Don’t try to get on bandwagons. You can learn a lot by studying admirable novels—about structure, about developing characters, about integrating history into fiction, and so on. But trying to write a story like one that made another writer famous is a prescription for frustration. Fiction in young adult literature does seem to follow trends for a while, but (a) who came up with the first one?—that’s the writer you want to be; and (b) nobody wants to be the last one who wore out the genre twist. Of course, if you can find a fresh interpretation for an old genre, go for it. Gone Girl made gothic thriller new again and has been madly recycled.
Go inside yourself. Every character you write has something of you in him. Don’t stay on your own surface. Learn more about what fascinates you. Find the story in you and you will find the subjects for your novels. Fear, anger, shame, joy, ambition, pride, envy, loss, grief; what you need and don’t have; what you had and lost; where you were and can’t go back. Great themes are about ordinary human wants in extraordinary circumstances. Or the other way around. Flaubert set himself the challenge of writing a novel about an unsympathetic protagonist—a whiny, self-centered, grasping woman with no real redeeming qualities. Huh? He wanted the reader to understand her so completely that it would be impossible not to care about her. That’s Madame Bovary. Some writers build their careers by being skillful at making every novel different, others by making their novels familiar. The simple truth is you have to find out where your passion takes you, something you care about so deeply you cannot help but find the right story and the right way to tell it.
Read what you love. Write from passion.
Exercises
Make a stack of novels you admire. Don’t deliberate too much; choose them intuitively, by your feel for them. For each one, identify two features you admire. Consider how you can strive to have those qualities in your novel, too.
The idea is to identify qualities you might aspire to, and to consider how those qualities are related to the concepts you think about as you read this book. You can set goals for yourself. Maybe you won’t write a novel like the one you chose, but if you liked the way it looked on the pages—the length of the chapters, for example—that tells you something to consider in planning your own structure. If you liked the friendly, informal tone of the diction, you can feel free to write in your natural voice, too. If the setting was evocative, you can remember that you want to think about creating a memorable setting.
If you love the way a first-person or close-third-person protagonist comments on her life and other people’s behavior, saying things to the reader that made you laugh and shake your head—You bet!—then you might want to try incorporating more of your character’s interiority into your own story. Or you may want to find opportunities for her to express her ideas to another character. Or you, too, can write in first person.
Perhaps what you love is the quickness of the read, the way the story flows with little adornment but a lot of movement. Look at a few pages from your manuscript and see if you can pare them down to make the pace faster.
You love the language itself, the beauty of the descriptions and the surprise of arrival at the end of a passage. So study sentences for a while, to improve the variety and quality of your own. (See recommended books in Resources.)
You like a novel that is multigenerational. Maybe instead of pulling in some backstory about your protagonist’s mother and grandmother, should you build their stories and their voices into the plot?
You like a novel that is built almost entirely of scenes. Study at least four consecutive chapters and note several things: First, how much time elapses between chapters? Next, is any narrative summary used in transitions, or does the author go directly into the scene in each chapter? And finally, briefly describe the tone or mood of each chapter—how much variety is there across the four scenes?
A Review of Narrative Elements
I HAVE FOUND THAT the first thing writers facing revision need is a way to talk about their text to themselves. If they get caught in the spiderweb stickiness of sentences right away, they’ll never understand what they have failed to dramatize. They’ll never learn to see wholes instead of parts—chapters instead of pages; scenes instead of sentences. If you don’t want to start a revision by fixing word choices, what do you start on?
Certainly you must first weigh the heft of your story: Is it what you hoped for? Is it passionate? Wise? Funny? If you are excited and confident about the story itself, there are craft issues to tackle. You revise by analyzing things like setups and predictions and transitions; through lines (“threads”) and pacing. You want to appraise whether you have “covered” aspects of story with a proper balance of “show” (scene) and “tell” (summary). I suggest that you start by describing what’s there. Your job in revising is to make sure that what the reader reads is the story you wanted to tell. Also, when you describe a page or passage or chapter, you start to see where you are losing the thread or oozing instead of structuring scenes. I daresay tangled narrative elements are the major characteristic of unsuccessful novel drafts.
And the failure to be clear about what the narrative is doing on a particular page usually springs from not having a vocabulary to describe it.
It’s helpful to think of narrative as a construction, with parts. This is not to say that all parts are, or should be, equal; nor to say that there is a perfect pattern. Different writers use narrative in different ways. Some like to build broad sweeps of story that cover a lot of time, and such novels require a different strategy from those that engage the reader in a chain of scenes over a shorter time span. The balance of show and tell varies. Likewise, writers differ in how much they reveal their characters’ thinking; in how much they have to say about the world of the story, and how much they use a narrator’s—an authorial—voice. All of these choices influence the shape of the story, its density (a perceived quality in books with a lot of narrative summary and commentary), and the story’s voice.
I take a kind of Lego block approach to narrative structure. What I call a component could be a red block, or a yellow block, and so on. Your structure has more blue than mine; mine has more green. We have different ways of telling stories, and that difference is conveyed in the proportions of narrative elements we create.
These are the structural components I will discuss, and they will figure in your analysis of your manuscript, and in your plans for revision:
Scene
Scene summary and sequence
Scene fragments
Narrative summary
Exposition
Interiority: Response, reflection, interrogation, time, and commentary
Exposition versus interiority
A novel uses all of these elements, but from one book to another, the balance of them varies according to the authors’ styles and choices and the needs of the story. I’ve written books that are essentially all scenes (Opal on Dry Ground; More Than Allies) and others that are dominated by summary and introspection (Gringa, Walking Dunes, Plain Seeing). I developed Beyond Deserving as a sequence of chapters, each with a key scene that I “nested” in exposition, summary, and interiority. Different stories require different narrative strategies. Compare Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (it’s all in the action) to Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (it’s all in the telling). I think that the latter approach is more difficult to control, but a story, like a heart, wants what it wants, and the novel has the capacity for deep psychological archeology and sustained empathy with a character. It isn’t that there is a right or a wrong proportion; rather, if you can be aware of your choices and evaluate them, you will be better able to create a strong framework that can hold the scope and tone of the story in the best way. You will find it easier to parse structural problems in a draft and to design a stronger revision. You will be able to revise deliberately, a different process from that of the draft, which
can feel like a journey with little light.
You almost surely have a natural inclination toward structure and voice, and you can assess whether your default mode is best for you, or whether you want to try other approaches. Many writers do have a default mode that works well for them. I liked using very different structures for my novels.
Note that in the Resources section, where I talk about particular novels, I point out the way the authors use narrative structure, that is, whether they emphasize scenes or summaries, and so on. If you choose a particular novel for close study, do it with colored markers, pens and pencils, and the curiosity of a puzzle lover. Buy a used copy and cut it apart; make charts. Work to visualize the way stories are put together; your mind can hold schemas better if they have shape as well as words. You will soon recognize these elements easily, and as you study how other writers use them, you will become more conscious of and at ease with the choices you make. Pay special attention to the transitions between scene and commentary. Becoming deliberate in craft brings with it the occasional agony of self-consciousness—Did I really do that? and What do I do now?—but in time your skill becomes integral to your writing, something you tap automatically as you write and then exploit consciously when you identify problems in your text. Isn’t that the way of building and using skills? Sometimes you play a game of tennis; sometimes you practice your backhand. Sometimes you play scales; sometimes a sonata.
Once you can automatically identify which narrative element you are reviewing, you can evaluate its function and its success. You can build smoother transitions. You can build stronger scene sequences. You can use the wonderful capacity of the novel to explore human consciousness.
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NARRATIVE IS THE telling of events in a logical order. We are interested in those events that have consequences for characters.
Now let’s look at its parts.
In conceiving of a novel, the most important thing is to have a strong story. I’m thinking of Story with a capital S: the idea that is large and deep enough to hold a book-length narrative. “Thin” stories are doomed. Some I have seen many times: Breakup stories. Rivalry in a family stories. Bang-bang crime stories. In other words, stories in which there’s really only one main event, one layer.
You may not really know what the story is when you begin writing. If you make an outline, you’ll capture some of the plot (the sequence of action), but you probably won’t really understand your story until you explore it in writing. It’s both the what of the book and the why.
Think about the difference between complication and complexity.
Complications are additions to the main line; tangles, if you will. More characters. More events. More questions. You have to have some, but you don’t want to get lost in them. Farce has a lot of complications. Cozy novels tend to have them, too. What? What? the reader asks.
Complexity is about intricacy, about layers, depths. Events reverberate beyond the moments in which they occur. Characters carry their past, their desires, their inner conflicts, into the story. Tragedy, certainly, is about complexity, but so is any story with depth and resonance. Why? Why? the reader asks.
It’s best to start with a unit of the story, so let’s look at the scene; knowing how to write one is probably the most important skill a fiction writer needs, because drama is the heart of narrative. Even if the strategy of a novel emphasizes broad sweeps of summary rather than scene-by-scene development, the writer still has to convey the sense of things happening to characters, and characters making things happen and having feelings; there is in narrative always a dramatic current occurring in action displayed or implied. Everything that happens in real life happens in real time. In a novel, everything that happens to characters happens in the idea of real time, but you don’t have enough pages to transcribe real time, so you choose when to enter it in a scene, and you summarize or imply the rest. One way or the other, you keep up momentum; there is always the sense of going forward (even when it involves looking back).
Scene
In a scene, characters do things and feel things. They act and react. If you want to test your scene, see if you can reduce it to a statement of what the event was (the thing that happened) and what the emotions were (what the character felt). Then ask yourself how the scene served the overall story.
In my novel Walking Dunes, there is a scene with this event: David’s mother—hungover, sloppy, and verbally abusive—stumbles into his room and discovers that he has a girl in his bed. Emotions: his embarrassment and anger. (Note: His mother is angry, too, but it’s his scene.)
A scene has a function in the narrative. It has a reason for being there. It may introduce new plot elements or set up a situation for what is coming; it may show us the character’s behavior so that we have a deeper understanding of her. The question you always have to ask is: Does this need to be a scene? (Could it be summarized instead? Could it be left out?) The scene with David and his mother exacerbates the teenager’s feelings of dislocation in his parents’ life, and subtly changes the tenor of his relationship with the girl. It also sets up the next scene, in which David’s father storms in to castigate his son. Both scenes need to be dramatized so that the reader experiences the awful awkwardness of the situation (the girl in David’s bed) and the quality of the relationships (son and mother, son and father), best conveyed in dialogue and gesture.
A scene has a kind of engine, something I call a “pulse.” It is the energy that drives the scene. It is a current that runs beneath it. It is emotional—a state of desire or need, of passion. If the pulse is weak, the scene is weak. Even if the action is dramatic, it may be hollow. The pulse is why the scene matters. You can see why a scene written mostly to provide information, to get from one plot point to another, without an urgency of its own, can slow down the narrative and bore the reader. The writer has to engage the reader; a scene creates a little movie in the reader’s head. And the blue ribbon goes to the scene that pierces the reader’s heart.
A scene has a structure. It is a mini story. At its beginning, there is a situation, and at the end, there is a different one. Something has changed because of what happened. What I often see in apprentice writing is that the narrative slides into a scene. You find yourself in the scene but you’re not oriented. Huh? is your reaction. Weren’t you just talking about something else? There should be a clear beginning of or transition into a scene. The failure to establish the switch happens frequently when the author is describing a character’s feelings and memories, and then all of a sudden the character is engaged with someone else, but it isn’t clear how or why the shift occurred. If you are done with the subject that has been presented, check to see that the last sentence before the new scene feels finished. If the scene interrupts what comes before it, make sure you have a reason for why action is breaking into the thought. The point is to be deliberate and in control, not accidental and random. Sometimes the shift to a new paragraph signals the entry into a scene. The best situation is when the two passages, the nonscene and the scene that follows it, are thematically connected.
Likewise, there should be a rounding off at the end, perhaps into reflection or commentary, or, sometimes, a sudden break in the action. I ask my students to block out their scenes with colored markers. What we often see is that the scene doesn’t start or end clearly. It is divided up by other aspects of narrative in ways that interrupt rather than cohere. It is diluted by lack of a clear structure.
Watching a movie can be a helpful way to practice this—I suggest that the movie be an indie or a foreign film. There isn’t any way to muddle when a scene starts and ends because it’s right there in front of you. You know when there is an end, a shift, a beginning. You want that same kind of clarity in your writing. Try watching part of a film sometime: Start a scene, watch a little bit, then go back to just before the scene began. Write a brief summary of what is happening before the scene you have chosen. It might be a p
anoramic sweeping view of countryside, or a rattling train ride, or a view of a rain-slick street. It might be a scene, but not the next one you are going to describe. Now run the film into the scene and describe what happens. Write it out in summary. Change video into prose. Indicate what the first step of the scene is. Do the same thing when the scene ends, that is, when there is a change to a different time or place. In a movie, nobody is talking about a scene; a scene just is. You know when you’ve left it because you’re not in it anymore. You can see that on the screen. Well, you need to “see that” on the page, too.
Look at a published novel. Choose a scene and find exactly where it begins and exactly where it ends. Look at what came before and what came after. Do this exercise many times, with short scenes, long scenes, and scene fragments; and you’ll understand what it means to keep the reader oriented with effective shifts in narrative.
Here is a brief excerpt from the novel Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen that illustrates what I am saying. The structure of the beginning of chapter 3 is this: NS (narrative summary); SS (short scene); C (commentary—a shift of subject).
NS Eveline spent the winter of her pregnancy reading Emil’s taxidermy manuals, the only bound pages for mile after boundless mile. Of everything she packed that hurried September morning in Yellow Falls, books weren’t something she’d considered stuffing into her suitcase, which meant she was stuck reading about dead animals now.
SS “Soon you’ll be able to preserve me,” Emil said when he came in from chopping wood on the first big snow day—two feet!—in November. He was growing a beard, which collected snow when he was chopping wood and, along with his foggy safety glasses, made him look a little like an owl until the snow melted.
“Just birds,” Eveline said, even though she’d been secretly drawing pictures of babies when she was certain Emil was deep in the woods.
The Last Draft Page 4
