This Year You Write Your Novel

by Walter Mosley

  Dialogue is an endless pleasure, but you have to get it right.

  Do not attempt to use slang or dialect unless you are 100 percent sure of the usage. If you get it wrong, it will taint the entire book. In relation to this admonition, remember that “less is more” when you’re dealing with accents, dialect, and colloquial speech.

  “Yeah, I seen ’im.”

  If you’re sure about this articulation, then use it, but consider completing the idea through explanation rather than dialect.

  “Yeah, I seen ’im,” Bobby Figueroa said. Then he told me that Susan’s brother was on the lookout for Johnny Katz.

  As they say in boxing, “Protect yourself at all times.” If you aren’t sure about the way someone will say something, then find another way to get at the same idea.

  One final note about dialogue: a novel is not a play. Don’t house your entire story in conversations. Don’t try to contain the whole plot in dialogue. As with metaphor, overuse of dialogue can bewilder and distance your reader from the experience of the novel.

  a solitary exercise

  In your meticulous rewrite, one problem you will be looking for is flatness in the prose.

  I went to the store and bought a dozen apples. After that I came home and decided to call Marion. She told me that she was busy and so she couldn’t make it to the dance.

  I won’t try to rewrite this flaccid prose for you. I’m sure by this time you can see the various ways that you might approach the revision. So instead I will ask you to take these three sentences and make them into something more.

  Consider the character who is speaking, the potential drama behind Marion’s reason for not going to the dance, the missing details, and the misconnections. From this, make the lines into some kind of beginning for a novel. Don’t write more than a page. Pretend that it was written by some writer friend who wants to tell a story but has gotten lost somehow.

  I’m not much for giving exercises. I believe that the novel itself is your exercise. But in this case there is a reason.

  Most writers, especially new writers, can see the problems in other people’s prose while being blind to their own failings. This exercise should be an experience that you will keep in mind while working on the revision of your own book.

  music

  Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too. If there is no music to your novel, no sound, then the book will be at best incomplete. You must have a rhythm to your characters, a unique cadence to the way each one speaks, an identifiable cacophony to the world(s) they inhabit, and a beat to the story that, when varied, gives the reader an almost unconscious sign of events about to unfurl.

  Novels, like large musical pieces, have movements. But unlike an opera or symphony, the novel doesn’t have set notation and rules for its musicality. There’s no score. There is no set theory for the music of prose. These truths are at once daunting and exciting. No one will tell you how to score your novel, so that means you have to discover the music for yourself.

  “How can I do that?” you might well ask.

  The answer is simple. Buy a tape recorder, and when you’ve done all the rewriting you can stand, read your book out loud into the little microphone—yes, the whole book. It will take you seven or eight morning sessions, but it will be worth it. When you listen to yourself while reading, when you play back the words you read, the sound of the characters and their world will come to you. You will understand how you want Aunt Angie to sound. You will see what was missing from those scenes on the street. You will remember birds and transistor radios and the blustering walruslike attitude of the surly man who saved your protagonist’s life.

  A tape recording of your book will do more than help with the will-o’-the-wisp musicality of the piece; it will also help you see things that you missed while rereading silently. You will detect words and phrasings that are wrong, misplaced, and overly used. You will become aware of giant plot gaffes and a plethora of misspellings. This is because, after rewriting for a while, you begin to know what you are (re)reading without actually reading it. You overlook mistakes because you know what you meant.

  I cannot stress how important this recording can be to your work. Maybe you are in the fortieth week of the book. This is the moment to reconsider and reflect on what you’ve done. The tape recorder is a perfect test for the worth, and the music, of your work.

  If you don’t want to record the book (or if you can’t afford or borrow a tape recorder), you can still get a lot out of reading out loud to yourself. This exercise alone will allow you to experience the story another way.

  You could, if you have very patient friends or loved ones, read out loud to one or more of them. You don’t have to read much. Just five pages will be invaluable to your rewrite.

  when am I finished rewriting?

  Never. The novel never attains the level of perfection. No matter how much you rewrite and rewrite again, you will still find places in the book that don’t do exactly what you want. You will feel that some characters are hazy, and plot connections unsure. There’s a subplot that will seem to get lost and a fairly important character that will change but not as much as you might have wished.

  This is true for all writers in all forms. Books are not pristine mathematical equations. They are representative of humanity and are therefore flawed.

  “So when will I know to stop rewriting?” you ask.

  When you see the problems but, no matter how hard you try, you can’t improve on what you have. That’s it. You find yourself reading through the book for the twenty-fifth time, and as you see problems, you try to fix them, but the attempt only makes things worse.. . . Then you know you’re finished.

  Congratulations. You have a novel. This one is good. The next one will be better.

  5.

  Miscellany

  on genre

  A novel is a novel is a novel. A crime story is a novel. A romance is a novel. A book about aliens that came to Earth millennia ago and made us what we are is also a novel. Most books have elements of crime, mystery, romance, and the fabulous to them. No one who is serious about literature would dismiss One Hundred Years of Solitude for being a fantasy. No one would write off The Stranger because of its courtroom or crime details.

  All novels have similar elements. They have a beginning, middle, and end. They have characters who change and a story that engages; they have a plot that pushes the story forward and a sound that insinuates a world.

  In these ways all novels are the same, but if you take on the task of writing inside a particular genre, you will do well to pay attention to the conventions of that kind of book. A mystery, for instance, usually has a complex plot that engages much of the reader’s attention. Where is the missing girl? Who killed Cock Robin? The story here is, in large part, about a conundrum surrounding a crime. But you still have character development and ideas, relationships and themes.

  A romance novel is about the complications and heartbreak of love. This genus of fiction pays close attention to relationships, their impossibility, and their transcendence. Again, only part of the novel concentrates on these issues—the rest of the book is a story like any other.

  Westerns are about a place and time and the people who lived then. Science fiction speculates on what we might know in the future based on what we do know today. Courtroom thrillers need a trial and lawyers and judges, law enforcement, and an accused.

  If you take on a genre, you should know something about the form, but you shouldn’t let the form gain greater importance than the novel itself. All novels are about characters and their transitions based on the story being revealed through a precise plot.

  a note on aesthetics

  You may have come to this book with high literary aspirations and ambitions. You may have read Ellison and Bellow, Morrison and Melville. You may have wanted your novel to enter into a dialogue with these great
literary lights. And so when you perused the previous pages, you may have been a little let down. Perhaps you were looking for an epiphany, and all you found was a joke.

  If you find that the previous paragraph expresses your feelings, I say, “Do not despair.” This book is meant only to teach the rudiments of novel writing. Greatness lies in the heart of the writer, not in technique. A great novel does not have to be the work of a consummate wordsmith. A flawless literary technician will not necessarily create works of art.

  Even if you are destined to be a critically acclaimed writer, you will still need to learn the lessons rendered here. All I can provide are the bricks and mortar; the architectural design, and its art, must come from you.

  writing workshops

  Writing workshops are useful to many. I’m not sure if they are necessary for anyone. Trial and error is how we learn. Workshops are based on failed experiments. You bring in your story or chapter, and everyone, regardless of his or her level of expertise, weighs in on what you did right and wrong.

  Some of the criticism may be accurate; some might be completely off. But no matter what anyone says, it will not be your own idea, so you will have to keep those external notions at bay.

  The thing I found the most useful about criticism in writing workshops was what people, especially the instructor, said about the problems in other students’ work. These constructive analyses of other people’s writing were objective inasmuch as I didn’t have anything at stake but was likely to have the same problems in my own work.

  You can learn some things in a classroom situation, but this is not the only use for the writing workshop. The two most valuable benefits are interrelated: building community and making possible literary connections.

  Writing in America can be a lonely experience. It is not a revered occupation (unless you write the script for some blockbuster movie). Most Americans are not interested in the unpublished writer. If you say you write, they ask, “Are you published?”

  But in a writing workshop, everyone is interested in the process of writing and the life of writers. Your comrades in this setting will ask about what you are working on and what you are doing to promote the work. This community-building leads to the second use of the writing workshop: you meet people who are trying to put work out in the world. They talk about literary magazines, agents, publishers, small presses, and so on.

  If you are interested in a career as a writer—or just wish to be published now and then—workshops can be very useful.

  literary organizations, agents, publishers. . . and getting published

  Getting published is another Sisyphean task. You will be rolling your manuscript(s) up and down Publisher’s Mountain many a time before you get your first book over the top. At this moment in my career, after publishing twenty-seven books and at least as many short stories, I still get rejected on a regular basis. Recently I wrote a story that every major magazine rejected. After going to the major presses, I went to the smaller ones. Nobody will publish it—nobody.

  So don’t despair—accepting rejection is part of the job description.

  As a published writer, I have no special qualifications that allow me to tell others how to get published. I was studying writing at CCNY when my mentor there, Frederic Tuten, gave the manuscript for Devil in a Blue Dress to his agent. She agreed to represent me. This certainly does not make me an expert on publishing strategies.

  There are various publications that list all the magazines, agents, and publishers available to writers. There are organizations for every genre: the MWA (Mystery Writers of America), for example, has a newsletter and supports various conventions where workshops are offered on all the issues of the business of mystery writing. The other genres have similar offerings. If you are a student or teacher, there’s the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs), which also offers a newsletter and a convention with a ton of informative workshops.

  One useful tidbit of information that I can give you is that if you want to publish this novel (the one you wrote this year) with one of the big publishers in New York, you will need a literary agent.

  How does one get a literary agent?

  The best way is through someone who knows and works with that agent. A personal connection is always best. Failing that, you might, in your perusal of bookstores and libraries, have found certain contemporary novels that have a resonance with your own work. Call the publisher of said work and ask who represents that writer. Get the agent’s address and send her or him a query letter explaining who you are (a vitae), what you have written, and how that writing echoes work that the agent has represented. In the best of all possible worlds, that agent will ask you for a sample of your book. After that, keep your fingers crossed.

  The only admonition I have is that you should never work with an agent who charges for their services. They should want to make money off the sale of the book, not from you.

  6.

  In Summation

  That’s it—everything I know about novel writing in less than 25,000 words. The work is up to you. I’m sure that if you write every day and take these lessons to heart, you will write a novel that works. This process will transform you. It will give you confidence, pleasure, a deeper understanding of how you think and feel; it will make you into an artist and a fledgling craftsperson.

  Maybe it will do more.

  About the Author

  Walter Mosley is the author of numerous bestselling works of fiction and nonfiction, including the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries. The first Easy Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle. Another novel, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, for which Mosley received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, was made into an HBO feature film starring Laurence Fishburne. His first novel for young-adult readers, 47, was published in 2005. Walter Mosley was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.

  *Part of this issue has to do with character development within the story. We’ll get to that later on. (back to text)

  *That is, unless the character really is having ambivalent or conflicting emotions. (back to text)