Your First Novel

by Ann Rittenberg

  Addie:... that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching,

  and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.

  Cash, oldest son: But there wasn't no use in that. "There ain't no use in that," I said. "We can wait till she is underground." A fellow that's going to spend the rest of his life locked up, he ought to be let to have what pleasure he can before he goes.

  Vardaman, youngest son: When they get finished they are going to put her in it and then for a long time I couldn't say it. I saw the dark stand up and go whirling away and I said "Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash? Cash? Cash?" I got shut up in the crib the new door was too heavy for me it went shut I couldn't breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. I said "Are you going to nail it shut, Cash? Nail it? Nail it?"

  Multiple narrators also worked well in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. The wife and daughters of a missionary preacher take turns, in alternating chapters, describing their life in Africa. Their narrations are so personal and distinct that it's like reading different diaries:

  Orleana, the mother: And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a plane we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, as you gnaw at my bones.

  Ruth May, youngest daughter: The women are all Mama Something, even if they don't have children. Like Mama Tataba, our cooking lady. Rachel calls her Mama Tater Tots. But she won't cook those. I wish she would.

  Adah, middle daughter, lame on one side: Walk to Learn. I and Path. Long one is Congo. Congo is one long path and I learn to walk. This is the name of my story, forward and backward.

  GENRE AND POV

  Best-selling authors in certain genres might use certain POV styles more often than others—lots of detective stories and romances are written in first person, lots of literary novels in third. Look at your favorite novels within the genre you have chosen. What POV do you run across most often? I find there is quite a variety out there. The following is a list of classic and best-selling novels in a range of genres.

  MYSTERY

  • Black Alley, by Mickey Spillane: first person/past tense

  • Incident at Badamya, by Dorothy Gilman: third-person omniscient/ past tense

  FANTASY/SCIENCE FICTION

  • Saucer, by Stephen Coonts: third-person omniscient/past tense

  • What Dreams May Come, by Richard Matheson: first person/past tense

  ROMANCE

  • Up Island, by Anne Rivers Siddons: first person/past tense

  • Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell: third-person limited/ past tense

  CHICK-LIT

  • He's Got to Go, by Sheila O'Flanagan: third-person omniscient/ past tense

  • Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding: first person/past tense HORROR

  • Rosemary's Baby, by Ira Levin: third-person limited/past tense

  • The Dead Zone, by Stephen King: third-person omniscient/past tense

  • Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk: first person/present tense WESTERN

  • Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry: third-person omniscient/ past tense

  • Sackett's Land, by Louis L'Amour: first person/past tense

  POPULAR FICTION

  • A Time to Kill, by John Grisham: third-person omniscient/past tense

  • The Wedding, by Nicholas Sparks: first person/past tense

  LITERARY

  • The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger: first person/past tense

  • The Master Butchers Singing Club, by Louise Erdrich: third-person omniscient/past tense

  CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULT

  • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling: third-person omniscient/past tense

  • Shadow Spinner, by Susan Fletcher: first person/past tense

  Write your story the best way you can—one narrator or ten—using your gut. Just because a recent best-selling mystery was written in first person or your favorite romance was written in third person doesn't mean you need to go against your instinct for entertaining storytelling.

  VOICE_

  When people talk about an author's voice, they're not talking about who you chose for POV or whether you decided on first or third person. Your voice is the way you write—the sound of your prose—and what makes your writing unique. Here are some examples of varied voices:

  Anyway, Here's how not to plan a career: a) split up with girlfriend; b) junk college; c) go to work in a record shop; d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: One quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years.

  —High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby

  In the desert the tools of survival are underground—troglodyte caves, water sleeping within a buried plant, weapons, a plane. —The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

  Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

  —The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

  It is not my own memory, but later you will understand how I know these things. You would call it not memory so much as a dream of the past, something in the blood, something recalled from him, it may be, while he still bore me in his body.

  —The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart

  I've already got one surefire contemporary audition monologue (Mozart in Amadeus, a prankish man-boy I was born to play), but I need to come up with a classical one, too. So I've bought myself a brand-new Complete Works of Shakespeare—a really nice one, with a velvet cover and gold leaf on the ends of the pages—and I'm going to spend my entire summer reading it. Plus work on my tan.

  —How I Paid for College, by Marc Acito

  I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

  —I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb

  In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields ...

  —Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

  EMBRACE YOUR OWN STYLE

  When Michelangelo was just beginning his career, he tried to age one of his sculptures, a reclining cupid, in the hope of fooling a buyer into believing it was an older statue and worth more money. Think about it. Making a piece of art look like it was not a Michelangelo in order to increase its value. If you feel tempted to imitate a current best-selling author, remember that you may be tomorrow's star. Claim your own voice. Be yourself.

  Find Your Voice: Exercises

  If you are new to writing, it might take a while to get into your groove and find your voice. Try one of the following exercises.

  • Paraphrased Passages. Open a book that you perceive as having a very different voice from your own. Choose a paragraph and rewrite it with the same meaning, but in your own words. Try to make it as distinctly your own as you can. Notice what was the most changed.

  • Character Chat. Take your protagonist, or antagonist, and imagine her in a setting, or staring at an object, that is in high contrast to her usual world. A preschool teacher describing a prison yard. A brain surgeon describing a Native American dance. A billionaire describing the flavor of SPAM Luncheon Meat. A homeless child describing an opera performance
. If you try several of these "chats" you'll start to notice that one kind of perspective on life feels more right than the others. Why is that?

  • Many Moods. Take a single page of any novel and rewrite it three ways—as if everything about the story infuriated you, as if it was breaking your heart, and as if it scared the hell out of you. Do the same with any one page of a novel and rewrite it twice, once as formally as you can and once as informally as you can. Now look at these pages you've created. Which one seems the most natural?

  Maybe all of these exercises frustrate you. Great! Take out a fresh piece of paper and start writing about it.

  If after trying these exercises you still feel unsettled about your voice, don't worry. Your most important job is to tell the best story you can in the best way you can. Stop thinking about voice for a while—let it go until you've written a few chapters and feel more confident. If you write while feeling self-conscious about your voice, your voice will sound self-conscious. Relax—your voice will come.

  Annie Dillard, in her book The Writing Life, describes her struggle to chop kindling. She was hacking away at a chunk of wood on her chopping block, making tiny splinters fly yet making no headway, until she had a dream in which she realized she should aim her axe not at the piece of wood but at the chopping block underneath it. Suddenly her axe could make contact with the block, and the wood in the way split in two.

  When you find yourself overwhelmed by concepts—POV, tense, structure—think about the heart of your novel, the reason you wanted to write this story in the first place. That's what you're aiming at.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  The Writer's Journey, by Christopher Vogler. Based on the teachings of Joseph Campbell, this book applies the mythic structure to the art of storytelling.

  Novelist's Essential Guide to Creating Plot, by J. Madison Davis. As you think up new scene cards to beef up your outline, you can look to Davis's book for tips on maximizing intensity, solving problems, and creating subplots that work.

  Mastering Point of View, by Sherri Szeman. This book shows you how to use POV to reveal or obscure your character's motivations, how to remain tasteful in violent or erotic scenes, and how to handle multiple POVs without being overwhelmed.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  the bones of your story

  STRUCTURE AND PLOT_

  Plot is what happens in your story, and structure is the shape of that plot. Your outline is a map of the plot and structure you've worked out so far. Now we'll look at what makes a great plot and which story structures work the best. No one hires an architect who doesn't have a blueprint. Your outline is your blueprint—we need to make sure it's sound before you put a lot of work into building your novel from it.

  When you're just getting started, you need to give your right brain a chance to play in the orchards of creativity. That's why it's best to listen to your ideas and scene card your outline before considering structure. Then, your left brain gets a chance to do its favorite dance.

  There's no secret recipe for a good plot. Brilliance can be born of anything from a twelve-layered mystery to one old man in a boat trying to catch a fish. It's all in the telling. But make sure your plot has the elements of great storytelling: believability, heart, and tension. (We'll address believability in chapter six when we discuss detail, and we'll address heart in chapter five when we discuss character. We'll discuss tension here after a short introduction to structure.)

  What kind of structure makes a great story? Here are some examples of story designs that work:

  Rags to Riches. A character (Cinderella, Rocky) starts at the bottom and, through many adventures that show off his pluckiness, ends up on top. This structure works because everyone can relate to being at the bottom and everyone hopes to find happiness. All feels right with the world when the good guy (or gal) gets rewarded.

  Boy Meets Girl. Two people meet, we want them to end up together, they are separated by something, and through many adventures they get back together for a happy ending. Romance novels usually have this structure. Fred and Ginger movies do, too. But the ending does not have to be happy, as in Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, or the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. Whether or not the fates were aligned, this structure works as long as the love was real. Readers want to believe in true love.

  Coming of Age. The protagonist grows up and discovers a strength from within. This can be a literal coming of age, when a character goes from childhood to adulthood, as in Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson, or The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, or it can be an emotional coming of age, where a character has to transform emotionally or spiritually into the person he is meant to be. In Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company, the obsessive-compulsive hero has to battle his own mind to become a functioning adult.

  Fall of the Corrupt. A bad person is brought down from a seat of power to the feet of justice: The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk, for example.

  The Making of a Hero. The protagonist starts in humble powerless-ness, is at first reluctant or doubtful, then rises to save the day: for example, The Dead Zone, by Stephen King, or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling.

  There's No Place Like Home. The protagonist longs to throw off her past and strives to get the goodies while the getting is good, only to discover that greed has a price and the original situation is ultimately the better deal. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, is a classic example. Faust-based tales are also examples—The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Stephen Vincent Benet; The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, by Douglass Wallop; The Firm, by John Grisham.

  Salvation. Someone struggles to open the damaged heart of another, the way Heidi warms her grandfather's heart. (This one doesn't work well without a happy ending.) It can also work with someone saving not just one heart but a whole community, as in Chocolat, by Joanne Harris.

  Another way of looking at types of story structures is through the concepts of Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Society, and Man vs. Self.

  Man vs. Man. The protagonist is fighting a person or persons—your hero is battling the villain who wants to steal his land, romance his sweetheart, ruin his reputation.

  Man vs. Nature. The protagonist is fighting some literal force of nature—your hero is determined to get back to her family and has to fight a raging blizzard to do so.

  Man vs. Society. The protagonist is fighting a group of people with a certain mind-set or code—your hero is trying to set up a college for young men and women of color in 1950s Alabama, to the disapproval of the Klan.

  Man vs. Self. The two halves of the protagonist's personality are fighting—your hero wants to keep everyone happy and at the same time needs to break free. Will she stay in her loveless marriage for the children's sake, or run off with the traveling salesman?

  Your story does not have to easily fall into any of the above categories, but it needs to do what they all do—deliver. Readers want to care about the characters and what will happen next. And when readers pick up your book, they make it deal with you. If they buy your book and it's a romance, they expect to fall in love. If it's a thriller, they expect to be thrilled. No matter what kind of story you choose to write, when it's done it needs to hold up its end of the bargain.

  ARE YOU WRITING A SUBCULTURE STORY?

  Sterling Watson, whose first novel, Weep No More My Brother, was about prison life, believes that many first novels are subculture books. A young protagonist is shockingly thrown into a strange, new world with its own rules, language, hierarchy of characters, goals, prizes, rites of passage, and themes. Watson believes the subculture must be implied, rather than explained, so the reader is thrown into this new world in the same shocking fashion as the protagonist. Some examples include:

  • The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald: the rich

  • A Separate Peace, by John Knowles: prep school

  • The Godfather, by Mario Puzo: the Mafia


  • The Secret History, by Donna Tartt: elite colleges

  • Hell's Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson: motorcycle gangs

  USING THE THREE-ACT STRUCTURE

  To get a fix on the shape of your story, divide your plot into three acts.

  Act I. You create a problem for your characters and bring them to a turning point.

  Act II. You complicate the story with tension and deepen the characters, holding out hope but throwing wrenches into the works, then end with another turning point.

  Act III. You make the situation even harder to overcome, build to a climax, and deliver the resolution. The story can either end happily or unhappily.

  Here are some examples of stories broken into three acts.

  THE THREE BEARS

  Act I. A family of bears has a problem with the temperature of their breakfast food. They go for a walk. While they are out, a little girl shows up at the house and (here's a turning point in your plot) she's hungry.

  Act II. Goldilocks tries the various bowls of food, the chairs, and the beds. She's cuddled down for a nap upstairs when the bears come home and (here's the next turning point in your plot) they don't know she's upstairs, and she doesn't know they're downstairs.

  Act III. The bears discover, one by one, that their furniture and vittles have been tampered with. They climb the stairs and find a human child in the smallest bed. Goldilocks wakes (the climax) and runs away screaming. The resolution, though not perfect, at least leaves the bears with a house free of humans and with most of their furniture intact. (We also assume Goldilocks has learned a lesson and will no longer break into strangers' houses, steal food, or destroy chairs.)

  STAR WARS

  Act I. There is trouble afoot, a hero is needed, Princess Leia calls for help, Luke Skywalker meets the wise mentor Obi-Wan but refuses the call to act. The turning point comes when Luke's aunt and uncle are killed and he leaves home ready to accept his role as hero.