consider completing the idea through explanation rather than dialect.

“Yeah, I seen ’im,” Bobby Figueroa said. Then he told me that Susan’s brother was on the lookout for Johnny Katz.

As they say in boxing, “Protect yourself at all times.” If you aren’t sure about the way someone will say something, then find another way to get at the same idea.

One final note about dialogue: a novel is not a play. Don’t house your entire story in conversations. Don’t try to contain the whole plot in dialogue. As with metaphor, overuse of dialogue can bewilder and distance your reader from the experience of the novel.

a solitary exercise

In your meticulous rewrite, one problem you will be looking for is flatness in the prose.

I went to the store and bought a dozen apples. After that I came home and decided to call Marion. She told me that she was busy and so she couldn’t make it to the dance.

I won’t try to rewrite this flaccid prose for you. I’m sure by this time you can see the various ways that you might approach the revision. So instead I will ask you to take these three sentences and make them into something more.

Consider the character who is speaking, the potential drama behind Marion’s reason for not going to the dance, the missing details, and the misconnections. From this, make the lines into some kind of beginning for a novel. Don’t write more than a page. Pretend that it was written by some writer friend who wants to tell a story but has gotten lost somehow.