by Dave Haslett
It’s important to remember that no one is wholly good or wholly bad – except in fairy tales and pantomimes. Your so-called villain might have a decent, fair and genuine reason for not wanting your so-called hero to succeed. Your villain probably regards your hero as the villain of the story. And in many people’s eyes, he might well be.
You might like to list five good points and five bad points about each character. At least three items on each list should be unique to that character. It’s also a good idea to make at least one item the same as another character’s, so they have something in common. If your hero has something important in common with the villain, that could make for a very interesting story. It could even provide you with your plot.
Know your genre
The fastest way to write your novel is to stick to a genre you already know inside out. You need to be familiar with all the character types and stereotypes, conventions, tropes, literary devices and figures of speech that your readers will expect to see. In fact, you ought to know all of this so well that you could write your own guidebook on how to write a novel in that genre.
If you need to check you’ve got everything covered, there are plenty of guides available: books, websites, blogs, podcasts, and more. But if you read that genre widely and avidly, you should know it all already.
Know your plot
You’ll also be able to write your novel faster and more easily if you know your plot inside out. You’ll always know what’s coming up in the scenes that follow the current one. And you’ll be able to work towards the next key plot point: dropping hints, adding extra levels of anticipation and excitement, and so on. If you get everything right at this stage, it could save you weeks of rewriting and editing later. The secret, as we’ve already seen, is to have a great outline before you start writing.
Tried and tested
Hundreds of thousands of authors have written millions of great stories over the last few hundred years. The vast majority of them are long out of copyright and available for you to adapt in any way you wish. You can reuse the same characters, plots, events, locations, dialogue – everything.
Out of copyright means the author has been dead for at least seventy years, and all of his work is now in the public domain.
Is there room for another retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? Yes, of course. But give it a new twist. You could make the characters junior executives in rival advertising agencies that their parents own. Give them modern names, a modern setting, modern dialogue, modern problems, and modern aspirations. Follow the original plot as closely or as loosely as you like. But closer is better: it’s a tried and tested story, and it’s been adapted successfully many times.
Method acting
Get inside your main character’s head – and body – by pretending to be him for a while. As you walk around, see the world as he sees it and feel what he feels. How does it look and feel compared with the way you see it?
Still in character, act out a scene from your story, pacing around the room and speaking his words. You don’t need to have written his words yet; just picture the scene and say what you think he would say in that situation, using his mannerisms and gestures.
You might like to have a voice recorder or video camera running so you can capture this. You can then transcribe the recording – or get someone else to do it for you – and that’s your main character’s dialogue written. It shouldn’t need much editing; if you were properly in character, it should be right first time.
You could try stepping into the villain’s body too. The world should seem different now. (If it doesn’t, you aren’t doing it right.) Think about what you want, and why you don’t want the main character to have it, then speak your words for that scene.
The more characters you can step into like this, the faster and easier your story will be to write. If you do it for every scene, your novel should come together really quickly.
It’s worth taking some acting or improvisation (improv) classes. I can also recommend Konstantin Stanislavsky’s book Building a Character, which is written for actors.
Write about what you know
If you know a lot about something, you can write about it quickly and authoritatively without having to do much research – or anyresearch.
Write about your life, things you’ve seen, things that have happened to you, people you’ve known, places you’ve lived and visited, the experience and knowledge you’ve gained through your work, hobbies, and so on.
Use what you’ve read in books, magazines and newspapers. If you can still remember something from several years ago, it must be interesting enough to write about now.
If you’re writing about a time or place that has a strong emotional attachment, remember how you felt and try to recapture the atmosphere and mood.
If you do this in conjunction with the brainstorming and Mind Mapping techniques from Chapter 5, you’ll soon have a mass of ideas for your book.
Let it grow
You should always let your story grow for a while – preferably for several months. Once you’ve had the initial idea, leave it to mature in the back of your mind. Make a note of any new ideas, articles, blog posts and relevant news items as you come across them.
In the meantime, write some of the other books you’ve been planning and thinking about for a while. You probably have a few.
When you’re ready to start work on your new story – after it’s been churning in your mind for several months – everything should fall into place remarkably quickly. The brainstorming, Mind Mapping, outlining and research phases should be a breeze.
Let the characters take over
Sometimes, when you have exactly the right characters and exactly the right situation, something miraculous happens: the fictional characters seem to come to life and take over the story. You can almost hear them and see them. All you have to do is let them get on with it, while you follow along, writing down what they do, say, and feel.
The secret of success here is to have a rigid outline and insist that your characters stick to it. Let them use their own words and make minor decisions, but you’ve already made the big decisions for them. If any of them objects to this, then they’re either the wrong character for the story or you’re forcing them to do something they feel is out of character. You’ll either need to change the character or change the story.
By this stage, you should only be making tiny changes to the story, so as not to disturb your outline. If the changes the character wants are minor, then make them. But if he wants bigger changes, don’t allow them.
You could try making tiny modifications to his personality or background history until he feels like the right character for the situation you’ve put him in. Or you could adjust the way he responds to the problem, while maintaining his sense of who he is. Or you could pass the problem over to one of the other characters.
If he really won’t work in this story, you might have to replace him. Perhaps you could reuse a character from one of your other stories. That will save you from having to invent a new one at this late stage.
But if you’ve let the story and characters grow and mature in your mind for a decent amount of time, all of these things should have been ironed out by the time you get around to writing it.
Match your mood
Writing is easier – and faster – if you match the mood of your story with your own mood. Write the sad parts when you’re feeling low and the happy parts when you’re happy. If something makes you miserable, don’t shut yourself away and sulk; write that tricky death-bed scene you’ve been putting off. Most novels span a wide range of emotions, so you should be able to find at least one scene in your outline that matches the way you’re feeling.
If you try writing each scene regardless of your mood, progress can be slow and difficult. You’ll have to work harder to recreate feelings that would have come naturally if you waited until you were in the that mood yourself.
Another issue is that if y
ou’re feeling happy and you write a sad scene, it will probably put you in a sad mood too. On the other hand, if you’re feeling sad but you write a happy scene, it might be difficult to write, but at least it might also cheer you up.
Life is a buzz
Writing can be a lonely business. Traditionally, writers shut themselves away for hours on end, often for months at a time, and miss out on all the fun. Some of them write in public places, such as cafés and libraries, but they’re still focused on the world inside their heads and they’re often oblivious to what’s happening around them.
But if you use mini writing sessions, where you only need to focus on your writing for twenty minutes at a time, you can still join in with everything that’s going on. There’s no need to cut yourself off from the outside world or miss out on anything. An extra benefit of this is that your writing should be livelier – especially the dialogue.
You’ll spend the first week of your book-writing project gathering ideas and planning, researching and outlining your story. It’s a good idea to spend as much of this time as possible immersed in the buzz of life. Go to parties; read books, newspapers and magazines; watch television; listen to the radio; go to the cinema with your friends; catch up on your emails; chat to friends on the phone and on social media networks; join in with all the conversations and gossip at work; and so on. It’ll be a hectic week, but you should be able to transfer a lot of that buzz into your story and really bring it to life.
Things will calm down once you get to the writing stage. But as we’ve already seen, there’s no need to give up your social life entirely. You might want to postpone a few things, or reduce the amount of time you spend doing them, but you shouldn’t need to cut yourself off from everything. The writing stage should only take three weeks or so anyway.
Picture This
Things are easier to describe if you can see them in front of you. It’s worth taking the time to go through your outline making a list of all the things you’ll be describing. Then gather together as many of them as you can lay your hands on: photos, drawings, sketches, maps, guidebooks, videos, souvenirs, artefacts, and so on.
Search for images of your characters in magazines, mail order catalogues, and online. Whenever you need to describe one of them, a quick glance at his picture will remind you what he looks like, what colour his eyes are, and so on. This will save you from having to wade through pages of notes when you want to remember the details.
Pin their pictures to a corkboard above your writing desk so you can look up and see them at a glance.
If you can’t find any suitable images, try drawing them yourself. No one else needs to see these drawings, so they don’t even have to look like people. If your hero has a square face, simply draw a square. If his face is heart-shaped, draw a heart. His eyes can just be circles of the appropriate colour. You might not need to draw his nose, mouth or ears at all, unless there’s something unusual about them. And even then, a simple line might be enough.
As long as you know what each part represents, and you can recognise its shape and colour at a glance, that’s good enough.
If you still don’t think your drawings are good enough, ask a friend who’s good at art to draw them for you.
It’s worth making a list of the things you can’t include in your pictures. These might include things like the character’s age, height, home town, accent, habits, motivation, temperament, behaviour, mannerisms, and so on. You’ll still need to keep notes on these.
Whenever you mention a character’s feature or characteristic, add it to your notes immediately. It’ll make it easier to check your story for consistency later on.
List these details on an index card and pin it to your corkboard under the relevant character’s image. Every essential detail will be just a glance away.
Similarly, look for photos of the locations where your story is set, or use locations that look similar. Even if it’s a faraway or imaginary place, you should be able to find photos or drawings in books, magazines, and online. Pin these images to your corkboard too.
It’s worth getting a really large corkboard!
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, draw it yourself. Even a rough sketch will help. But keep things simple: only draw the things that have to be there and leave the rest out.
It’s useful to have a map of the place where your story is set. This could be a real map or one you draw yourself. The location could be a single room, a building, a few buildings, a street or two, a village, a town, a large city, a country or kingdom, or an entire planet. But you only need to include the locations that feature in your story.
If you’re using a real map, use a highlighter pen to mark the places you’ll write about. If you draw the map yourself, only include the places you’ll write about, and leave the rest blank. Or you could use blocks of colour to indicate commercial and residential areas, parks, and so on.
It’s also useful to have detailed floor plans of the rooms you’ll write about. Ideally, you should also have images that show how each room is laid out, including the colour, type and position of the furnishings. Again, this is better – and faster – than trawling through pages of notes or hunting through earlier chapters trying to recall what you said about a particular place or piece of furniture.
Computer software and free online tools for creating floor plans are widely available. Search online for “floor plan designer”.
The right time and the right place
It’s a good idea to create a timeline for each story that shows the beginning, ending, and key moments in between, including the dates and times when each event takes place.
Beneath the main timeline, add additional timelines for each character, showing where they are throughout the story. This is an easy way of checking they haven’t been left behind or forgotten, and whether you’ve allowed them enough time to get from one place to another.
Storyboarding
Many writers create storyboards to help them plan and write their stories. Screenwriters do this far more often than novelists, but it’s well worth doing if you tend to think visually.
Film producers always think visually. They insist on seeing the storyboard before deciding whether to commission a film.
A storyboard is a set of sketches that each represent a key moment in your story. You could create one for each section of your story. Each image could show the date and time, the location, the characters who feature in it, and one or two bullet points or snippets of dialogue that explain what’s going on.
Remember that a “section” represents a single mini writing session – one or two paragraphs that you’ll think about for five minutes then write in fifteen to twenty minutes. In a novel, this would be a single “camera shot” within a scene.
It’s best to create your storyboard at the planning and outlining stage when it’s easy to reorganise your story if you need to. Simply move the images around until the whole thing flows smoothly.
As before, it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw; draw them anyway, because no one else ever needs to see them.
You could use a computer graphics program or slideshow creator (such as Microsoft PowerPoint) to create the sketches. You should be able to find all the images you need in clip art collections and photo libraries online. Google’s Image Search is a fantastic tool for finding suitable images. Copy the images you need and paste them into your storyboard to build up each scene.
Right-click on any image you find online and you should see an option to copy it. It will be stored in your computer’s memory temporarily. Right-click on your storyboard and you should see an option to paste the image into the current scene. You can then drag it into the correct position, and click and drag the sides and corners to resize it. Hold down the Shift key while resizing it to keep its original proportions.
Experiment with the graphics or slideshow software you’re using. You should be able to stack images in layers to build up a scene that’s as complicated as you ne
ed it to be. The Layer and Arrange tools will be particularly useful here. It’s also worth watching tutorial videos on YouTube that show you how to use the software, and the amazing effects you can achieve.
As your storyboard is for your own personal use, you don’t need to worry about copyright. You can use any image that appeals to you.
Cull the dull
If any of your characters are too dull, you could remove them from the story and create more interesting ones to replace them. This takes time though, and we’re trying to work quickly, so it’s very much a last resort.
A faster approach is to spice up the lives of the characters you already have. Perhaps you could dig up some dark secrets from their backgrounds to make them more intriguing. Or you could give the weakest character a missing limb and an interesting backstory that explains how he lost it.
If you don’t mind deviating from your outline slightly, you could kill the weakest character and show his grisly death in the story. That should make a lively scene.
Or you could replace the weakest character with a much stronger one from a previous story.
