No Write Way 2

(Part 1 here.)

Once you’ve riffed for a while on your characters, it’s time to start thinking about the story. This
still isn’t a plot, but you can begin to develop a theme. Why are you writing a story about
these characters? What’s the heart of the story? William Burroughs said (in his Review of the Reviewers),
that all “good” writing must get at the human condition, it must have something of “high seriousness” to it.
It’s hard to say just how literally William intended for us to take the word “high.” All the same, this
is a valid point. Fulfilling this requirement will answer the question “why should this story be told in the first place?”

Most intro to writing teachers will tell you
at this point to look for the conflict, since that is generally the easiest way to put
your characters into motion. But there are plenty of modern novels where very little happens
at all outside the minds of the characters. Take Joyce’s Ulysses for instance. This isn’t to
say it isn’t rife with conflict, it just happens to be primarily psychological. If you want
to talk brass-tacks, it’s about another boring day in Dublin. (On the other hand, not all of us can be James Joyce.)

This “brass-tacks” approach misses the heart of a story like that. As I said, it isn’t so much
about what happened. No matter how bizarre your narrative style, there is still going to be
a theme, which is rooted in your ultimate intention in writing the story in the first place.
It is only in relation to this theme, and the underlying intent, that you can tell if you’re
on or off the bar as you move into the process of actually writing your story, so hold onto it.

For example, with my first novel, Join My Cult!, I was writing from experience about
the plunge into the subconscious (and out of the surrounding culture) that can and does
occur with some adolescents. The entire story, (if you want to call it a story), is centered
around that painfully vital, melodramatic and sometimes even shrill and terrifying feeling of not belonging, of perceiving
a world that no one but your closest friends seem to see. It’s about that, and not what happened
at the beginning or end of the story. If you are telling a story that focuses on the internal, rather than the external,
then the theme and characters become even more essential, because there’s nothing else there to move it forward.

With my second, (Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning), you have many of the same
characters rising out of that state and actually coming into
their own and truly becoming adults, if in their own bizarre, rockstar-messiah kind of way.
Even though many of the central characters are the same, they seem very different because
they are being approached from another angle. The plot is far more central because the characters have moved outside themselves to a certain extent, and they are actually engaged in an external world of events. I had to totally re-learn how to write a book, especially since the first was such an experiment, for better and worse.

I use these personal examples for a reason: every book you write should in this sense be your first.
Each theme, each grouping of characters, each intention demands a completely different
execution. Different characters demand a different use of the language, and a unique means
of exploring the story. Consequently you have a different writing style that is going to arise in the
process of bringing
that to life. You have to re-discover and re-interpret your voice and your approach to writing, which is why it’s so damn hard to give a step by step process for how to write a novel.

We may all fall back on conventions, turns of phrase or techniques that availed
us in the past, but the more we can avoid that the better. It’s very much like the cliches
that musicians resort to when improvising. Cliche should only be utilized intentionally.

A final note on the topic of your theme: if you find yourself purposelessly rehashing your style, it’s time to zero back in on the vital kernel
inside your story, and try to be true to that, or there’s really no sense in wasting your time.

Now that you have a sense of your characters, and probably a bunch of disconnected scene sketches
that you wrote in the process of coming to know them, you can get to the actual story.

If your story does require a fairly complicated plot, I suggest diagramming it out, chapter
by chapter. When diagramming Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, I got out a big ream of paper with a co-conspirator
and created a plot arc for each character with a different colored crayon. At points
where events would make different characters paths cross, the lines would cross. I would
convey the system we “invented” that day to flesh this out except that it was pretty intuitive.
It wasn’t a “system” at all. Start playing around with your story visually on a time-line. Make flow-charts in Viseo if you feel the need. Your
diagram will either come, or it won’t.

If it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean that all is lost. You can probably move on to the next step, at
least for a short while. You’ve spent quite some time – probably several months – preparing to
write your novel. Now comes the part where you write it. During this phase, you need to turn off
all the critical voices in your head. All the editors and naysayers. Show the text to no one that will
throw you off track. Just be as true to your characters and your theme as you can be, and write.
Remember: this is the fun part. So have fun now, because you probably aren’t going to during the editing or marketing
phase of your project.

There is too much to be said about the details of writing a book. For the most part you pick it up as you go along, and if all goes well, your voice will come out of that struggle. However I want to point out the importance of natural dialogue. My first novel might seem a horrible example of “natural dialogue,” mainly because the primary characters talk like 19th century Philosophers stuck in 19-year-old bodies. But really, you need to be true to the characters… If that’s how they talk, be true to it. If you’re unable to hear their voice, write a couple scenes just in dialogue. Add the other details later. If you still can’t find their voice, you need to get back at your character, and try to find examples of those personality traits in the people and media around you. Find their voice, and come back to the writing process.

If you get stuck at any point, put down the pencil. (Or the keyboard.) Lie down, and close your
eyes. Do some deep breathing, move yourself close to sleep without slipping away,
and then focus in on that character again. Imagine them
in your minds eye, at the point that you got stuck at. And just watch. Now sometimes of course you’ll
get nothing. They’ll turn into giant pink elephants or you’ll get distracted thinking about crazy zero-G sex
or what you’re
going to cook for dinner. But sometimes the characters will take over, and that block will melt away.

This leads me to another point. If in the process of actually writing, your characters feel like they
want to go in a direction that wasn’t in your plot diagram, for the love of God let them. If it hits a dead
end, the worst thing that happens is you have to delete a couple pages. As a general rule of thumb, if your
characters don’t overtake you and your well planned structure and lead it in a totally unplanned direction at least
a couple times in the course of writing a novel, you probably need to spend more time breathing life into those characters.

Finally, and this one can’t be under-stressed: write every day. That sounds really obvious, right?
But you’d be amazed how many people do all the planning, and then peter out when it comes to the work ethic.

Your average novel runs somewhere between
80,000 – 250,000 words. You may have this romantic idea in your head of an author going
in and hammering out his opus in a brief, intensely melodramatic fugue, like Handel in fact did
with his Messiah. Every word is perfect, and it comes out full-formed.

More likely than not, most of your favorite books were written
slowly and consistently, a couple thousand words a day. At the end of the process 30,000 words
might have been shaved off, and then another 10,000 added to tie together those dessicated
loose ends. Not every day is going to give you a gem, that doesn’t mean you didn’t benefit
from the effort. Just get up the next day and keep at it. Good luck!

Next I’ll be getting into the editorial process, branding, and the other intermediary steps between your first
draft and the PDF you send to the printer.