This Year You Write Your Novel Read online

  What should be your plan? How should you go about reworking the manuscript in front of you until it is a finished book?

  There are different ways to approach this job, but there is one that all writers have in common: you must decide whether or not this document is worth the next nine months of your life.

  I’m not asking you if the book is pretty, well tooled, sensible, or even mostly comprehensible. What you have to decide here is whether the novel has a soul or not. Is there a story in all that mangled-up language that is worth the telling?

  This may take another reading, and one after that. Each of these can be considered a draft. Roll past the inelegant phrasings and contradictory timing. Ignore the plot flaws and hackneyed notions. Love isn’t articulate at first blush. Neither are most important ideas.

  Look closely at your book and make sure that you want to see the novel it implies.

  Once you have made this decision, there are different paths you can take. These paths are many, but all can be reached through either the intuitive or the structured approach.

  You may wish to start on page one, retooling sentences and setting up the theme at the same time. You might decide to go through the novel making only certain kinds of changes (e.g., dialogue tooling, spelling, word repetition) and making notes for future drafts when other issues arise.

  Whatever choice you make, tomorrow is when you begin the next nine months of draft making.

  the elements of rewriting

  In this section I will give you an idea of what is possible to attain in the process of rewriting, along with a few suggestions about what you should be looking for when you’re trying to make a better story.

  the nexus of character, story, theme, and plot

  When the writer began telling the story about Marissa and Love, she was under the impression that Love was just an overbearing force standing in the path of her daughter’s personal development. Maybe this writer was thinking about her own mother, or other older women she’d known who had been impediments while professing to have concern for her.

  When going over the story, the writer realizes that Love has a static character. She makes no transition in the telling of the tale, but she is obviously an important player therein.

  This is a problem that the novelist jots down. “What to do about Love’s character development?” she scribbles at the bottom of page 180.

  Later, on the ninth rereading, a line pops out at the rewriter. Let’s say that Trip has been released from jail, and even though he has been having an affair with Marissa’s best friend, Marissa takes him back.

  Enraged at her daughter, Love says, “Man’s just a wild dog without a leash.”

  This declaration doesn’t make sense; of course a wild dog doesn’t have a leash. The first consideration is to delete this bit of dialogue. But then again. . . maybe Marissa will see that the phrase makes no sense and learn something about her mother.

  This idea seems good. The author adds the thought into Marissa’s internal dialogue. But later the writer comes across the note about Love’s character. This brings her back to wild dogs with no leashes—what could she have meant? The statement is not really in character for Love; she’d more likely say, “That Trip’s a wild dog that should be put down.” But instead she wants him on a leash.. . .

  When no answer comes, the rewriter leaves this problem and goes on retooling sentences and looking for overused words. Then, a week or so later, she comes back to the wild-dog declaration. Love seems to be worried about Trip; she’s thinking that Marissa doesn’t know how to deal with a man like him. Maybe she believes that Trip will be harmed by a woman who doesn’t know how to grab hold of her man and make him see that he’s not some damned cowboy on TV.

  If this is so, maybe Love has a backstory—a time when she loved someone too much—and maybe she believes that this uncontrolled love killed her man. Love killed her man. This sentence takes on a double meaning. Love’s relationship to her daughter now makes sense, her hatred of Trip is somewhat clearer, and a possibility for her to learn something (or at least to recognize that thing) opens the potential for her character to change as the story unfolds.

  Love’s story might be the underlying theme of the novel. Maybe the characters are seeing themselves in their loved ones and not loving them for who they are.

  The story started out as a tale about a young woman who was hindered by those who professed love but did not deliver. But now, after this wild-dog notion, we see Marissa in a new way. Rather than being the personification of innocence, she begins to represent danger. Love and Trip become her victims. So instead of the original trite ending—the one in which Marissa moves to Phoenix and falls in love with her rich and handsome boss—we see Marissa at the cemetery, where, on that same day, funerals are being held for both her lover and her mother.

  The novel changes course from romance to black comedy, and we begin to tease out moments in Marissa’s life that seem innocent but when added up equal an unconscious force of nature that overwhelms everyone and everything around her.

  This, I believe, is a good example of what can come from rewriting. Our questioning of every phrase and every element of the novel will blend together and bond into a story that will do us well.

  the devil and the details

  The above example illustrates the most important overarching concerns in any successful rewrite: What is the novel about? How do the characters come together and change? What does it all mean?

  These large notions are important, but if you don’t write a reader-friendly book, no one is ever going to get that far.

  The following are the minutiae of rewriting any piece of prose.

  repetition

  First, you must cut out all extraneous repetition of words and phrases. Punctilious, pinewood table, amber eyed, flatulent, moribund. . . these words, and most others, should hardly ever be repeated within a few pages of one another. To go even further, they shouldn’t be used more than two or three times in the whole book.

  Repetition, as any poet can tell you, is employed to bring attention to the word or phrase being used. Maybe the word has more than one meaning (e.g., “Love” as a name and an emotion). Maybe it echoes a deep emotional state. “Death all around me—Death, with its sightless eyes and mirthless grins; Death, with its silent tales and broken promises; Death, that eternal visitor, who came to my mother and father and theirs and theirs and theirs.”

  If you’re going to repeat a word or phrase, have a reason for it. Maybe it’s used to create a mood or to underline deep desire. Maybe your use of repetition will show you something about the story; if not, get rid of it. If the repeated word seems necessary, open a thesaurus and find a synonym. If there is no appropriate equivalent, rewrite the sentence. And if the sentence refuses to be rewritten. . . well, okay, you can use the repetition—but just this once.

  descriptions and condensation

  Any simple act or situation in life is comprised of hundreds of actions and circumstances. Just look around the room you’re in—the number of chairs, tables, and paintings on the wall; the subject of those paintings; the color of the wall or carpet; the aberrations inside those colors. There might be a fly buzzing overhead or a dead mosquito amid clumps of dust in the corner behind the couch. What is the temperature of the room? How many people are there? Are the ceilings high? Low? Is it a large room? Are there sounds other than the fly in the room? Are there sounds from the outside? The people might be talking. Do you understand them? No? Why not? Is it because they are murmuring or because they are speaking a foreign language? (Maybe you don’t hear as well as you once did.) What kind of clothes are they wearing?

  These are more or less objective observations of the place one might be in. But now that person takes an action. Let’s say that he picks up a cup of coffee (by the handle or the body?) and drinks from it. Is the coffee hot? Tepid? Cold?

  The character is sitting across from someone, a woman he’s interested in. What is she wearing
? How old is she? What is her expression? What irregularities are there in her skin?

  You could go on forever. Details are endless, and they will overwhelm your story unless you master them. Even the most interesting acts cannot bear the weight of too much detail.

  Let’s say that the man and the woman leave the public hall and go upstairs to the bedroom. They begin to make love. Their progress in this will seem endless if you record every action taken. He puts a hand on her shoulder. She looks away. He touches her forearm and notices a dark cloud out the north-facing window. She caresses his right cheek with the palm of her left hand. They stare into each other’s eyes.. . . Sixteen pages later, they’re getting ready for their second kiss.

  Details will devour your story unless you find the words that want saying.

  The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character. The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character. (You see—repetition works.) So when the main character, Van, walks into the room, he’s nervous about talking to Rena, the woman he’s interested in. Maybe the fly manifests Van’s anxiety. He notices its lonely buzzing in the big empty space of the ceiling, by the pastoral scenes of the paintings on the wall, and onto the wedding ring, which glints like an amber fog light from his finger.

  You might use other details, but here again they should be used only to further story or plot, character development, or the mood of the scene.

  The room is warm. Van knows this even though he’s feeling chilled. He knows because of the three beads of sweat on Rena’s forehead. The murmuring of the men sitting two tables away makes Van nervous. He wonders what they’re saying. He tries so hard to make out their words that he misses what Rena has just said.

  The awareness of details comes into the novel via the experiences and emotional responses of your characters. Using this as your rule of thumb, you can cut out most extraneous facets in any scene.

  But there’s another level of description and condensation that you must be aware of—you should not confuse the reader’s understanding of character responses with overly ornate and ambivalent detail.

  Van was irate, angry, furious, out of his mind with rage.

  Here the fledgling writer is trying to build a mood by using three different words and one phrase that convey similar meanings. Each word is more powerful than its predecessor until we come upon a six-word saying to cap off the sentence.

  The problems with using this kind of language and structure to explain Van’s feeling are threefold. First, the words are at odds with one another. Is Van angry or out of his mind with rage? Is he furious or irate? Second, even if we accept all the words as a buildup to a kind of personified explosion, we still have to wonder at those aspects of the definition of each word that make what is being said a kind of repetition. It’s always best to give the reader one emotional state at a time to deal with.* The third problem with this description of Van’s fury is the question of who it is that’s giving us the information—even an omniscient narrator wouldn’t be so removed from the character’s heart as to use this objective, albeit strong, language. The description of Van’s anger feels like an out-of-kilter definition rather than a closely felt experience.

  So how do we fix this sentence? There are many ways. If the only thing that bothers you is the narrative voice, you might want to change the declarative sentence into a bit of dialogue. Maybe Rena, after seeing Van obliterate that annoying fly with the flat of his hand, tells a friend what she thought Van was feeling. Depending on her character, this sentence might work well. Dialogue can be sloppy, overly elaborate, inarticulate, and many other things that the novel’s narrative voice can never afford to be. If we believe that Rena communicates in this repetitious manner, we will accept the information and move on without question.

  We could get rid of all the adjectives and simply show Van smashing the fly and then looking at the remains of the insect with grim satisfaction.

  We might have Van say something over the top and inappropriate for this seduction scene.

  “I hate that goddamned fly.”

  The easiest thing to do is to get rid of the sentence and go on. Maybe his rage or anger or fury is not all that important to the story.

  Always try to pare down the language of your novel. Is that word necessary? That sentence, that paragraph, that chapter? Most writers tend to overwrite. They either fall in love with their use of language or want to make sure that the reader understands everything.

  But, as we saw above, you can never say everything. There are too many details in reality. Fiction is a collusion between the reader and the novel. If you have brought your characters into the story in such a way that their emotions both color and define their world, you will find that readers will go along with you—creating a much larger world as they do. It won’t be exactly the world you intended them to see, but it will be close enough—sometimes it will be better.

  You must investigate each sentence, asking yourself, “Does it make sense? Does it convey the character properly? Does it generate the right mood? Is it too much? Does it get the narrative voice right?”

  Every sentence.

  Every sentence.

  dialogue

  How your characters express themselves is just as important as what they say.

  “Man walk up to me,” Roger said, “an’ say he know my name. . . I told him he better get on outta here.”

  We know a great deal about Roger from just this snippet of dialogue. He’s angry and confrontational. He might be afraid of something, and he identifies himself with a street sensibility. He probably isn’t well educated, but he has a subtle appreciation of language. We understand that Roger’s dialogue has the potential to tell us things he doesn’t say.

  “What’s wrong?” Benny asked Minna.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on,” he said, coaxing her by touching the side of her hand with a single finger.

  “Um. . . #8221;

  Here we appreciate an underlying disturbance in Minna. Benny sees it and tells us about it as he questions his friend and reaches out to her. He has seen beneath her subterfuge. It might be that these few words are intended to tell us about the relationship between these two rather than to lead us to some undisclosed personal problem.

  Many new writers use dialogue to communicate information such as “My name is Frank. I come from California.” This is the simplest use of dialogue. It’s okay for a job interview or a chance meeting in a bar, but in the novel, dialogue is meant to be working overtime.

  Every time characters in your novel speak, they should be: (1) telling us something about themselves; (2) conveying information that may well advance the story line and/or plot; (3) adding to the music or the mood of the scene, story, or novel; (4) giving us a scene from a different POV (especially if the character who is speaking is not connected directly to the narrative voice); and/or (5) giving the novel a pedestrian feel.

  Most of these points are self-explanatory. The last two, however, are worth a closer look.

  If your novel is written in the first or third person, you have a little extra work to do with those characters who are communicating most directly with the reader. A first-person narrator, for instance, might not be aware of certain aspects of her personality or the effect her presence has on others. The writer wants her to be humble in this way and therefore brings in another character to say what the narrator cannot say (or maybe even know) about herself.

  “They all love you,” Leonard told me. “Everybody does. Markham said that the only way they’d let me come was if I brought you along.”

  The narrator could deny what Leonard has told her. Later on we will be able to tell if he was right or wrong.

  Making the dialogue pedestrian might seem counterproductive to the passionate writer. Here you are, telling us a story of profound feeling in which the main characters are g
oing to experience deeply felt transitions, and I’m asking you for ordinary and prosaic dialogue.

  Absolutely.

  If you can get the reader to identify with the everydayness of the lives of these characters and then bring them—both reader and character—to these rapturous moments, you will have fulfilled the promise of fiction. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence. Dialogue is an essential tool to bring them there.

  Among the five points, there isn’t anything all that challenging. I’m sure the new writer will have no difficulty getting a secondary character to interact with the first-person narrator, giving us much-needed information. It’s not that hard to put plot points into someone’s mouth.. . .

  The problem is getting three or more of our five rules working at the same time. The problem is making sure that when Leonard is telling us something about the first-person narrator, he’s also telling us something about himself and advancing the plot.

  “They all love you, not me,” Leonard said. “Markham didn’t care that I stole that money for him. He told me I could get lost if I didn’t bring you with me. You’re the only one him and his crowd want to see.”

  Inside this dialogue there is jealousy, hints of self-deprecation, the fact that Leonard is a criminal, and the impact that the narrator has on others.

  The information in this example might be too blunt. But I’m sure you see what I mean. Dialogue in your novel is not just characters talking. It is sophisticated fiction.

  There are many different ways to get people to speak in novels. They can have conversations, write and read letters, and leave messages on answering machines; someone can tell one person something that someone else has said; one character can overhear someone else’s conversation. People shout, whisper, lie, seem to be saying one thing when they’re saying something else.