Starting to Write a Novel

You have a whole bunch of ideas floating around in your head. How do you get them from your brain to the screen in front of you? There is no one single answer to this. What works for me might not work for you.

Some people are planners intricately detailing their novel to an extreme level of specificity before starting to draft. Others are plodders who just look at a blank screen and start writing, leaving the details in their heads where they are easier to manipulate as the story takes form. Most of us are somewhere in the middle.

I personally identify as a plodding planner, meaning I plan but my planning results in a fairly casual framework on which to hang my story when I begin drafting. To a true planner, I would likely appear as woefully unprepared. To the plodder, I’m one of this world’s most organized people. Well, that might be overstating it a bit.

First Steps

The very first exercises I do when planning a novel are focused on achieving clarity of purpose. I want to get clear in my mind exactly what I’m writing about. I want to set my north star so that everything I do from that moment on is in pursuit of the novel’s progression from idea to being fully realized.

Over the course of a week or two, I do three things:

• I draft a Pitch. Three or four sentences maximum. This is akin to an ‘elevator pitch’ or the paragraph that may one day appear on the back cover. It is something you use when people ask what your novel is about, or as the basis of a pitch you might make to a literary agent. Provide enough of a hook but don’t give away too much. The following is the Pitch I drafted for A Criminal Act of Heroism, my first completed novel which I am about to pitch to the traditional publishing world.

  
  

Pitch: A young girl visiting a military cemetery in Europe with her veteran grandfather finds a grave with her own name on it. Wanting to know more about her namesake, she starts to research his death. As inconsistencies in the official record become apparent, she becomes more obsessed with learning the truth. So begins what will be a decades long quest to learn the startling truth behind one death in a war that took tens of millions.

• I then distill the pitch down into a Logline, a single sentence that captures the complete essence of the imagined novel. This is like the blurb that might appear in an advertisement for your book, or possibly next to the title on a bestseller list somewhere.

Logline: Seeking the truth about a single death in the second world war, a young girl becomes entangled in a mystery that’s been kept secret for over fifty years.

• The Pitch and the Logline answer the ‘what’ of the novel. The third thing I do is draft the Dramatic Question, the ‘why’ that will propel the story forward. This is the motivation behind the characters’ actions, the resolution of which will conclude the novel.

Dramatic Question: Will young Sam Barnes discover the truth about her namesake’s death in a long-ago war, despite a trail of partial truths and more than a half-century of silence?

I write and rewrite these, usually on a pad of pad rather than on screen. I write them, scratch them out, write them again, and again. I change a word here or there, writing them with clarity and precision. They might seem simple, but they are integral to keeping me on track. Whenever I feel I’m straying in the draft, I return to these three basic starting points to confirm the direction I need to take the draft in. Without these, I would be rudderless, drifting aimlessly.

My advice to my fellow plodding planners, take the time at the outset to do these three simple tasks. And once done, resist the urge to change them to fit any tendency you may have to stray in your writing. Once these three are drafted, everything you do in plotting your novel, devising your character arcs and creating your first draft must be in furtherance of the direction you’ve set by completing these three simple tasks.

Stay Nimble

I make it sound like I produce a very rigid structure or framework on which to hang my novel as its fleshed out. Staying true to the Pitch, the Logline and the Dramatic Question (PLDQ) still allows for leeway in drafting. You’ll see over my next number of blogs that I do draft a fairly detailed bulleted overview of the plot, right down to drafting a detailed table of contents at the outset of drafting. But stay nimble. While the detailed plot is in service of the PLDQ, you have to be able to react and adapt as issues in your plot arise.

Staying nimble means continuing to focus on your end goal while being prepared to jettison or amend plot points. If a character doesn’t feel right, change the character. If a plot point seems forced or otherwise wrong, change it. Just keep your changes focused on your end goal. Resist going back and changing any part of your PLDQ as this could have broader implications for the full book.

This leads me to the story behind a story I had published in Island Writer Magazine. There is a character in A Criminal Act of Heroism that is crucial to the subplot. He appears as a name initially but not as an actual character until quite late in the novel. I had initially envisioned the character as dark and morose, consumed with guilt. But the point in the novel where he makes his entrance marks the point where resolution of the Dramatic Question begins to appear possible. To introduce him in a negative state might be true to a real-life version of the character but is the wrong vibe for this point in the novel. So, I changed him.

However, I couldn’t get this initial vision of him out of my mind. It was leading to a writer’s block with the novel’s progression. So, I decided to exorcise him from my mind by writing the short story Come Home.

I also saw the short story as an exercise in writing dialogue, in trying to find distinct and consistent voices. So Come Home is told entirely through dialogue, with three characters pairing up for three conversations. I had mentioned in my first blog that I would present some of my work here, so below I’d like to share the first of those three conversations. I’ll share the second and third conversations at the end of my next two posts, then likely post the story in its entirety subsequently.

Come Home (Part 1)

“It felt like I was under surveillance. Being watched. And I mean for real this time.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that. But let’s go back to my question. How do you see yourself?”

“What? Okay, fine! How do I see myself?

“I see myself … trying. I’m struggling here. I don’t think I can answer you. Well, not honestly. So, I guess I see myself as honest. That’s something. I’m aware of my capabilities. My limitations. But awareness, that’s not the same thing as how I see myself, is it?”

“You can define the question however you want. I’m not confining you.”

“So, how do I see myself? Maybe I can’t answer directly because I don’t think I exist, or I don’t think I should exist. I don’t know. Maybe I can try through other’s eyes.

“My father, hah. He certainly sees me, or saw me – hell, I don’t even know if he’s still alive. Doesn’t matter, in any case. We’re past tense. He saw me as violent, no good.

“How do you see me? Drunk, alcoholic, drowning in sorrows, fighting inner demons? Hah! Perhaps I’m just a child who happens to be older than your father? And why are you so interested in me? Am I a rat in a maze to you? You’re probably just helping out one of your friends at the University, I bet. What’s the term they use for people like me? The ‘highly functioning homeless,’ or some bullshit like that? I don’t beg. I don’t steal. I don’t do drugs. I work every day.

“But, well, I do like to drink my dinner. And stay outdoors, or sometimes stay in a nice shelter like this place of yours.”

“You’re very self-aware. Why can’t you tell me how you see yourself?”

“How I see myself is no more important in the world than how I see you. Or how I see this damn city. Or how I see the fucking Pope. I see it all – you, me, the Pope – through an alcohol induced haze. So I’m sure my opinion just doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t tell you how I see myself because it isn’t important. I’m NOT important. I’m irrelevant.

“I’d like to see myself as a father. I do have a daughter out there, somewhere.

“I had a son. It’s fifteen or sixteen years now since he died. He’s been dead now for more years than he ever was alive. I’d like to see myself as a father, but that would take some real mental gymnastics, ‘cus I was a failure as a father.

“I mentioned my daughter.  She’d be twenty-eight or twenty-nine now ...  but it doesn’t matter. I wonder how she sees me, or the memory of me. I often wonder that. Wondering helps my dinners go down smoother, if you know what I mean. Glug, glug, glug.

“How do I see myself? In a thick fog, barefoot, surrounded by broken mirrors, shards all over the ground. Shards reflecting my bloody feet upwards. I see myself cowering. I’ve been dead these past fifteen years.

“My father. Did I mention how he sees me? His phrase – ‘presumed murderer.’”

“Why did you come in to see me today?”

“Weren’t we scheduled for today? No! Well, I saw someone today. She reminded me of my wife. But was way too young. Made me think of my daughter.

“She was about fifty feet away, maybe closer. Whatever the distance, it was unbridgeable. But, she was … staring at me. Just staring. When she realized I was staring back, she looked away and went about her business. Or pretended to. I kept catching her eye because she kept looking back at me. Like I said earlier, I felt like I was under surveillance.

“I didn’t feel threatened. I felt that I should talk to her, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t and anyhow, I never got the chance. It was eerie, but in a peaceful, calm way, if that’s not too much of a contrast.

“You know, except for you, Archie, I don’t think I’ve had a personal connection in fifteen years. But this girl, this young woman. Well, this was intimate in some way.”

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