This Year You Write Your Novel

by Walter Mosley

  But beyond revealing the shallow traits that help the reader know the players in your tale, you must make the characters express those deep feelings that will allow us to anticipate (with fear and joy) their transition.

  As in life, your characters develop mainly because of their dealings with one another. The complex and dynamic interplay of relationships throughout the course of the novel is what makes change possible.

  One of the primary ways we learn is through our relationships with other human beings. But what we learn is not always accurate or good. We might decide from watching our parents that women exist to serve men. We might decide that the foreigners down the street are unworthy of trust, incapable of love.

  The mistakes we make in life are what make us interesting. The errors your characters make, more than any other thing, will drive the engrossing aspects of your novel.

  a final note on character development

  Not all characters face the extreme dramatic tension that Bob Millar experienced. Any change in a character can be the subject of a novel—a young girl’s conflict with her stepmother has repercussions across an extended family; a man opening to love with a pet begins to see a world he never suspected; a student decides to become an artist even though her parents want her to be a doctor, she thinks.

  There is always conflict in character development, but this can be a subtle divergence.

  George decides to take a different route on his walk to work. This new path shows him three things: a pastry shop, a magic store, and an old man who stands on a corner selling books. These elements become central to George’s beginning to understand that he has wasted his life.

  story

  A man loses his magic goose. He looks all over the countryside, trying to find his beloved pet. This adventure takes him far from home. Somewhere on the journey the man realizes that he loved his pet but neglected her. He almost gives up hope, but then, in the barn next to his home, he finds the goose sleeping on a bed of hay.

  This, in its basic form, is a story.

  A story doesn’t have to be elaborate, convoluted, or hard to explain. The most elegant story lines are often simple and straightforward: an aging man, losing his memory to old age, tries to retain what is important; girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl realizes that she just missed a disaster; a couple climb a mountain to pay homage to their son, who died courageously and alone—along the way they find that they’ve lost each other.

  A story is a simple thing. It is a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end.

  A man, we’ll call him Trip, tells his wife, Marissa, that while he was out taking a walk, he ran into an old friend. This friend invited Trip to a bar, where the friend plied him with a sugary concoction that didn’t at all taste like it was one-third gin. When the police got there, Trip had no idea that the girls (his friend’s friends) at their table were underage.. .

  Stories are often lies. More often, they are only partial truths.

  What makes a story interesting? A subject that is absorbing and the way in which that story is told. A guy who hangs out around the watercooler at work engages you by using not only the power of the story but also his gestures and his voice. He winks, bellows, and grins knowingly while telling the story his friend told his wife after getting arrested at a bar known for prostitution. The storyteller has you doubled over with laughter. He relates the yarn word for word, just the way Trip must have done when explaining to his wife about his travails. But the tone of the storyteller’s voice and the delivery allow you to perceive a completely different meaning on top of Trip’s explanations.

  As a novelist I have often wished that I could tell my stories to each and every one of my readers and critics. “If only I could explain to them exactly what this phrase means,” I think. But this is not possible. The oral storyteller has me beat. He has a whole repertoire of physical tools not available in print. So when I’m telling a story, I have to re-create the winks and nods, insinuations and emotional outbursts, with words alone. I have to create a world for the reader that is just as intimate as that watercooler setting.

  So maybe I have Trip’s wife, Marissa, coming to her mother’s house to ask for the money to pay Trip’s fine. This will be a larger story, designed to contain the more humorous one of Trip’s great adventure.

  Marissa’s mother is a forty-year-old woman, named Love by her hippie parents. She is dour and untrusting. She hates Trip and thinks that her daughter is an idiot. Marissa believes Trip’s story—why wouldn’t she? After all, Victor, the friend who got Trip into trouble, didn’t tell Trip about the girls. He really didn’t know.. .

  The first story, Marissa and Love’s conversation, is the watercooler. Here we are told, at the same time Love is, about the dubious tale that Trip unloaded on his wife. We see the complex relationship between Marissa and Love. We may take sides with one or the other.

  As an introduction to the novel, this brings deeper levels of interest than the everyday oral tale. We are introduced to a much larger story than Trip’s perfidy or innocence.

  At the end of this first scene or chapter, Love either helps Marissa or doesn’t. Trip is sent to jail (this is his third offense, let’s say) or he comes home.

  We laugh about Trip’s adventure but feel sorry for Marissa. Why doesn’t she see that this man is no good for her? Why doesn’t Love see the trusting beauty of her daughter’s heart? Why is Trip such a fool?

  A novel is both a larger story and an accumulation of many smaller stories, such as the ones about Love and Marissa, and Trip at the bar.

  intuition versus structure

  At this point we have to ask the question—what is the larger story, or what is the novel about? For some writers, the intuitive kind, this might be a very difficult question to answer at first. They started writing the tale because of a story they heard at work about a guy somewhat like Trip. In their re-creation of the tale, they came up with Marissa, a girl much like Janey Fine, whom they knew in high school. Love, the mother, is their aunt from Spokane. This chapter was just a way to get into the larger story, whatever that might be.

  For the intuitive writer, there is no necessity to know the overall subject of Trip’s Night in Jail. From here they might have to slog through writing hundreds of pages before the larger story makes any sense to them.

  But the structured writer, the kind that knows from the first word that they are telling Marissa’s story of self-realization and ultimate liberation, will have a much different approach to the text.

  For this writer the next scene or chapter will take Marissa to a predestined place. For the sake of argument, we’ll say Marissa goes to the county jail to see Trip and tell him that her mother has refused to post his bail. Love wants Trip in jail and Marissa to move back home.

  The structured writer knows her story from beginning to end before she sets pen to paper. If you ask her if Trip and Marissa stay together in the end, she will reply without the slightest hesitation. She knows every beat of Marissa’s story.

  The intuitive and structured methods are equally valid. Whether you start out knowing the whole story or you don’t know a thing beyond the opening scene, you will still have a finished novel at the end of your labors.

  This end product is worth a bit of discussion.

  The structured writer knows from the outset that the novel is about Marissa, that Trip and Love, and people like them, are two sides of the same impediment that has always kept Marissa from flowering into a realized person (whatever that means). The act of writing is just finding the right way to tell the story. I mean, even an accomplished watercooler orator must tell his story in such a way that the listener will be entertained. The oral storyteller might practice his tale a dozen times on as many individuals before he gets just the right delivery.

  The intuitive writer, on the other hand, must discover the subject of his story. He follows Marissa from Love’s ranch-style house to the jailhouse to Victor’s apartment—where she’s running an errand for t
he imprisoned Trip. In this way the writer slowly gets to know his subject. The more he writes (and rewrites), the clearer this story becomes.

  This instinctive method of writing is random in appearance, but that is not to say that it is less ordered. Discovering knowledge from your well of unconscious information looks sloppy, but we must always remember that there are no straight lines in the chaos of our hidden minds.

  Whether your approach is structured or intuitive, you will have to discover form in your novel. As I said before, the novel is an accumulation of many stories coming together to tell a larger tale. Each of these stories (e.g., Trip’s adventure at the bar) will have a beginning, middle, and end; they will also lead into another part of the novel (in this case, Marissa going to her mother for help). The first section of this proposed novel will contain two stories that happen simultaneously: (1) What happened to Trip, and (2) Marissa coming to her mother and telling her the story about Trip.

  The intuitive writer, out of the practice of writing each day, will come upon these stories as they occur. Maybe this writer will decide to separate Trip’s adventure from the mother-daughter tale; maybe she will start out with Marissa going to the jail and telling Trip what her mother said and did.

  The structured writer may break down the whole novel into brief numbered descriptions of each story, chapter, or section. For example:

  1) Marissa goes to see her mother after finding out about her husband’s arrest.

  2) Marissa goes back to Trip, telling him that she can’t raise bail. He wheedles her into raiding her college fund.

  3) Marissa goes to the bank and lies to the manager, who is a friend of Love’s. The manager stalls her, promising to have a check by morning.

  4) Victor comes to Marissa’s home and offers to help, seducing her with his promises.

  5) Love comes to Marissa’s when she finds out from the bank manager about Marissa’s request. There, she finds Victor in Trip’s housecoat. . .

  This outline either will come before you write the novel (i.e., the structured approach) or will be implied after you’ve finished (i.e., the intuitive way).

  Most writers are not entirely intuitive or structured. Most of us have parts of both in our approach to fiction. Maybe we know the beginning and end of our story in general terms, but that’s all. Maybe we know every beat of the tale, but in the telling we change key moments. It doesn’t matter if you change your approach when writing your book. It is the novel that matters, not the literary religion of the writer.

  engagement

  The story’s job is to engage the reader. She, the reader, becomes concerned about Marissa and at the same time sympathizes with Love’s point of view. The reader has a good friend who once had a boyfriend like Trip. The way the writer explains the desert community in which they all live exposes the beauty and ignorance of semirural life in the contemporary Southwest, or at least the reader is persuaded to believe in that ignorance and beauty.

  The reader wants to know more about these characters and their humorous and sometimes poignant predicaments. From the moment that Love looks at Marissa’s chipped red nails and says, “Either put the nail polish on or take it off,” and Marissa replies, “Yes, Mama,” putting her hands in her jeans pockets, we know that these people have a story to their lives.

  The author pulls out all the stops, regaling us with language and characters and descriptions that pique our interest.

  This is the hook—the hook you use to catch readers, not the one that is used to pull the bad actor offstage.

  And, to continue the metaphor, once you’ve hooked the reader, you have to work them until they are reeled in and on the deck. Throughout the novel, you will have to keep up their interest in the characters they’ve met and the ones they are yet to meet. You have to show them more interesting sides of this community, and they will have to feel even more about Marissa and Trip and Love.

  For the entire novel, you will have to keep them wanting to know more and wanting to know what will come of it all. Mastering plot will achieve these ends for you.

  plot

  To keep your audience reading, you have to make them wonder—after each action, chapter, or scene—what happens next? Will Love dominate her daughter’s marriage? Will Marissa see that Trip is lying? What will happen if Marissa goes up to Victor’s apartment in the middle of the night? I need to know. I have to turn the page.

  So. . . . you don’t, when you introduce Victor, say, “Trip’s friend Victor, who will later seduce Marissa when she comes to his apartment to borrow bail money to get Trip out of jail. . . #8221;

  You let the reader worry that Marissa may be set upon by this sexual predator, but you don’t let them know what will happen. We already know that Victor is a hound from Trip’s story about the bar. We also know that Marissa is an innocent, and we are worried about what Victor might do.

  By holding back essential information, we arouse the reader’s curiosity and keep them reading; this is the function of plot.

  Plot is the structure of revelation—that is to say, it is the method and timing with which you impart important details of the story so that the reader will know just enough to be engaged while still wanting to know more.

  So, for instance, in the previous example of Bob Millar running from his torturers, I mentioned that we might learn that his son Lyle loves chocolate. At the time we get this detail, we believe that it is just a bit of character explication for the suffering boy. Indeed, this is true. But later Bob realizes that his son has sunk into depression because of his blindness and that no one can seem to reach him. Bob brings Lyle to their house and puts him in the center of his old room. He tells Lyle that he has put secret caches of the boy’s favorite chocolates in hiding places around the room. If Lyle wants to find those delicacies, he has to come down to Bob and Amy’s room, ask him for the placement of a chocolate, and then go back to his own room to find it. In this way Bob gives his young son both a goal and the confidence to move through his blindness.

  Bob is also forced to deal with his son. This action brings out something in Bob. He realizes, after a time, that self-hatred has blinded him just as surely as the brigands have blinded his son, that he needs a method like the one he’s set up for Lyle to face the killers of his family.

  This device is an example of the blending of different elements of fiction writing. Initially, we have the frightened character traits and the responses of Bob and Lyle to the big event at the beginning of the story. Lyle is blind. Bob is half blind and unable even to look at his torturers. Lyle wants sweet chocolate because it is something that gives him solace. Bob wants to rid himself of his bitterness against life.

  Later, Bob comes to see that he has abandoned Lyle, whom he has raised as a son even if they aren’t related by blood. He uses his intimacy with the boy, made concrete by the chocolate and the layout of their house, to reach him. This action allows Bob to see himself. And maybe it allows Ramona to see something deeper in this taciturn, seemingly cowardly man.

  From this point Bob at least understands what he has to do about his fainting spells at the jailhouse and in the court. Will he do it? That will have to come later.

  So here we begin to see how the various elements of fiction writing come together in plot. We have started a story with a horrific event that engages the reader’s interest. We have gotten to know the main characters through their responses to that event and their relationships to one another. What we have learned about these characters later allows us to understand their struggles with their physical and psychological wounds.

  How, and at what moment in the story, these character and story elements are revealed or advanced makes up the plot of your novel. Without this structure, your story may well be flaccid and uninteresting.

  There is another important component to plot that you must always consider: with plot you always have the potential for the element of surprise. You give the reader all the constituent parts of the tale, and then you add these facto
rs together, coming up with an obvious but wholly surprising piece of knowledge or event.

  The best way to understand this potential strength of surprise in plot is to look at the structure of most jokes. In a joke you are given a great deal of storylike information up front, but by the end that information comes together in an altogether unexpected way. For example:

  A poor woman, with a great big bag of money, goes to a bank officer wanting to make a deposit. When the handsome and arrogant banker asks her how she made her money, she says, “By making bets.”

  It is a great deal of money, and the banker is dubious. He asks, “What kind of bets?”

  She says, “Well, for instance, I might bet you one hundred thousand dollars that you have square testicles.”

  “You would make that bet?” the banker asks.

  The old woman nods.

  “For a hundred thousand?” The banker reaches for his zipper.

  “Wait,” the woman says. “Anyone knows that for a bet to be valid, you have to have a witness.”

  “I’ll call my secretary,” the bank officer offers.

  “No, no, no,” the old woman says. “She works for you. We must have someone beyond reproach. Do you know the lawyer across the street? The man named Morton?”

  “Why, yes,” the banker says. “Frank Morton is the most respected jurist in town.”

  The old woman smiles and says for him to call Morton and have him in his office tomorrow at nine.

  The next day the three meet in the banker’s office. The old woman says, “Okay, let’s see what you got.”

  The banker drops his pants and grins.

  “Pay up,” he says.

  “Oh,” the woman says, a little dismayed, “yes. They seem to be. . . round.”

  “You better believe it!” the banker confirms.

  “Then let me touch them to be sure that they are flesh. Let me hold them in my hand.”