These considerations of subject really are about developing a rich base for a story to be told in. Think of this stage as finding rich loam for planting your story. Rich or poor? Big city or small village? War or peace? High finance or western ranching? Immigrants moving into Missoula? Aliens into St. Louis? Missionaries in the Congo? Trying to define something interesting and specific and full of possible conflict helps you to develop your story in a place and time where what other people believe and want affects your characters; where other things are going on in the community; these are the attributes that make your story robust. What “matters” in a novel needs to matter both specifically and broadly. The reader has to feel with the protagonist, but also with the world of the novel. It’s obvious why there are so many novels set in wartime, so many adventure stories. We’ll talk about this more when we talk about context.
Think of yourself as a pilgrim on a long trek: You really do need a passion before you walk very far. Ask yourself:
Why do I want to write this novel? What is it about the subject that inspires or drives me to this story? (Does it tie into something in my family experience? Something that I aspire to? Something that scares me?)
Why am I a good writer to tell this story? (Special knowledge? Special interest? Love of “digging” into history? Experience with some aspect of the story?)
What do I know—or what am I willing to learn—that will make a good story?
Exercises
State the subject of a novel you know. Think about how the novel develops it. Do this with several novels. (Don’t expect it to be an easy task.)
List some of the things you had to research in order to write your story. When did you realize there was deep story in the subject? Do you need to do further research for your revision? If so, try to narrow the focus by writing out questions and seeking the answers.
Read some descriptions of novels on booksellers’ websites. State the subject of each.
Make a list of writers you have liked enough to read at least two of his or her books. State the subject of each book. Is this a writer with a theme you see across various novels, or does the author totally change the realm of subject matter? (There’s no right or wrong answer. Writers do tend to do one or the other sort of thing in selecting subjects for their novels.)
Name some writers you think of as “writers of” some subject or theme. For example, Jodi Picoult writes about social issues that challenge families. Robert Goddard favors mysteries set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ann Patchett writes about wildly different subjects, reinventing herself as an author over and over. Kent Haruf wrote about common folk living in small towns. Margaret Atwood, with over forty works of fiction, has covered a lot of ground, but several of her books have visionary, otherworldly, sometimes terrifying subjects. Alice Munro imbues her Canadian “ordinary people” characters with deep inner lives that reflect history, culture, and psychology—as well as the fallibility of memory.
Imagine yourself as a “writer of books about—.” What subjects intrigue you? What would you want readers to say about your books? How would you be identified? By subject? By writing style? What makes you different?
3. State what your novel is about (action and effect).
The goal here is to be able to speak about your novel succinctly in a way that indicates not what the subject of the novel is, but what actually happens. Your statements become stars to guide you. You think, What next? and your statement suggests direction. You review a scene and ask, Did I illuminate my aboutness? Your ideas become concrete. My students tell me that once they go through this process, laying out sequences of scenes under each of the two parts, and then reducing the whole exercise to a single statement of aboutness, they go around with it thrumming in their brain! It really does become the North Star. But it can take a lot of false starts to find the right way to describe a novel’s “aboutness.”
This approach considers two aspects of the novel, then puts them together. One is about event, the other is about character emotions and behaviors.
The first statement is focused on action. (What events occur that have consequences?)
The other statement is focused on affect (What are the emotions and psychological states in the protagonist that are altered by events? How is behavior shaped?) and effect (What does this lead the protagonist to do?).
In the following examples I have included notes about what happens in a sample of novels to develop the statements. Strong statements of aboutness always suggest event. Note that the point of developing these two statements is to parse the story in a way that helps you identify the threads of plot and subplots. This is a template, not an elevator pitch. That said, when I work with students on developing queries, we start here.
Example 1 (Plain Seeing)
The story is about:
a. what happens when a girl loses her mother in adolescence (she grows up with unanswered questions; she makes immature life choices; she goes in search of her mother’s story)
and
b. what happens when a woman is locked in grief about the past and can’t love her family in the present (she seeks fulfillment in affairs; she withholds true commitment to her husband; she fails as a mother when her daughter most needs her; she searches for meaning)
Then you can collapse the two parts (the events and the emotions) into a single aboutness statement that describes the novel: A woman whose obsession with her dead mother’s mystery has ruined her marriage and her relationship with her teenage daughter goes on a search for her mother’s true story.
Example 2 (Opal on Dry Ground)
The story is about:
a. what happens when a woman’s divorced daughters move in with her (she tries to direct their lives, right down to making their beds)
and
b. what happens when the mother feels responsible for her daughters’ lives (she neglects her new husband; she incessantly mourns her own mother’s death; she mixes her own emotions with her daughters’)
Aboutness statement: A woman’s divorced daughters resist her efforts to remake their lives, finding their own roads to independence and leaving her to construct her own life without them.
Example 3 (The Scarlet Letter)
The story is about:
a. what happens when a young Puritan woman has a child by an unidentified man not her husband (she is reviled and shunned, but she makes a life for herself and her daughter, while her absent husband secretly seeks retribution)
and
b. what happens when the persecuted woman is a stoic freethinker (she overcomes shame through her strength of character, her compassion, and her good works)
Aboutness statement: Despite persecution and isolation for her illegitimate pregnancy, a Puritan woman of strong character makes a Christian life for herself and her child.
Example 4 (from a student manuscript)
The story is about:
a. what happens to a family when druggie parents lose their sanity and their children grow up without guidance (there are incidents with police and jail; a couple bouts of homelessness; only one daughter graduates from high school; the mother dies of an overdose)
and
b. what happens when a woman thinks she should have been able to “fix” the broken family, even though she was herself a wounded child (she fails in relationships; she gets overinvolved in a brother’s shaky life; she has to decide whether to carry a child to birth)
Aboutness statement: A woman in early pregnancy is unexpectedly reunited with her troubled brother, whose low spirits and bad acts threaten to dismantle the fragile life she has constructed after their unspeakable childhood.
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BRIEFLY, HERE ARE a few more from recent students; they are works in progress, but each has the nugget of a viable premise for a story.
A historical novel: When a widow takes i
n boarders in order to keep her house, she is drawn into the lives of poor, exploited women, and she joins them in their struggle for workers’ rights, searching for her place in a world where you can be beaten for seeking a living wage.
A historical fantasy: An orphaned boy is raised by a powerful monk to be the warrior-protector of a future empress and must reconcile his role with his love of and fear for her.
A young adult novel: A thirteen-year-old girl, the sole survivor of a car crash that killed her entire family, is sent to live with an uncle she doesn’t know.
A historical novel, World War II era: A young man who sat out the war in America with relatives returns to rural Germany and what is left of the family farm, and finds that a girl he loves is accused of having betrayed the community to the Nazis.
In each statement, you can see the potential movement of action, and events in the story that develop the statements of aboutness. Another way to think of the two parts of the story statement is that they are event and pulse. Event means things happen, arising from circumstances, situation, and character choices. The character’s behavior occurs in a kind of river of feeling, a pulse that drums beneath the story. You engage the reader with events; you captivate the reader with character.
—
THIS IS AS good a time as any to bring up the notion of a novel being either plot driven or character driven. We’ll spend more time on this later, but keep the issue in mind. A novel always has to have a pleasing balance of plot (action) and character. Things have to happen; what happens has to have meaning for characters. In a plot-driven novel, what is happening in linked sequences is the key focus. In a character-driven novel, who the protagonist is becoming is the primary focus—how the person is responding to events in a way that changes something about who she is. (In any really good novel, you have a compelling protagonist and a captivating plot.) So I am differentiating between story and plot, although to do so is somewhat artificial.
Story is what the narrative is about: what it says about life and how it illustrates it in event.
We use the word in that way all the time. (“What a story that old man’s life was.” “You won’t believe the story I heard this weekend.” “The stories I read about the stranded refugees make me weep.” “I’ve heard that story before.” And so on.) It can be organized in any way—it does not have to be chronological. Plot is the constructed sequence of causally related events. The critic Peter Brooks says, “Plot . . . is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning.” Plot is the arrangement of the story so that it makes sense and has an effect. Though plot, too, can hold and reveal elements of story history in ingenious ways, it has as its spine a chronological arrangement of incident (first this, then that), because that is the Western way of conceiving story. Plot is all about forward motion. This is true even when the structure of the novel is built around the revelation of past events. The story-driven novel (character is paramount) may have a tight plot underlying its development, but the plot is revealed in a rich context of character and story world. I do hasten to say that a plot-driven novel can be a terrific—and literary—read if it has strong characters. Consider the Wallander mysteries by Henning Mankell. I would certainly identify them as plot driven, each focused on solving a crime and illustrating police procedure. At the same time, the weary, philosophical, touchy, solitary Inspector Wallander is drawn with psychological acuity, and over the course of the series, growing older, Wallander not only becomes increasingly weighed down by work and life and relationships, he also begins to lose his cognitive faculties. His personality and behavior, however, are not the structural engine of the novels; crime is. Similarly, Michael Connelly’s Detective Harry Bosch novels have an overall arc in his search for his mother’s killer, his inability to compromise with corruption and ineptitude, and his absolute sense of justice—that every victim deserves it, regardless of class or occupation. But the novels are about solving crimes.
So consider: Is the narrative driven by forces outside the protagonist? Major events, disasters, venomous villains, pressure from others’ demands, and so on? All novels have a chain of events that are linked causally. Something happens so that something else happens. When the emphasis is on plot, the spectacle of events unfolding is more important than the character with the problem that arises out of them. In thrillers, for example, the hero is usually someone called upon to solve a crisis; it isn’t necessary for him to change, only for him to step up. A way of describing such a plot might look like this: situation + circumstances → produce plot → produces pressure on character. Certainly it is possible to write a novel with plenty of action, adventure, and conflict, and still have a story solidly based in character. But what does that mean?
Primarily it means that character isn’t a pawn of the plot. Character-centered stories respect the mystery of personhood, and the influence of life experience and basic traits on how a person behaves and faces challenge. The simplest way to put it is that in this kind of story, character + circumstances → produce situation → produces plot. The question isn’t always what is going to happen next, so much as: Why is this person doing this? How will she choose the right thing? Given who she is, what can she do? What will she have to overcome in order to solve her problems or reach her goals? Who will she be, in the end? How do her choices affect those around her? Novels are wonderful vehicles for character exploration, and, for that matter, the exploration of ideas, not by aimless musing, but by plots that arise and are constructed because of who the protagonist is. A novel is a presentation of lives lived on the page.
If you go back to my examples, you’ll see that the stories are character centered. Of course there’s no reason that a character can’t be the heart of a story that also has a rousing good plot! The universally accepted great example is The Great Gatsby, wherein an intricate and inevitable plot carries the revelation and destruction of a character who, from the beginning, has nowhere to go but the hell his desires send him to. (By the way, the book is also a wonderful example of revision; Fitzgerald worked hard and made many changes, always with a vision in mind of how he would write a book for the ages. Look for an edition of the novel that includes a good introduction.)
Chances are you have a natural inclination toward one or the other approach—plot or character—to conceiving a novel. By recognizing what it is, you can make your scheme strong, and also be sure plot and character are balanced pleasingly. Furthermore, you may learn that your natural instinct is different from what you thought you were doing. If you write great scenes and enjoy moving things along, your work probably has commercial promise; that doesn’t mean it can’t be elegantly written. It doesn’t mean it can’t have a fascinating protagonist. It just means you aren’t as limited by literary intentions as you maybe thought you were.
Exercises
Write statements of action and effect for novels that you know. For each novel, consider: Is it primarily a novel of story or of plot?
Write statements of action and effect for your novel. List some of the events that develop each part of the statement. Then collapse your work into a single sentence that sums up the story. (This is isn’t easy. It will take a lot of time and tries.)
Write your statement of the aboutness of your novel in large script and post it above your workspace. Look at it often. Tweak it.
Is your novel governed by story or plot?
4. State the vision or intention of your novel.
Think of what happens in your story as being governed in two ways: by the “agency” (power, intention) of the character; and by the “world” of the story. This task asks you to consider what you believe about agency. A characteristic problem in apprentice novels is that the protagonist is acted upon more than he acts. Even in the most controlled circumstances, your character must make choices (and mistakes). Whether the character directs his own fate to happy consequence is a d
ecision in your hands—and it arises from your vision of the world of the novel. Emma Bovary certainly made her own bed and laid the path to her death in a social context where she could never have had what she wanted. Her dreams didn’t fit her circumstances, but she couldn’t accept the reality. That was how Flaubert saw her. What makes the story powerful instead of melodramatic is the precision and intricacy of the narrative, and, of course, the revolutionary way he conveyed Emma’s voice.
The vision can be stated in a dramatic premise that is proven by the action of the story. This use of the word “premise” comes from the esteemed playwright and critic Bernard Grebanier. It isn’t an absolute; it isn’t a tenet. It is an understanding of human nature that is proven in this particular story as developed by conflict and its outcome. It is the result of the protagonist’s journey.
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