This Year You Write Your Novel

by Walter Mosley

  Copyright © 2007 by Walter Mosley

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: April 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04043-3

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. The General Disciplines That Every Writer Needs

  2. The Elements of Fiction

  3. Where to Begin

  4. Rewriting, or Editing

  5. Miscellany

  6. In Summation

  About the Author

  Also by Walter Mosley

  Easy Rawlins Books

  Devil in a Blue Dress

  A Red Death

  White Butterfly

  Black Betty

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Gone Fishin’

  Bad Boy Brawly Brown

  Six Easy Pieces

  Little Scarlet

  Cinnamon Kiss

  Fiction

  RL’s Dream

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

  Blue Light

  Walkin’ the Dog

  Fearless Jones

  Futureland

  Fear Itself

  The Man in My Basement

  47

  The Wave

  Fortunate Son

  Fear of the Dark

  Killing Johnny Fry

  Nonfiction

  Workin’ on the Chain Gang

  What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

  Life Out of Context

  In memory of William Matthews

  Introduction

  I’m writing this book as a guide for anyone who wishes to commit themselves to the task of beginning and completing a novel within a year’s time. Here I will give you all the knowledge I have about writing, and rewriting, fiction.

  Writing a novel is not nearly as difficult as some people would make it out to be. Anyone who communicates verbally, or by sign, is a writer of sorts. Any manager, mother, counselor, teacher, or guy who hangs out on the corner telling tall tales is a writer-in-waiting.

  What I will try to point out in the following pages is how you can redirect your natural abilities at communication into creative prose.

  But before we begin our journey, I have to present you with a few caveats concerning the goal.

  First, I am fairly certain that anyone who reads this book, and who applies its lessons with tenacity, will be able to produce a complete draft of a short novel. I emphasize the word “short” because I doubt if many first-time novelists will be able to complete a draft of some equivalent to Bleak House or War and Peace within the requisite time. I don’t promise a masterpiece, just a durable first novel of a certain length (let us say fifty to sixty thousand words).

  Second, I am not promising that you will, necessarily, produce a book that is destined to be snapped up by the publishing world. It may be that you have the right story and the right words to interest a publisher. It might be that you have written a beautiful piece that no one is interested in. And, of course, your first attempt as a fiction writer might not come up to the standard set by the industry.

  I can’t promise you worldly success, but I can say that if you follow the path I lay out here, you will experience the personal satisfaction of having written a novel. And from that point, anything is possible.

  The body of this book is broken up into five essential sections. It starts out with the general disciplines and attitudes that a writer of fiction must adopt. These practices will see you past many of the emotional, intellectual, and psychological restraints that come to bear on almost every writer.

  Next I will give an exhaustive explanation of the elements of fiction writing. Here I will talk about plot and story, character and character development, showing versus telling, and narrative voice. This section will be capped off with a discussion of poetry and how important that discipline is to any writer. These are the tools of the writer of fiction; without them, the story you wish to tell will lose its way and founder.

  After presenting you with these tools, I will give you some choices about how you might start your book. I will also talk about the process of writing, explaining how to create a first draft—pretty much painlessly.

  After learning how to go about writing and studying the tools with which to accomplish this task, you will find out about editing, which is another term for rewriting. Rewriting is the most important job for the novelist; this is where the real work begins. The first draft is little more than an outline of the novel you wish to write. Rewriting is where you make the story into song.

  After this music lesson, we talk about the miscellaneous topics of genre, publishing, and aesthetics.

  Once you read these few pages, I believe that you will be prepared to write a book of your own. From that point on, all you’ll need is the desire and the will to write your novel.

  1.

  The General Disciplines That Every Writer Needs

  writing every day

  The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day—every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.

  There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.

  If you want to finish this novel of yours within a year, you have to get to work! There’s not a moment to lose. There’s no time to wait for inspiration. Getting your words down on the page takes time. How much? I write three hours every morning. It’s the first thing I do, Monday through Sunday, fifty-two weeks a year. Some days I miss but rarely does this happen more than once a month. Writing is a serious enterprise that takes a certain amount of constancy and rigor.

  But will and regularity are only the beginnings of the discipline and rewards that daily writing will mean for you.

  The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write to begin with.

  The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.

  What, you ask, is the dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel.

  You may have spent only an hour and a half working on the book, but the rest of the day will be rife with motive moments in your unconsciousness—moments in your mind, which will be mulling over the places your words have touched. While you sleep, mountains are moving deep within your psyche. When you wake up and return to the book, you will be amazed by the realization that you are further along than when you left off yesterday.

  If you skip a day or more between your writ
ing sessions, your mind will drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you’ll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day.

  Some days you will sit down and nothing will come—that’s all right. Some days you’ll wish you had given yourself more time—that’s okay too. You can always pick up tomorrow where you left off today.

  In order to be a writer, you have to set up a daily routine. Put aside an amount of time (not less than an hour and a half) to sit with your computer or notebook. I know that this is difficult. Some of you live in tight spaces with loved ones. Some of you work so hard that you can’t see straight half the time. Some of you have little ones who might need your attention at any time of the day or night.

  I wish I had the answers to these problems. I don’t. All I can tell you is that if you want to finish your novel this year, you have to write each and every day.

  learning how to write without restraint

  Self-restraint is what makes it possible for society to exist. We refrain, most of the time, from expressing our rage and lust. Most of us do not steal or murder or rape. Many words come into our minds that we never utter—even when we’re alone. We imagine terrible deeds but push them out of our thoughts before they’ve had a chance to emerge fully.

  Almost all adult human beings are emotionally restrained. Our closest friends, our coworkers, and our families never know the brutal and deviant urges and furies that reside in our breasts.

  This restraint is a good thing. I know that my feelings are often quite antisocial. Sometimes I just see someone walking down the street and the devil in me wants to say things that would be awful to hear. No good would come from my expressing these asocial instincts—at least not usually.

  The writer, however, must loosen the bonds that have held her back all these years. Sexual lust, hate for her own children, the desire to taste the blood of her enemy—all these things and many more must, at times, crowd the writer’s mind.

  Your protagonist, for instance, may at a certain moment despise his mother. “She stinks of red wine and urine,” he thinks. “And she looks like a shriveled, pitted prune.”

  This is an unpleasant sentiment, to be sure. But does it bring your hero’s character into focus? This is the only question that’s important. And there’s no getting around it. Your characters will have ugly sides to them; they will be, at times, sexually deviant, bitter, racist, cruel.

  “Sure,” you say, “the antagonists, the bad guys in my book, will be like that but not the heroes and heroines.”

  Not so.

  The story you tell, the characters you present, will all have dark sides to them. If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.

  Our social moorings aren’t the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon. Many writers come to the discipline after having read the old, and new, masters. They read Dickens and Melville, Shakespeare and Homer. From these great books of yore, they develop tics and reflexes that cause their words to become stiff and unnatural.

  Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being created on this day.

  You will not become a writer by aping the tones and phrases, form and content, of great books of the past. Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you.

  Don’t get me wrong—you can read anything and learn from it. But your learning will also come from modern songs, newscasts, magazine articles, and conversations overheard on the street. A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints.

  Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it. Many writers use themselves, their families, and their friends as models for the characters they portray. A young woman who has had a difficult time with her mother may render a tale in which the mother seems overly harsh, maybe even heartless. She (the writer) wades in, telling the story in all its truth and ugliness, but then, feeling guilt, she backs away from it, muddying the water. Maybe she stops writing for a while or changes her subject.

  Whatever it is she does, the novel suffers.

  This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day.

  This form of restraint is common and wholly unnecessary.

  To begin with, your mother is not reading what you have written. These words are your private preserve until the day they’re published.

  Also you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.

  Don’t let any feeling keep you from writing. Don’t let the world slow you down. Your story is the most important thing coming down the line this year. It’s your year—make the most of it.

  avoidance, false starts, and dead-end thinking

  Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer’s greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.

  Straightforward procrastination is an author’s worst enemy, but there are others: the writer who suddenly has chores that have gone undone for months but that now seem urgent; the diarist who develops a keen wish to write about her experiences today instead of writing her book; the Good Samaritan who realizes that there’s a world out there that needs saving; the jack-of-all-trades who, when he begins one project, imagines ten others that are equally or even more important.

  Forget all that. Don’t write in the journal unless you’re writing a chapter of your book. Save the world at 8:30 instead of 7:00. Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls.

  For that time you have set aside to write your novel, don’t do anything else. Turn the ringer off on your phone. Don’t answer the doorbell. Tell your loved ones that you cannot be disturbed. And if they cannot bear to live without you, go write in a coffee shop or library. Rent a room if you have to—just make the time to write your book.

  a final note about process

  The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It’s not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.

  2.

  The Elements of Fiction

  the narrative voice

  The voice that tells the story is the first thing the reader encounters. It carries us from the first page to the last. We, the readers, must believe in this narrative voice or, at least, we must feel strongly for that voice and have a definite and consistent opinion about it.

  The first words and all the rest you encounter throughout the novel give informatio
n, images, and emotions all at once, much the way it happens on that street corner with the guy telling tales.

  “Man come outta that burnin’ buildin’,” Joe Feller said, his voice straining and hoarse, “red as a lobster with smoke comin’ out of his clothes.”

  This brief snippet of dialogue brings us immediately into an event that we know some things about while suspecting others. There was a building on fire, we are told. There’s a man who was in the fire for some reason. Maybe he was a victim or a hero. It is even possible that he set the fire—we don’t know. But Joe Feller’s voice has authority, and we’re ready to hear him out in order to find out more about this smoking red man.

  This is narrative voice. Actually it is more than one voice. There’s the character (Joe Feller) speaking, but there’s another voice (the narrator) telling us what the speaker said and explaining the speaker’s emotional state by describing the strain in his voice.

  There are many kinds and styles of narrative voices, and it is imperative that you decide which one you will use to tell your tale. Although there might be thousands of subtle differences in the narratives of the novels you’ve read, there are only three types that you need to be aware of. Actually there are four, but the last one is a voice you should never use: your own.

  first-person narrative

  The first-person narrative, put simply, is when the “I” voice is telling the story.

  I met Josh Sanders on the first day of March 1963. He was a shy man with big hands and an earthy smell about him. He reminded me of my grandfather, whom I hated more than Judas.

  We know from the first word that we have an intimate relationship with the narrator of this tale. He, or she, has a name, an age, and a history that we will learn about as we read. This narrator is our conduit to the novel. She might be a college graduate or an illiterate. She may be enchanting, cantankerous, or even untrustworthy. Every bit of information we learn about this narrator helps us understand more of the story being told.

  This is the most familiar storytelling voice, the one with which we all naturally relate the stories of our days to those we know. In a first-person narrative, you are stuck with this one voice. Therefore this character, or at least her point of view (POV), must be engaging. Her story must evoke strong feelings in us. We are compelled to empathize with her experiences and care about the world she moves through. We have an emotional connection to this narrator, and because of this bond, we want to learn what happens in her story.