Novels

People often ask me about the process of writing and selling a novel, so I thought it might be useful to walk through the stories behind my published novels (and maybe after that a few unpublished ones that involved withcraft, spycraft, and being banned from several government buildings). So let’s start at the beginning with my first published novel, Lifers.

I wrote the first draft of Lifers when I was twenty-six years old, which means we’re traveling back to the mid-1990s, a magical time when people had aol.com email addresses (mine was linknull@aol.com) and I was still writing everything on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. I was pretty broke, so I rarely changed out the ribbon on that sucker, either, so the original first draft of the novel is written in type so faint it’s almost invisible ink.

The inspiration for the book was simple: I was spending a lot of time drinking in bars, hanging out with friends, and hating my job. So I wrote about that. Any time you’re lacking in inspiration, you can use this one weird trick: Imagine your life, then imagine something strange happening in it. Meteor strike? Future You appearing in a ball of energy and warning you not to eat that sandwich? Doesn’t matter. I imagined my life but with me deciding to commit grand larceny, and a novel was born.

I wrote the book pretty fast; it’s not a very long novel, clocking in around 40,000 words, which people will tell you is too short to sell. I revised it once—exactly once, mainly to produce a clean typewritten copy since back then you didn’t have to submit electronically, and often couldn’t. I didn’t really change any of the story or even the actual words—I just typed out a clean version making minor fixes as I went. That was it for revision (until the publisher asked me to add a sex scene, that is), so the published novel is about 96% the same as the first draft.

I thought it captured something about that moment in my life even though I resisted every urge to have anything dramatic happen. No one gets the girl, no one gets arrested, and no one’s life changes in the story, on purpose. At the time that sort of non-dramatic story felt powerful to me—and to be honest remains one of my worst habits, opting for a non-event climax to a novel. So, impressed by myself, I started submitting it to agents and publishers.

I’ve told the story of how I sold Lifers elsewhere, so there’s no need to repeat it her verbatim. It was the end result of a lot of submissions, though, which is the important bit. I worked my ass off mailing that manuscript out to the world, and two years after finishing it I sold it, and two after that it published. And I got some polite reviews and low sales and that was that, really, until 2011 when I re-released it as an eBook.

So what are our takeaways here? One, selling a novel takes a lot of grunt work, not even counting the actual writing. Two, selling a novel might not change your life in any way. And three, I need to get out that old manual typewriter and start working on it again. That thing is a monster.

There are as many ways to plot a novel as there are, well, novels. Anyone who claims there’s one way to do it is lying, or very confused, or possibly selling you something. Fact is, once you have the premise the rest is just coming up with a reasonable series of steps that take you from the beginning to the end. Like life, a novel is just one goddamn thing after another.

Okay, okay, it’s a little more involved than that. How to work out a plot is one of the most common questions I get, which of course led to the whole concept of Plantsing (a hybrid approach combining the best bits of Plotting with the best bits of Pantsing), but sometimes you need to get a little more granular, and sometimes you have to just get nuts. Sometimes, for example, you get stuck. You’ve boxed yourself into a corner and can’t see the way to the next plot point. There are a lot of ways to handle this, but one I like to use from time to time is a lot fun: I hit the Insanity Button.

Pick-a-Path

You can look at your novel as a Choose Your Own Adventure, in a way; at the end of every chapter or sequence your characters are in a certain situation, and must make decisions that drive the plot. Now, in any scenario there will be decisions that could be classified as rational, and then there are decisions that could be classified as Pantsless Crazy. For example, if I’m sitting in a restaurant and I realize I’ve left my wallet at home, I can discretely call for the manager and work something out, or I can take off my pants and feign food poisoning, loudly threatening to sue.

Why do my pants have to come off in this scenario? If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

You can try this in your plotting, too. If you’re stuck, if you have your characters in a spot and can’t see how to move them forward it’s possible you’ve unknowingly restricted yourself to rational decisions. Consider something crazy. Something self-destructive. Unexpected. Irrational and maybe even inexplicable.

If it works, your plot will suddenly rush forward, pushed on by this crazy energy you’ve unleashed. It will take your story in directions you didn’t foresee. If nothing else, it might entertain you and divert your brain long enough for a more sensible solution.

If it doesn’t work, in my experience there is always heavy drinking. It will never let you down.

If you talk to new writers, or lurk around Internet forums dedicated to writing like some sort of weirdo listening in on other people’s conversations, or do panels or give presentations at writing conferences and the like, you’ll find something kind of strange: Writers, as a group, seem to think there are a lot of rules out there. They always want to know if you “can” do something in a story—is this idea too weird? Is that too many characters? Is this plot twist too crazy? Can you actually write a novel in the second person from the point of view of a dog?

Here’s something that isn’t all that shocking: Sure. You can do all those things.

We’re We’re Going We Don’t Need Rules

Look, writing is imagination committed to paper (or pixels). Writers have been pulling off novels that seem, on paper, at first blush, to be completely ridiculous. Novels have been written in stilted, theatrical ways, with oddball characters, and with only a glancing relationship with logic. And many of these novels have failed, sure, but not because of the crazy ideas or overly ambitious approach. They failed only because the writer failed to sell it.

That’s the secret: There are no rules. No idea is too crazy, too stupid, or too clichéd to be successful. All that matters is whether you have the skill and the acumen to pull those ideas off.

I sometimes think writers are looking for excuses not to tackle those big, crazy, complex ideas, or that they’re thinking way too hard about selling and marketing that book before they even write it. There are no rules there, either. Anyone who tells you that you can’t sell a book with a certain theme or in a certain genre is wrong—you can sell anything, if it’s good enough.

So, write your novel. Be crazy. Get crazy. Throw everything in there. Write from the dog’s point of view and then decide the dog is a Venusian time traveler. Write it without using the word and just to see what happens. And if it doesn’t work, don’t blame the idea—blame the writing, and start over.

Well, blame the writing, have a few stiff drinks, then start over.

There’s very little in this world as humbling as writing a novel. Anyone who says it’s easy hasn’t actually tried writing one—no, it’s not hard labor, so bellyaching about how difficult it is is just First World problems, but it is challenging.

For me, every novel starts off easy. The premise is clear, the plot is easy to see in the basic outlines. All I have to do, I tell myself, is write the damn thing! Meaning that I approach each novel initially as a time management problem. And also a whiskey-drinking management problem, a binge-watching management problem, and a hey-look-a-butterfly-let’s-chase-it management problem.

I lead a rich inner life.

Anyways, what always happens is things get complicated. I lose track of the plot, I get lost in the weeds and everything slithers out of my grasp, and there is usually a point where I realize I’ve forgotten something. Sometimes it’s a character I forgot to introduce much earlier, or a clue, or a sequence that’s vital to the comprehension of the story or the back-story. I realize with dismay that the next bunch of words I’m about to write just won’t work in the larger whole unless that earlier work gets done.

I take a deep breath, pour a fresh drink, and then I don’t do it. I don’t go back to fix things up. I just plunge ahead.

That’s What the Revision is For

It’s almost irresistible, that urge to go back and fill in the blank space you’ve just noticed. But you really ought to resist. Sure, that means the draft you’re writing is flawed. It won’t make sense, things get introduced in clunky, awful ways. Anyone reading it will throw your manuscript across the room, enraged.

But, that’s just it, isn’t it? No one will read this version. You’re going to revise it. You’re going to let it sit in the drawer and marinate for a few months and then go back and start re-working it. So you’ll have time to fix everything—and you’ll see even more that needs to be fixed.

The urge to stop forward momentum to go back and fix something you’ve just thought of is a powerful one, but trust me: Don’t so it. It will just stop your train of thought and ultimately slow you down and make the story worse. If it’s really a problem, it will still be there when you revise. If it wasn’t really a problem in the first place, you just saved yourself weeks of unnecessary work.

I like to use the time I save by not wasting time doubling back on myself to drink a little more. What will you use the time for?

Like most writers I have met, my mental health is suspect. No one chooses this career out of rational sanity; it’s a lot of work for (mostly) low pay, and all you really get is criticism and mounting suspicion that you did not really think through your plot before settling down to write. And so you wind up spending all of your energy arguing that yes, the fact that a character you described as one-armed in chapter one did, in fact, grow a second arm over the course of the book (the hidden literary clues are there, man, you just have to be smart enough to notice them), all over a book you sold approximately 33 copies of, 23 to yourself as you tried to correct a maddening kerning problem in your Word Doc.

So, stipulated: We’re all crazy. When are we craziest? When our work-in-progress (WIP) isn’t going well. Because we so often give up.

Take It to The Limit

So, when should you give up on your new novel? You gonna get differing opinions on this, and some folks will have a pretty complex equation involving word counts and palm readings and what quadrant of the sky Mars is currently sailing through, but here’s my answer: Don’t.

Don’t give up on your projects. I don’t care how borked they are (borked being a legal term meaning “incoherent and incomprehensible”), there’s gold in there if for no other reason than the simple fact that you were inspired enough to start writing. There’s a few thousand words or a plot twist or a single golden sentence in there that’s worth saving, so instead of giving up on a WIP that’s not working, start cutting. Hit Save As and start stripping away all the non-working stuff, starting with the most recent work you’ve done. When you start hesitating about the deletions, stop. Think about what you can re-purpose, what could be revised, re-used, stolen.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be a novel. Maybe it’s a short story or novella that got uppity, or maybe it’s an epic poem, or a scene from another novel, or the backstory to something else. The point is, use the material you’ve created, somehow. Don’t just walk away from it.