Writing

No one ever said writing novels was easy. Except me, several times, but I almost certainly drinking when I said that and not thinking clearly.

Let me start over: Writing novels isn’t easy, and sometimes the hardest part is starting. If you’ve got several dozen files on your hard drive named some variation of GENIUS_NOVEL_D1, GENIUS_NOVEL_D1_2, GENIUS_NOVEL_D1_3 and so on, you know of which I speak.

For me, approaching novels in the same way each time is sometimes part of the problem. After all, if something works, why change it? If you’ve written several novels before simply by starting at the beginning, or by outlining for weeks before writing a word, or, I don’t know, sacrificing a chicken and praying to dank gods, then you could make worse decisions than to try that successful approach again.

But if it stops working, sometimes it helps to try something different in terms of approach. After all, what have you got to lose? In this scenario you’re already failing to write that novel.

Five Easy Chapters

Sometimes the secret to writing a novel is getting past the vast void of blankness that faces you when you start. If you’ve tried a few times to get Chapter One going and have nothing but discarded drafts to show for it, try one of these approaches.

In Media Res: Skip the boring parts and jump right to the part of the story you’re most excited to write. Sometimes what slows you down is doing all the ‘eat your vegetables’ writing right away. Dive into dessert first. You can always go back and eat that broccoli later.

The Lecture Approach: Exposition can be deadly, but can also be cut out later—if you’re having trouble getting started, start explaining the universe, characters, et al., as a way of jump-starting the story. Don’t worry about style or narrative, just tell it like you’re explaining it to an insurance adjuster.

The Alternative POV: Just because you have a POV main character doesn’t mean they have to be the first Voice your reader encounters. Maybe you’re having trouble hooking into your main character’s tone or style. Work on someone else for a bit, see what happens.

The Unrelated Incident: A great way to make a splash and write a fun, energetic Chapter 1 is to ignore your plot entirely and write a self-contained story that sets the table and introduces everything and everybody—because it’s unrelated, it allows total freedom. It can also be deleted later if it helps you get going–or be adapted into something else.

The James Bond Approach: James Bond movies start with an exciting action sequence that often has nothing to do with the main story. Why not do the same? Chapter 1 shouldn’t be a dull simmer of introductory information, it should be a story unto itself. Introduce your characters and universe by creating an awesome mini-adventure that stands alone as an exciting story even if it also ties into the greater plot later.

There’s no guarantee any of these approaches will cure your novel, of course, but there’s plenty more where these came from. Get creative! That’s what you do! Creativity isn’t just about story and characters. You can be creative in your process as well. Just like I get creative when all I’ve got left in the bar is vermouth, Blue Curacao, and Frangelico.

The Writing Life is often presented in pretty rosy terms: You get to be creative and curious! You get to work in your pajamas¹! You get to transform your functional alcoholism into a marketing brand²!

But as anyone who has actually tried to make a go of this writing thing as a profession knows, there are downsides. So, so many downsides. There are bad reviews and unsatisfying freelance projects³, writer’s block and failed novels, low sales and bad experiences with publishers, the discovery that the world at large is much less interested in reading books than you assumed and the discovery that this is because most of the world is actually Slender Men in human disguise⁴.

Every writer has a few bad days in their career. It’s easy to love some aspects of writing. It’s easy to love the creative rush when you have a great idea or put THE END on a manuscript you know is strong. It’s easy to love great reviews, or invitations to speak at events.

The trick is to love the downsides as much as the easy-to-love stuff, because it’s all writing⁵.

Embrace the Suck

There’s a positive core at the center of every terrible thing about writing:

Negative feedback. No one likes hearing all the many ways their writing sucks. We’ve all had that moment of finishing a story that is very dear to us, or a freelance assignment we’re incredibly proud of, only to have a Beta Reader or critic tear it to pieces or the client send it back with reams of edit notes. It’s not fun, but love the way criticism like that improves your work. Because nine times out of ten, when you assess the work in light of the critique, you realize they have a point, and the story or piece gets better⁶.

Failed Deals. One of the most heartbreaking things is getting close with a deal to publish or sell your work and watching it fall apart. It never fails to be demoralizing; there’s just nothing worse than imagining yourself richer and better-known than you already are and then having to re-calibrate back down to current levels. But every time this happens I walk away a little smarter about the business side of publishing. Which doesn’t replace the money or fame, but at least makes me feel a little better⁷.

Failed Novels. I’ve had plenty of story ideas that start off buzzing with energy and then slowly turn into overcooked potatoes⁸. And it’s painful every time, even when I’m able to salvage a novella or short story from the mess. But at the same time, I always have a long list of ideas I haven’t had a chance to write yet, so a filed novel offers me an opportunity to write the next thing, which just might be amazing. Or more potatoes.

Downsides are everywhere, and sometimes you string together a bunch of downsides in a row and it’s depressing. But learning to see and appreciate the upsides to the downsides is a skill that will serve you well in this business.

I’ve written before about how realism doesn’t guarantee your writing is good; in other words, just because you’re writing about something that actually happened doesn’t mean the end result will be persuasive. You can base stories and plot twists on actual events that you actually witnessed and still get pushback from readers and editors who just don’t buy what you’re selling.

When this happens, there’s a tendency to outrage because it actually happened. How can someone tell you that plot twist doesn’t work when it actually worked in the real world? I understand, and have experienced, that precise flavor of outrage, but it does you no good. Arguing about it does you no good. You just have to write better.

Reality <> Good Writin’

Just because something actually happened doesn’t mean you get to ignore the usual rules of storytelling, after all, and one of those rules is this: If your reader doesn’t get something in your story, it’s your fault. If something doesn’t seem realistic or plausible in your story, even if it’s based on a real event, you have to go back and revise it until you’ve sold it properly. Getting defensive just because you’re working from memory is no excuse.

The craziest part of this, of course, is the fact that sometimes the more you deviate from the reality of the event, the more readily your reader accepts the scenario. It can be super counter-intuitive, and occasionally frustrating. And while one reader who doesn’t get what you’re doing can be an outlier, if all of your readers complain about the same thing you have to stop assuming the reality basis of the bit will sell itself, and start looking into doing a better job of selling.

This is complicated when you base your stories off of hair-raising moments you experience after drinking two bottles of ripple and eating $50 worth of Taco Bell. Those visions are vivid.

I am certainly no genius. <glances at notes, which read PAUSE FOR ARGUMENT>. No one’s going to argue the point? I see.

So: Not a genius, it’s agreed. But I do have a particular set of skills when it comes to words and stories, and having complete about a thousand novels give or take (with maybe a dozen of those salable) I can claim to know at least a thing or two about the craft. Maybe not the right things, but … things.

One thing I know is that there are many, many ways to write a novel, including the often-overlooked super secret way: To not write a novel at all.

Every Story Tells a Story Don’t It

A novel is just a series of scenes, after all. I tend to be a bit linear in my writing in the sense that I start at the beginning and work my way to the end, and even if the scenes in-between those two poles jump around in time or are otherwise complex in structure. But there’s no reason you have to adhere to any sort of linear process.

My recent Avery Cates fiction, for example, are novels that are written as a series of novellas. This isn’t revolutionary or unprecedented, of course, but it’s a technique that I hit on for two reasons: One, I wanted an experiment to challenge myself, and this was a new way of working; and two, it allows me to work on a novel as my schedule and energy allows without delaying the satisfaction of finishing. Part of the joy of creation, after all, is putting THE END on the page and showing it to the world. By breaking my novel into parts, I get the best of both worlds.

It also makes writing more manageable. Instead of trying to create 100,000 words that all fit together, I can concentrate on writing 20,000 words and making those work. This takes away some of the complexity, allowing me to focus in on specific aspects of the larger story. It’s freeing.

Of course, you don’t have to break your next novel into novella-sized chunks. There are myriad ways of breaking a novel into more manageable chunks — down to the scene level, writing different scenes as they catch your interest instead of in strict chronological order. Just the act of cutting your story up into chunks can help clarify any issues you might be having.

Of course, I’ve also had a few recent novels collapse into chaos, leaving me just a short story to salvage from the debris, which is a bonus of this technique, since even failed novels produce standalone bits and pieces you can pull out.

The other advantage, of course, is that if I die suddenly the chances that I’ve finished one more story is pretty good. As is the chance that my hard drive is filled with photos of my cats and terrible poetry. Please come to my house, steal my hard drive, and burn it if I die. Thank you.

A question you often see on writing forums and the like involves just how many characters you’re legally and morally allowed to have in a story. I responded to this weird obsession with an acceptable number of characters a few years ago with an article in Writer’s Digest concerned with the fact that very often a manuscript that isn’t working is suffering from too many characters. And while this is absolutely sometimes the problem and I stand by that article, writing isn’t a science, friend. It’s a big mess of superstition, imagination, and magic.

As a result, despite the fact that having too many characters is sometimes the problem, inventing new characters is sometimes the perfect solution to myriad story problems.

Make Room! Make Room!

Too many characters is a problem for Future You, with their completed novel and their insufferable smugness because they completed a novel. Worrying about having too many characters before you’ve actually completed your novel is like worrying whether you’re planning to use too many nails when building a house—you have to wait until the house is finished to make a judgment call.

Because a new character can solve problems. Granted, this is also what leads people into trouble, because every time they have a problem they invent a new character to solve it, and before you know it you’re a 70-year old fantasy writer trying to resolve the arcs of like 15,000 characters in two novels. But there’s a reason pro writers get into character trouble in the first place: Characters solve problems.

So in the Draft Zero stage, why not create characters with abandon? Characters can fill plot holes, provide exposition, and do plenty of other work for your story. And you can always eliminate them later, either by wholesale deletion, or by combining one or more characters doing work into one. Of course, you could also solve plot problems by giving an existing character a new role, but this leads to a parallel problem—over-busy characters. Which solution works best for your story is entirely up to you.

The point is, just as there’s no definitive rule about having too many characters, there’s isn’t a rule on minimum numbers of characters, either. Create them, delete them, combine them and split them at will. You can always go back and make some corrective adjustments later in the writing process.

I also like to create throwaway characters based on people I know IRL and then kill them off in creative ways when the IRL people annoy me. I’m not saying that’s a healthy approach, but it sure is fun.

We’ve all heard the old saw about how good writers borrow and great writers steal, and it’s definitely important stuff to think about—great new books are absolutely built using the bleached bones of great old books. That means reading other books, especially outside your usual preferred genres and time periods, is essential.

That doesn’t mean stealing is easy. Obviously, if you’re not careful you’ll blow the alchemical process of transforming the cool stuff you mine out of someone else’s story into your own brilliance, and wind up with a copy instead of something unique.

In his review of Stephen King’s The Outsider, Victor Lavalle talks about one of the first things he ever wrote as a kid, a story unabashedly ripped from King’s Night Shift. He later admits to near-relief when the story is thrown away, because he knows it couldn’t possibly be any good, being far too slavishly tied to its source. It’s easy to simply copy someone else’s style or ideas. It’s much harder to transform them.

The secret is the same as everything else: Practice.

I Keep Telling Y’all to Write More Stories

This is where short stories and flash fiction are your friends. When I’m reading a book and really enjoying it, I have a tendency to naturally rip off the tone, style, and literary devices used in it. Because I write a short story every month (sometimes more than one), I can easily channel this tendency towards theft into a standalone story that lets me play around with these things without ‘infecting’ a longer manuscript. Otherwise these new idea might suddenly appear in, say, chapter 23 of a novel-in-progress, then suddenly vanish again. By working them into a story, I can have fun and start the process of making them my own without any sort of commitment.

If the experiment goes well, I can always write more stories. I can keep playing with these tools until I am actually ready to introduce them into a longer work. And by the time I choose to do so, I’ve gotten comfortable with them. They’re just part of my toolbox.

So, think about what you’re reading right now. Think about what you can steal from it. Then sit down and write something short using this new tool, whatever it is, and have fun with it. It will undoubtedly make your writing stronger.