Joseph Bates - Writing Your Novel from Start to Finish: A Guidebook for the Journey

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Cincinnati, Ohio

Writing Your Novel from Start to Finish. Copyright 2015 by Joseph Bates. Manufactured in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writers Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Suite # 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242. (800) 289-0963. First paperback edition 2015.

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WritersDigest.com

Cincinnati, Ohio

For Jacob and Emma

My thanks to the fine people at Writers Digest for making this book possible, including Rachel Randall for seeing this new paperback edition into print and my editor Chelsea Henshey for her wonderful guidance in getting it there. Special thanks to Jane Friedman, Kelly Nickell, and Lauren Bailey for the invaluable role they played in making this book a reality in the first place. My gratitude to the English departments at Clemson University and the University of Cincinnatiin particular Ron Moran, Harold Woodell, Keith Lee Morris, Michael Griffith, Jim Schiff, and especially Brock Clarkefor teaching me what I know, and to my generous colleagues at Miami University of Ohio for the opportunity to pass it on.

And my great thanks, once again, to my family and friends for their endless encouragement and support. I wouldnt be here without you.

Joseph Bates is the author of Tomorrowland: Stories (Curbside Splendor 2013) and The Nighttime Novelist (Writer's Digest, 2010). His short fiction has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Identity Theory, South Carolina Review, Fresh Boiled Peanuts, and InDigest Magazine. He is a consulting fiction editor with Miami University Press and teaches in the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Visit him online at www.josephbates.net .

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

It might seem strange to begin a book on novel writing with a quote like the one above. After all, this is a book that seeks to illuminate and demystify the process of writing a novel. If you take a glance at the , youll see there are plenty of guidelines you have to consider, rules to follow (and sometimes bend or break), and elements youll need to incorporate into a cohesive, artful whole. From the basics of world-building, voice, and character to the bigger questions of plot, structure, and theme, these elements are indispensable to have in mind as you start the novel-writing journey and look for ways to reinvest narrative energy along the way.

But to say that writing a novel is only a matter of understanding the rules and following them faithfully is to miss the fact that writing is, when its working best, a mysterious process. J. R. R. Tolkiens thousands of pages chronicling Middle Earth began one afternoon as he graded a stack of student papers, turned to a blank sheet, and wrote, In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. He didnt know what the heck a hobbit was, because he hadnt invented one yet, but he spent the rest of his life finding out. The idea for Animal Farm came to George Orwell as he watched a young boy having trouble controlling a horse cart, which made Orwell consider the relationship of power and domination, and what would happen if it were flipped on its head. Twenty-five years and one billion dollars ago, J. K. Rowling got the idea for the Harry Potter series while stuck on a train at Kings Cross station, where she began daydreaming about a hidden platform that served as an access point to a parallel, magical world, and almost immediately, all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me.

Its sometimes said there are two kinds of novelists, the intuitive and the meticulous, or as they are more often called, plotters and pantsers (as in, by the seat of the pants). The intuitive novelist, the so-called pantser, has a sense of where the story is headed but leaves the particulars openshe knows where shell end up, but not necessarily how shell get therewhereas the meticulous novelist keeps the journey mapped out and well organized, using note cards of possible scenes and events, planning each new step, turning her writing space into something that looks like a crime lab littered in scrawled-out clues. The truth of the matter is, most novelists are neither exclusively intuitive nor meticulous but somewhere in between. Tolkienhe of the painstaking, detail-oriented world-building, mythologies, histories, maps, and invented languages of Middle Earthwas surprised early in the writing of The Lord of the Rings when a character named Trotter showed up in a scene with Frodo at The Prancing Pony, who Tolkien at first thought was another hobbit, and later still perhaps a relative of Frodo, before slowly revising, and realizing, the character as Aragorn, the rightful heir of the throne of men, a turn which would help direct and shape the rest of the trilogy. J. K. Rowlings tightly plotted Harry Potter novelsthe ending of which Rowling wrote early on, in order to foreshadow events over the course of a full seven booksunderwent constant revision and rewriting to fit the pieces together, changing aspects of plot and presentation along the way to make a unified whole. As Rowling once told an interviewer of her process while showing the outline for one of the books in the series, I have to fill in some of this as I go. Because as Im writing, it occurs to me how and when things have to happen.

Novel writing is a process of discovery, of play. And, as with any kind of play, its foregrounded by a system of rulesin the case of writing, what makes a compelling character, what defines a completed arc, how to a structure a story so it invests a reader with a sense of urgency and stakes, as well as those rules you establish for your story, the reality it takes on and abides bybut the rules arent play themselves. Theyre the framework that allows you to take risks, to build or create connections, to make unexpected moves, and, importantly, to learn to embrace the unexpected and even the mysterious as necessary parts of the process.

Out of the initial idea springs the basic premise and protagonist, which suggests overall character and plot arcs, as well as a few general key scenes, important turning points, or moments of conflict. But bridging these points, or specific markers, from beginning to end is still something of a mystery, even for the most meticulous writer. We can see the next point we need to get to on the map, but we have to make the roads ourselves even as we travel them, taking an occasional wrong turn, dead end, or detour as we do, but ideally staying on the most direct, but also the most interesting, path. Occasionally, well write toward a particular plot point or character that, in keeping with the metaphor, weve believed would be a clear right turn all along, and then find ourselves taking a left instead opening up a path we hadnt anticipated. Suggesting new and unforeseen possibilities will not only keep the reader invested and excited by what might happen, but will keep the writer typing for the same reason. Writing a novel is a journey for the author, first and foremost. And as with any journey, its ultimate success depends upon how we navigate the path just ahead, one step at a time.