Tips for Novel Writing (Without Going Totally Insane)

As someone who's written multiple (read: double digits) novels, it is both easy and hard - it really depends on how you approach it!

Romanticon's Tips for Novel Writing (Without Going Totally Insane):


Part 1: Before you start

1. Come up with an idea! If you don't have an idea, you don't have a novel. Simple as that.
2. No idea? Pick a genre you like. Do you read a lot of mystery, romance, scifi? Set out to write what you know.
3. Background research. If you want to write a Victorian period piece, you should read up on Victorian era daily life. If you want to write a space adventure, read up on rockets and space.
4. Plot-in-a-sentence. Imagine that you're in an elevator with Christopher Nolan. How do you convince him to buy your book as a movie deal before he reaches his floor?
5. Accountability. Set a reward for completion, but a punishment if you don't hit a daily goal. I've found that a good punishment for me is running a mile on each day I don't hit my word goal.
6. Choose a time or place to write, and make it a habit. I personally have a favorite coffee shop where I can people watch as I write.

To outline, or not to outline?

I've talked to other writers, and they swear by always/sometimes/never outlining their stories. Personally, it really comes down to what you feel works best for you. I outline, because I like the organization, and it helps me push through the "middle slog" when I no longer love my plot any longer.

I also find that a good outline means my book is already about 20% written! I'll start with just listing out the plot-in-a-sentence, and then I'll break that down into a list of events that happen in the book. Break those down a little further, and I've got chapters! Add in a few sentences describing what happens in each event, and I've got chapter summaries!

From there, I find it easy to just take a chapter summary a day and flush it out into a full chapter.

Part 2: Time to write! Uhhhh....

1. Have a word goal in mind before you start writing. I will usually aim to write 2,000 words a session - that gives me a 50k word novel in 25 days! Even a 500 word a day goal still gets you a novel in under 4 months.
2. Remove distractions. Check out apps like Write or Die, or even turn off your internet connection for the writing time. You can also find apps that block access to certain sites for a length of time (like turning off Reddit...).
3. Use a timer! I personally am a fan of the Pomodoro method - 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. Great for writing intensely without getting burned out.
4. Find a writing group! Writing is much easier with other people, even if it's only a digital connection.
5. Keep a cheat sheet of important details. Write down your characters' names, descriptions, important backstory details, etc. I've had a character's eye and hair color change halfway through the story because I forgot how I originally described him. This also helps you with backstory.
6. Don't go back and edit! Editing a story before it's finished is a death stroke to the novel. If you realize you need to go back and re-write a plot point, make a note of it, and then KEEP GOING to the end before backing up to make changes.
7. If you think of a cool plot point or detail to add in at a future chapter, make a note of it so you don't forget. At the bottom of my document, I keep a slowly growing list of "things to remember".

Part 3: Halfway through and hating it

1. Relax. Every writer hates their story at some point and wants to scrap the whole thing. Keep going.
2. If you have an outline, don't forget to refer back to it - or update it if your story takes a new direction.
3. If your characters get "stuck", think about their goals. What are they after to be happy? Why don't they have it, what's holding them back? How do they accomplish their goal? What does that mean for your other characters?
4. Remember, your story doesn't need to hit a certain word limit, just wrap up. Some of my novels stopped at 45k words, some went all the way to 65k words. The story ends when it ends.

I'm done! Now what?

First, congratulations!
Second, put the novel aside for a few days. You need to distance yourself.
Once you're starting to forget some of the details of what you've written, go back and re-read it, preferably with a highlighter. I review in the following order:

1. First, does the overall plot flow? If not, what do I need to change?
2. Second, do the characters stay consistent in talking style, goals, motivation, attitude, and so on? If not, fix that after the plot's solid.
3. How's the logical consistency? If a character doesn't have a car, how do they get around? Is a broke character flying around the world? Is an awkward geek flirting effortlessly with supermodels? Make sure things make sense.

When I read one of my stories, I often try and see it as a movie in my head. If scenes in the movie aren't clear or don't make sense, I know I need to rewrite that section.

Composition of a novel

When I write a novel, it ends up being about:

• 20% descriptions and scenery
• 40% dialogue
• 20% emotion (how's the character feeling, thinking?)
• 20% action

Your numbers may be different, but you do need a blend of all 4 of these. Leave out emotions, and your characters all feel robotic. Leave out dialogue, and the thing doesn't feel real. Leave out descriptions, and your readers will be utterly confused.

Okay, now I'm really done with the thing. Now what?

Now, put your baby out in the world! You can either:

• Submit to traditional publishers (although you'll want an agent for this, and it's a long slog)
• Publish it yourself for free! Check out programs like Scrivener for making an ebook, and printing platforms like Lulu to get a physical copy.
• Put it up for sale! I sell my novels through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, as well as on other sites.

Remember, every author hates his finished product most of the time. You only get better through practice and self-assessment. You can do it!

Some other resources to check out:

www.nanowrimo.org - National Novel Writing Month is a competition every November, where people challenge themselves to write a novel in a month, 1,667 words per day! It's a great way to get motivation, with local writing groups all across the US and around the world.

www.savethecat.com - guide for anyone wanting to write a screenplay. In addition, google "Save the Cat beat sheet" for a great outline for writing a novel.

www.kboards.com/authors/ - forum for self-published authors through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program, great for getting started in self-publishing.

www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php - Scrivener is a great tool for writers - it lets you organize by chapters, compile a book from separate documents, adjust formatting, and export in many different formats, including as an epub book.

www.duotrope.com - exhaustive, amazing list of all markets for submitting stories, long or short. Well worth the membership fee.

What is Noir?

There's always a lot of debate on what noir is. So much so that it comes up on every noir panel at every mystery con. It's reached the point where it's kind of a joke and people roll their eyes and say things like, "French for black."

I've had my view of it challenged and changed and that's affected my writing and what I focus on. So I think it's an important question.

Chris Holm, an excellent thriller and noir author (also did a noir UF series called The Collector through Angry Robot - you should check it out, it's excellent) put it the most succinctly of anyone I've heard. "Poor options, bad decisions, dire consequences."

There's a difference between noir and hard-boiled that I think gets overlooked a lot. Chandler is hard-boiled, Hammett is hard-boiled (though maybe not his RED HARVEST, but I'm on the fence with that one). Thompson and Goodis are noir. Macbeth is so goddamn noir it should have its own tropes page (ambition, murder, a femme fatale, blackmail, backstabbing, guilt, everything falls apart, a violent end).

Hardboiled characters are, as another author, Megan Abbott put very well, tarnished knights. They are good people in bad situations who walk through the muck and come out the other side intact. Philip Marlowe might be more cynical and jaded at the end of The Big Sleep, but he's still largely the same good person he was at the beginning. Sam Spade is rougher around the edges, darker and more morally ambiguous, but he's the same way. Hard-boiled characters operate within the seediness but remain largely untouched by it.

But noir characters. They're fucked from the word go. They might survive, but they'll survive changed, probably broken. Even if they win they lose.

Noir characters are doomed and they're often doomed by their own hand. Walter Neff in Double Indemnity is a perfect example. "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman." He's backed the wrong horse. And Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale, who's using him, and he KNOWS he's being used and he goes along with it anyway, is just playing him. And in the end, they gun each other down.

More tragic is when it's bad decisions for the right reasons and it all goes to shit, anyway. Take John Rector's THE COLD KISS about a young couple trying to escape a bad situation and run into a hitchhiker who pays them $500.00 for a ride, only to die in their backseat with a fuckton of money. They could report it, let it go, give the cops the money and walk away. But they've got a baby on the way. They're trying to make a new life. They're stuck in a motel in Nebraska in a blizzard and that money could really com in handy. But they should really do something about this corpse.

You can probably guess how that turns out.

The weird thing about noir, though, is how hopeful it is. It's surprisingly optimistic. Noir characters are driven by hope and optimism. I know that sounds weird, but think about it. These characters are doomed. They can't be anything BUT doomed. It's who they are. It's in their DNA. So why don't they just roll over and give up? Because they have hope. They might be screwed, they might even know they're screwed, but they can't let it go. That hope's too tenacious.

So... this probably went on longer than you were expecting. Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, short answer: "Poor options, bad decisions, dire consequences."

SOURCE

Writing and Original Ideas

It's an oft-repeated maxim in writing that good ideas are overrated: a good writer can make a good book out of an awful idea, and conversely, a bad writer will take a great idea and usually turn it an awful book. A common story, first brought to my attention by Brandon Sanderson, tells the origin of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. To quote Wikipedia:

The inspiration for the series came from a bet Jim was challenged to by a member of the Delray Online Writer’s Workshop. The challenger bet that Jim could not write a good story based on a lame idea, and Jim countered that he could do it using two lame ideas of the challenger’s choosing. The “lame” ideas given were “Lost Roman Legion", and “Pokémon”.

The moral of the story, aside from "don't make bets with Jim Butcher 'cuz he really takes that shit seriously," is: don't spend too much time worrying about whether your ideas are good or not, when you could be using that time to write (and thus becoming a better writer in the process).

There's a flaw in this story which I'll elaborate on later, but overall the utility of this advice is obvious. Just consider the structure of a typical novel: if the average novel contains 30 chapters, each of which contains 1-3 scenes (or more if you're feeling frisky), and each of these scenes requires at least a few ideas to make them interesting (to say nothing of the ideas needed for characters, the setting and the premise of the book as a whole), it's clear that a professional novelist absolutely must be able to generate a lot of ideas quickly to stay in business.

Of course, we don't want to write books by always chaining together the first things that pop into our heads (at least, I assume we don't; who knows, I haven't tried it), but we can't afford to spend hours or days deciding what path to take on every little detail either. So for the most part, once we have the "big picture" laid down the way we like it, it's better to just take what your brain will give you and trust your writing skills to paper over any residual lameness that's left over.

Now, all of the above is pretty standard craft-talk, but it's a subject that's close to my heart, because I was a longtime sufferer of the "is my idea good enough?" syndrome. In my particular variant, I had an unhealthy, often subconscious aversion to any idea which I perceived as "cliché" or overdone. And I wasn't alone either: I can't count the number of times I've seen people post variants of "how do I get past the feeling that everything has been done before?" to various writing forums.

It's easy to understand where this feeling comes from; literature, if not society as a whole, places a high value on originality. How many times have you seen a critic quoted on a movie poster or book jacket describing a work as "dazzlingly original" (or "brilliantly original" or "wonderfully original" or some similar adverb)?

Conversely, re-using ideas that have already been done is associated with plagiarism; do it too much, and you might be labeled a hack. Sure, maybe there's really no use in trying to be original since everything has been done before, but we don't want our books to be like everything else, do we? We want to be special, and if that means we have to try a little harder, then so be it.

It's a convincing fiction, and an easy trap to fall into, but for the rest of this article I'm going to make the best argument I can that the exact opposite of the above statement is true. Originality is not necessarily any better than being unoriginal, and in many cases may actually limit the potential audience for your work.
The basic tenet of my thesis is this: when consuming media, most humans are hard wired to desire familiarity first, and novelty only in small doses.

Rather than speculate on how this came to be (I have some ideas, but I'm not an evolutionary psychologist and this post is going to be long enough), I'll start with the example of my 3-year-old son, for whom we purchased a Netflix subscription a few months ago (ah Netflix, ultimate tool of the lazy parent). Right now, he's on a massive Spiderman kick--every time he sits down, it's Spiderman, Spiderman, Spiderman, which is fine since Netflix has approximately 10,000 Spiderman cartoon episodes available for streaming. Except, he doesn't want to watch 10,000 Spiderman cartoons; he wants to watch one cartoon, the first one he ever saw, where Spiderman fights the ice monsters. Over and over and over. It's a pattern he's engaged in ever since we started letting him watch TV: unless you demand that he watches something else, he will ask to watch the same thing again and again until some sort of threshold is reached and his brain switches and says I don't want to see this anymore, give me something new.

Of course, that might be typical for a toddler, but what about an adult? I'd argue that the degree to which this behavior changes as one enters adulthood is highly dependent on the individual. Some people will watch the same movie 200 times or read the same book every year for their entire life, while others are put off by anything that isn't very different from what they've seen before.

Personally, I'm probably in the upper quartile of novelty seekers; I hardly ever see movies twice and I never re-read books, which might account for some of the anxiety about originality mentioned above (and it would be interesting to see how many other creative-types feel the same way). However, my unscientific viewpoint is that the majority of humans actually fall closer to the familiarity-seeking side of the scale than the opposite. Just look at popular music: remember the Four Chord Song? Those with a background in music theory know that this video isn't just a clever joke: most rock songs really are very structured very similarly, drawn from a small set of intervals that people are used to hearing, which in turn makes those intervals sound pleasing to western ears. Then there are genres where the differences are even more shallow, like the blues; there are blues fanatics who would gladly listen to blues every day, even when almost every song uses the same twelve bar progression or the same minor pentatonic scale!

In terms of print, the amount of novelty the average reader seeks also varies by genre. Some genres (i.e. Gothic romance) are so predictable they could almost be written by filling in character names on a Mad Lib. Literary fiction sits on the opposite end of the spectrum, because almost anything is acceptable as long as the prose has good "style" (which in itself is subjective). There are some forms of science fiction where the goal is to come up with completely new ideas, and others where the same concepts are recycled over and over (space opera, etc.). But for the most part, if you survey the most popular works from any given genre, you'll find that they borrow liberally from popular books that came before.

And here's the key point: this is not a bad thing. On one level, a genre is nothing more than a set of promises made to a reader: the reader goes to a particular shelf and selects a particular book cover because they think they already know what's going to happen in that book. Of course, you as the author want to surprise them, toss them a curveball once in a while the same way a good songwriter will sometimes change up and add an accidental or put in that iii chord before the V-IV-I turnaround. But if you examine the above-mentioned popular books, you'll see for yourself how light of a touch they tend to use with originality: they pick one, maybe two existing tropes and invert them, or inject one completely new concept, but leave the rest of their genre's conventions alone. And that's what most people crave: to have their hands held, then be shaken up just a bit before being gently placed back into their comfort zone.

And therein lies the flaw in the Codex Alera story: "Lost Roman Legion" crossed with "Pokémon" isn't a lame idea at all. It's actually an awesome idea, because it re-uses two concepts that most people are already familiar with. If you don't believe me, try pitching a book to an editor that doesn't have some obvious comparison to another book which readers are likely to know already. Or, try doing an elevator pitch for a complex, completely original story and watch an agent's eyes glaze over, then repeat the process by saying "it's X meets Y!" (example: Tale Spin in the Warring States Period) and observe the result.
So, if you're going to be anxious about something, be anxious that maybe your ideas are too original to sell, and you need to dial it back and start stealing more. Start with the Tale Spin thing. That one's free.

Please don't interpret this article as me encouraging people to defy their own artistic sensibilities for the sake of sales. If your ideas have rarely or never been done before and that's the book you want to write, then go for it. But you can still be aware of humanity's propensity for familiarity and use that to understand your audience: you're aiming for the experimental noise-rock listeners, not the people that listen to Justin Bieber. On one hand, there's a lot less of the former than the latter, but on the other, if you can find those core fans and really speak to what they crave, you may find yourself with a truly devoted fanbase. After all, there's so little out there for a true novelty-seeker to enjoy.

On Writing

"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important."

--Gary Provost