The Empty Counsel

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Part of why I love it is because I love thinking about what they would be. Sometimes I am even pretty sure that I DO know them. The problem is simply that they're not terribly satisfying. At three, it's almost the level of 'get good.' It's big enough that it's just kinda: yeah, duh.

Be clear

In general you should write a novel so that the intended audience understands at least all of what you want them to understand. Mysteries and weirdness is fine but the reader shouldn't think the character is in a cellar when you need them to know they're under the open sky. If the character's hand bursts into a swarm of horse flies for no known reason, yet, the audience needs to know that is what happened instead of asking, "huh?" because they have no clue what happened to the hand so they don't know they have to solve that mystery.

Be believable

You should use the details that will get that audience to believe what is happening in the story within the context of the story as you set it up while avoiding details that will make them disbelieve. If the story is about Superman, he can fly because the audience knows that Superman can fly. You can't just have some rando fly 3/4s of the way through a novel about a washed up golfer getting one last chance to make it big. Context does matter. But within the context, the audience has to be willing to buy what you're selling as legit.

Be interesting

And none of that will work unless you know why the audience is going to care about what is happening. Because you're going to need to sell that to them to get them to invest enough energy to try and understand and believe your writing when they can do something else easier and more fun. There is a particular thing your audience is interested in and you have to give that to them to keep them.

and all you need is the first part. Seriously.

if you're writing the story well enough, you shouldn't need to state why a character is doing what they're doing, thinking what they're thinking.

You don't need to write: [name] said "this," feeling [this way] about [certain thing].

You can literally write: [name] said "this."

You don't have to write characters intentions explicitly, or their thought processes and opinions quite this literally. I find a lot of newer novels tend to really bloat stories this way, and we end up with doorstoppers that don't actually have much to them in the long run, most of it is an author really explicitly trying to show you [x] is my good character, [y] is my bad one, or [x] was representing this and [y] representing that. It's very heavy handed when it comes to telling, across almost every aspect of the story.

Nothing is left to interpretation (which if you're developing the characters well, the reader will come to the same conclusions as you intended anyway, just in a far more effective way.) It lacks nuance.

The story you're telling, the way you frame the scenes, the moments you choose to show - or not to show, the choice of point of view, the ways the characters respond and react and change with the plot, should enable the reader to piece together who or what the character represents, who they are, how they were feeling, for themselves, without the author needing to state it outright throughout the whole novel.

One of the things you’re stuck worrying about when you’re writing any fiction longer than a paragraph or two is propelling the reader along towards the end. The most common metaphor we tend to use for this is Tension. We like Tension as a metaphor because it suggests things that are useful to achieve what we want. In the case of tension, as just one example, there is the suggestion of a straight line, so it puts in your head the idea that you don’t want to go off in a different direction or let things drag (same metaphor, you see?). But Tension isn’t the only possible or even only useful metaphor for reader propulsion. Another useful possibility is Magnetism.

Magnetism relies on the attraction of positive and negative. If you put something in a story that is too positive, your reader is going to expect something negative. If you put something too negative, your reader is going to expect the opposite. You can exploit this by putting in too much of anything. Even if it is just too much emphasis.

I recently saw this handled extremely deftly with the opening paragraph: “I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man.” Every reader who sees that placed so baldly in front knows that the whole book ahead is going to challenge that statement. The positive, the need to cry, is going to seek that sort of statement out, home right in on it. I’ve seen it handled much less deftly too. This is the same technique as, ‘had I only known what was going to happen, I would(n’t) have….’ This is, again, the negative, putting the expectation of the positive. In this case the lack of knowledge putting the pull on events. Thinking of this as magnetism tells you why that second version is less powerful. You are mentioning the negative and the positive in the same statement, diluting the amount of attracting charge. The magnetism metaphor equally implies the strength of the crying example, it’s not just negative in specific, it is a negative quality that will continuously attract, it is HOW the character is negative.

And that brings me to the next way that the metaphor of magnetism is helpful. It tells you WHY you need to have character flaws. A character is not flawed simply to be flawed or just because every person has a flaw. The flaws are your negative qualities, what will naturally attract tests and difficulties throughout your story. This suggests the connection between character and plot, the character is one charge and the plot the other, which means a story about an alcoholic challenged by issues of self control, addiction, and tragic loss is going to naturally work well where a story about an alcoholic challenged by the hordes of Mordor and a vicious curse by a necromancer is not going to work as well naturally without some non obvious machinations since that is not the obvious attracting charge to the flaw.

Today, in my Transpositions workshop, we did a pretty fun exercise that you might want to try.  Basically, the theme was ‘from long to short’, where we took an existing plot and made it shorter and shorter.  In the end, we were reducing films and books into magazine headlines and then read them out for others to guess.  Here are a few of mine:

“Watch Me Use a Pronoun: Rorschach in the Hot-Seat”

“World War C-Bomb: The Typewriter is Mightier than the Gun”

“I’m Absolutely Neckered: Mina Harker Reveals All”

—

Michel Foucault- The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, p. 23 (via findingsherlock)

—

How Not to Write a Novel (via fictionfiction)

What matters is knowing what audience you are writing for and knowing what you are selling them.

Sometimes the baroque language is the selling point. Sometimes the book is as much if not more about the poetry than it is about the plot. That's fine.

When it's not fine is when the language isn't the selling point. Then you're drawing attention to the wrong thing and driving away both the audience who won't read you and the audience who would with a better focus.

You can think of there being 6 primary categories of sell in a story. You will need all 6, at least a little, but you need to emphasize some over others. Having them all equal is competing with yourself and you end up driving away audience as above. Instead, your job is figuring out who to satisfy because different readers want different clusters.

The 6:

Character(s)

Plot

Ideas

Setting

Structure

Language

For myself, as a reader, language is very low down on my list of concerns. I'm not going to like a book where Language is the primary selling point. So I'm a terrible audience to test that sort of work on. On the other hand, Plot is very high on my list of concerns and if everything else is only halfway decent, you can sell me on just that. So I'm probably a very good audience to test that sort of work on.

The trick, for writers, is knowing which you're doing and doubling down. You pour your energy into the important elements and for your read and critique, you focus on that and ignore people like me who just won't get it. That may mean you're writing for a smaller audience but that is also alright, as long as you're doing it intentionally. But it also means anyone who is commenting toward your focus has to be taken much more seriously. Anything that suggests a problem with the focus requires intense attention.

I would still note that purple prose is quite common among amateurs who don't know what they're doing because it is an easy way to self aggrandize (look at what I can do) and hide flaws in what should actually be the focus.

When asked to write a full story in six words, Ernest Hemingway once responded with “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This story in a sentence has become somewhat of a trend now. So why not try it yourself? Try to write a story in six words. Here are some links for inspiration:

Smith Magazine Six-Word Memoirs

If there was an answer, he’d find it there.

-Another Place, Another Time from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg.

This is another of my favorite exercises from grad school:

Write a single page from a story that is meant to have this picture accompany it. In the course of the page you must use the quote, “If there was an answer, he’d find it there.” However, this page can neither be the first nor the last page of the story. Begin the page with a sentence that has carried over from the previous page and end the page with a sentence that will carry over to the next.

When I was in grad school I got an entirely different picture and quote out of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick which is, if you are interested, a beautiful book essentially composed of writing exercises without it ever being identified as such. Just pictures, titles, and quotes for you to weave a story around. I believe there is a website somewhere entirely devoted to submissions of stories inspired by the Burdick pictures. And waiting on my shelf to be read is a published book of short stories by famous authors, each having picked a story to write in full, called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. Which means not only can you do all these exercises you can find examples of other people doing them. 

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

WILLIAM BLAKE

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

CHARLES DICKENS

If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done.

WILLIAM STYRON

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

BILLY COLLINS

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.

W.P. KINSELLA

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

NEIL GAIMAN

You go to the attic of your mind and rummage around and find something.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK

Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.