Novels

If you talk to new writers, or lurk around Internet forums dedicated to writing like some sort of weirdo listening in on other people’s conversations, or do panels or give presentations at writing conferences and the like, you’ll find something kind of strange: Writers, as a group, seem to think there are a lot of rules out there. They always want to know if you “can” do something in a story—is this idea too weird? Is that too many characters? Is this plot twist too crazy? Can you actually write a novel in the second person from the point of view of a dog?

Here’s something that isn’t all that shocking: Sure. You can do all those things.

We’re We’re Going We Don’t Need Rules

Look, writing is imagination committed to paper (or pixels). Writers have been pulling off novels that seem, on paper, at first blush, to be completely ridiculous. Novels have been written in stilted, theatrical ways, with oddball characters, and with only a glancing relationship with logic. And many of these novels have failed, sure, but not because of the crazy ideas or overly ambitious approach. They failed only because the writer failed to sell it.

That’s the secret: There are no rules. No idea is too crazy, too stupid, or too clichéd to be successful. All that matters is whether you have the skill and the acumen to pull those ideas off.

I sometimes think writers are looking for excuses not to tackle those big, crazy, complex ideas, or that they’re thinking way too hard about selling and marketing that book before they even write it. There are no rules there, either. Anyone who tells you that you can’t sell a book with a certain theme or in a certain genre is wrong—you can sell anything, if it’s good enough.

So, write your novel. Be crazy. Get crazy. Throw everything in there. Write from the dog’s point of view and then decide the dog is a Venusian time traveler. Write it without using the word and just to see what happens. And if it doesn’t work, don’t blame the idea—blame the writing, and start over.

Well, blame the writing, have a few stiff drinks, then start over.

There’s very little in this world as humbling as writing a novel. Anyone who says it’s easy hasn’t actually tried writing one—no, it’s not hard labor, so bellyaching about how difficult it is is just First World problems, but it is challenging.

For me, every novel starts off easy. The premise is clear, the plot is easy to see in the basic outlines. All I have to do, I tell myself, is write the damn thing! Meaning that I approach each novel initially as a time management problem. And also a whiskey-drinking management problem, a binge-watching management problem, and a hey-look-a-butterfly-let’s-chase-it management problem.

I lead a rich inner life.

Anyways, what always happens is things get complicated. I lose track of the plot, I get lost in the weeds and everything slithers out of my grasp, and there is usually a point where I realize I’ve forgotten something. Sometimes it’s a character I forgot to introduce much earlier, or a clue, or a sequence that’s vital to the comprehension of the story or the back-story. I realize with dismay that the next bunch of words I’m about to write just won’t work in the larger whole unless that earlier work gets done.

I take a deep breath, pour a fresh drink, and then I don’t do it. I don’t go back to fix things up. I just plunge ahead.

That’s What the Revision is For

It’s almost irresistible, that urge to go back and fill in the blank space you’ve just noticed. But you really ought to resist. Sure, that means the draft you’re writing is flawed. It won’t make sense, things get introduced in clunky, awful ways. Anyone reading it will throw your manuscript across the room, enraged.

But, that’s just it, isn’t it? No one will read this version. You’re going to revise it. You’re going to let it sit in the drawer and marinate for a few months and then go back and start re-working it. So you’ll have time to fix everything—and you’ll see even more that needs to be fixed.

The urge to stop forward momentum to go back and fix something you’ve just thought of is a powerful one, but trust me: Don’t so it. It will just stop your train of thought and ultimately slow you down and make the story worse. If it’s really a problem, it will still be there when you revise. If it wasn’t really a problem in the first place, you just saved yourself weeks of unnecessary work.

I like to use the time I save by not wasting time doubling back on myself to drink a little more. What will you use the time for?

Like most writers I have met, my mental health is suspect. No one chooses this career out of rational sanity; it’s a lot of work for (mostly) low pay, and all you really get is criticism and mounting suspicion that you did not really think through your plot before settling down to write. And so you wind up spending all of your energy arguing that yes, the fact that a character you described as one-armed in chapter one did, in fact, grow a second arm over the course of the book (the hidden literary clues are there, man, you just have to be smart enough to notice them), all over a book you sold approximately 33 copies of, 23 to yourself as you tried to correct a maddening kerning problem in your Word Doc.

So, stipulated: We’re all crazy. When are we craziest? When our work-in-progress (WIP) isn’t going well. Because we so often give up.

Take It to The Limit

So, when should you give up on your new novel? You gonna get differing opinions on this, and some folks will have a pretty complex equation involving word counts and palm readings and what quadrant of the sky Mars is currently sailing through, but here’s my answer: Don’t.

Don’t give up on your projects. I don’t care how borked they are (borked being a legal term meaning “incoherent and incomprehensible”), there’s gold in there if for no other reason than the simple fact that you were inspired enough to start writing. There’s a few thousand words or a plot twist or a single golden sentence in there that’s worth saving, so instead of giving up on a WIP that’s not working, start cutting. Hit Save As and start stripping away all the non-working stuff, starting with the most recent work you’ve done. When you start hesitating about the deletions, stop. Think about what you can re-purpose, what could be revised, re-used, stolen.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be a novel. Maybe it’s a short story or novella that got uppity, or maybe it’s an epic poem, or a scene from another novel, or the backstory to something else. The point is, use the material you’ve created, somehow. Don’t just walk away from it.

We all know what conflict is, right? It’s one of those essential ingredients to a story. You need a setting, you need characters, and you need those characters to have to fight for or against something—i.e., you need conflict.

You get much deeper into the weeds of what conflict means in terms of good storytelling, but essentially that’s all it is—something for your characters to struggle for or against. It’s kind of necessary so that your story isn’t just 100,000 words of people sipping tea and commenting on the weather. At the same time, conflict doesn’t necessarily mean evil wizards, despotic kings, assassins, or even office rivals. In her classic book Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin boils conflict down to an even more essential element: Change. “Story,” she wrote, “is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

The Change

Where a lot of writers go wrong is in assuming conflict must be huge and oversize. It must be fighting Nazis or slaying dragons, murdering husbands or surviving terrible torture. But of course there are plenty of stories that exhibit low-key, subtle conflicts, and our everyday lives are filled with conflict that doesn’t qualify as epic.

And that word—epic—is the problem, often enough. Writers can get so fixated on the idea of “epicness” (no matter the genre) that they start to imagine stories where every single scene is like something out of The Matrix movies, with rain pouring down and people shouting as they fly through the air, metaphorically or literally. You can’t craft a successful story where the emotional charge is always at 10, and your conflict doesn’t have to be “something something save the world” or “something something we’ll all die horribly otherwise” or any sort of similarly “big” problem.

It’s also a mistake to think that you have precisely one conflict in a story, or that your conflict has to be a thread through the whole story. Think about what Le Guin says, again: Conflict is change. Thus it can change. The conflict that motivates your character in the beginning of a story might be resolved and replaced—or augmented or transformed. Say your character has been hired to break into a safe in an old mansion. The first few chapters are about their research, prep, and hiring a team to help. Then they get into the safe—and discover a portal to another dimension inside and are promptly sucked in. The conflict changes.

Of course you could make it your goal to write the ideal conflict-less story, but there’s a good chance your characters will still be sipping tea by page 300.

I’ve often discussed the different approaches to creating the plot of your novels, from Pantsing (yay!) to Plotting (10 GOSUB 20), to Plantsing, which is, in my humble opinion, the only way to go. I’m a Pantser by nature, but a Plantser by professional necessity. Sometimes you just have to stop what you’re doing and Plot out a little, no matter how much fun Pantsing is.

Sometimes, though, you’ll find yourself in a scenario like this: You have at the center of your plot a pretty amazing feat. Maybe it’s a locked-room murder with an elegant, brilliant solution or a plot twist that will give people whiplash in the best possible way. The problem? You have no idea what the actual solution is. You have the greatest set up in history, you just have no idea how it works.

Some would assume you have to figure that part out before you start writing. Me, being Day Drunk and unconcerned with things like propriety or making sense in first drafts, I say you Leeroy Jenkins that son of a bitch.

Leeeeeeroy Jennnnnnkins!

If you were alive and online a few years ago you might have heard about Leeroy Jenkins, who was a member of a World of Warcraft guild. Faced with a huge number of enemies, the guild was resolved to take them on for Leeroy, who needed something from the area. While Leeroy was away from his computer making dinner, the guild constructs a complex, intricate plan in order to give them a chance against overwhelming odds. Then Leeroy comes back to his computer and, ignorant of the plan, just charges in, shouting his own name as a battle cry. The intricate plan falls apart and the entire guild is killed as a result.

Leeroy has become shorthand for a stupid charge into certain death—which is exactly what you should do if you have a premise that’s super cool but you can’t figure out.

Really, what’s your downside? You might write a lot of words that lead nowhere. Don’t even pretend you haven’t done that before, many times. This time, do it intentionally. If you have no idea how your protagonist committed the clever murder, or how you’re going to work the reveal that the hero is actually the evil mage everyone is fighting against, just dive in. Keep writing. Write what you have figured out, and hope to hell you get the rest by the time you run out of blacktop.

Will it work? Damned if I know. I myself am rocking probably 50% on that score. But it’s always illuminating, and if you don’t figure it out, the idea wasn’t all that great to begin with.

Exposition is difficult to deal with in fiction, especially when you’re world-building in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. The urge to explain everything is pretty powerful, and there is a practical point where you must explain things, or your story won’t make sense. But exposition is usually a drag, because it’s essentially like a scene in a movie where the actions stops dead and everyone stands around while someone lectures the audience.

This is where people will always, always trot out “show don’t tell,” which is fine as far as it goes. Show don’t tell is a pithy piece of airless advice you can carry around and spit out easily, but it’s not always the most helpful nugget. If you’ve got 16 pages of single-spaced information about your universe’s religions, you have to tell some of it, right?

No, you don’t, of course. In fact, in your first draft you should even try to avoid exposition altogether.

Dressing

There’s two things to remember about exposition. One, no one in real life engages in it in any sort of natural way, which is why it feels so weird and is so noticeable when it pops up in fiction. Your inner monologue is not, I hope, an endless recitation of historical facts, cultural observations, and detailed descriptions of everything you see. We only engage in exposition in real life in very formal moments: Classrooms, presentations, lectures, heated discussions at bars that skirt up to the edge of a stabbing, that sort of thing.

So, treat your characters like real people and avoid it. You know the backstory and history of your characters and your universe—it will come out in little details, asides spoken in dialog, that sort of thing. Write your first draft with the assumption that everyone has read the little bible you’ve created for your characters and universe, and no exposition is necessary.

Then, after you’ve let the draft sit for a bit and you return to revise it, you’ll find it’s very easy to pick the moments when exposition might be needed, and you can judiciously dole it out. Your Beta Readers will tell you when they were confused, and you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised at how much information was present just in the more natural dialog and actions of your characters and the details of your descriptions.

That’s showing without telling. And once you’ve done that, you can go in and fill in some gaps with exposition. The end result will seem much more electric and natural.

One of the biggest mistakes writers—both published and unpublished—make is trying to game the system by picking a project based on what they think will sell, instead of writing something they’re excited about. From my own personal experience, this is usually a one-way ticket to a terrible novel no one wants to read, much less pay you money for.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but the writing you do for passion will always be better than the writing you do via market research and trend-watching. Smarter writers than me might sell those novels, of course, while I wallow in my for-the-love paradise, but personally I think when you write a better book, you sell more copies. My experience has also been that the books you sell yo publishers are rarely the books you think you’ll sell to publishers. Again, your mileage may vary on that, but so far every time I write something that’s a surefire hit, no one wants it, and when I casually toss a trunk novel onto the table with little enthusiasm, it comes back to me with a contract. The world is mysterious.

The Patterson Effect

Some might point to writers like James Patterson, who seems to have the “write for sales” formula in lock—and he certainly does, along with a few other writers who can churn out 4-5 novels a year (often with co-writers, who are likely doing most of the actual writing) and hit the bestseller lists with most of them. This is a thing, of course, but consider that Patterson worked a long time in a more traditional way, building up not only writing experience and craftsmanship but publishing-specific business experience as well as relationships throughout the industry. He didn’t just decide one day to become James Patterson, Inc. It was a process.

Of course, for many unpublished writers the urge to try and crack the code so you can write a book genetically engineered to sell is a powerful one. Just keep in mind how many novels are bought and published each year, compared to the ones that actually sell enough to warrant second novels. The gap there is huge, and the lesson is easy: No one knows what’s going to sell. Publishers make educated guesses, and are often wrong. So the chances that you’ll guess right are even slimmer. Just write a book you’d want to read. It’s the strongest play.

A lot of writers are obsessed with originality, believing their ideas for stories must be, you know, 100% original and unique. Not me; I generally settle for 33% unique, with the other 66% being freely appropriated from everything else in the known universe. And while your exactly ratio of originality-to-borrowed might vary, the fact remains: There’s nothing new under the sun, and if you think you’ve got a story no one’s told before you simply haven’t read very widely.

If you’re struggling for ideas to write about, one possible problem is you’re being too precious about originality. Forget it. Try this: Take a very shopworn story idea, and just write a story. What gives your fiction value isn’t the elevator pitch, it’s what you add to it. So, for example, write a story about a wife and her lover who plot to murder her husband for his money. It’s so ancient! It’s so cliché! So, figure out how to make it sing.

Another thing to try is to cannibalize yourself.

They Taste Just Like Lady Fingers

We all have failed novels. I have several dozen. They all failed for different reasons, and they contain at least some good writing and interesting ideas, like a rotten plank that can be ripped down to healthy wood. If you’re currently not doing well in the inspiration department, why not go back through the graveyard of your failures and see if there’s a novel that had a great premise but didn’t work in execution, or a novel that took a wrong turn somewhere and died right under your hands. Start over.

Or, look for discrete sections in your failed novels that hum, that sing—and see if you can rip them out of their rotten narratives and combine them, or use them as the core for a whole new attempt, lathering on fresh words until you have a healthy novel.

Will it work? Sometimes, sure. Not always, certainly. But if you don’t have any ideas now, what do you have to lose?