by Michael Lydon
So you want to write a novel? Well, as the coolly cynical cats in my high school gang used to say, “Better pack a lunch!”
Seriously, writing a novel is a major undertaking, and you may learn, as I learned on my first try at the form, that you’re not cut out for the job—even though a novel is, in essence, a story, and we all read and tell stories every day. A joke sketches a quick story; an anecdote relates a slightly longer one. Then come short stories, ten to thirty pages long, after that novellas, fifty to a hundred pages. Only then do we reach full novel proportions, anywhere between two hundred to eight hundred pages.
Taking on such a ginormous task may be a bridge too far for most beginning writers. Don’t let that discourage you however! If you have a novel inside you eager to be born, start writing it today—you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Start Writing Today
Here’s a suggestion I hope will help you get your pen flying: you don’t have to start on page one! Write a few pages to describe your central character, his or her house, his or her childhood. You can even write an ending. Most of these scribbled efforts may not make it into the novel, not word-for word at least, but the freedom such experiments encourage will surely enrich your story’s subtext.
Find Your Story Arc
From that improvisatory suggestion I’ll leap to a more disciplined one: see if you can find your novel’s beginning-to-end arc. Your scribbling may have given you one, two, or a half-dozen detailed scenes; great, they’re your raw material. Now start looking for the framework those scenes will hang on.
Next, why not try to divide your story arc, even if only in your own mind, into writing’s three classic sections: beginning, middle, and end. The beginning introduces the novel’s people and places; the middle describes their conflicts, the end describes how those conflicts get resolved. Yes, I know that sounds boringly cut-and-dried, and many fine novels will never fit this formula, but thinking of your novel in terms of these three immortal chunks will help illuminate the areas of your story that need attention in your next draft.
Optionally, divide the sections into scenes. This is the who, what, where and how that's supports each section of the story arc. Congratulations, you just started your outline!
Crafting The Opening
You still need to get your opening sentences down on paper, the sentences that, you hope, will hook your readers. Sarorah (US) grabbed me with her lively opening portrait of her heroine Charlie:
“Charlie, Charlie,” my dad calls out to me hysterically. I laugh to myself: he probably thinks I ran away again but in reality I was hiding under my bed. He hears my silent giggle and peeks under, his sullen expression turning deadpan when he discovered me. “Charlie why are you hiding, do you know how much of a fright you gave me young lady?“ Blah, Blah, and more Blah is all I think to myself while I fish around my head for an excuse…”
Originally posted by cozy-autumn-life-x
That sparky beginning wakes me up! I’ve just got to find out where this lively gal will be going for the next two hundred pages.
Consider Characters throughout the Middle
The middle of your novel is the meat of your story and probably the longest of the three sections. Here in many tales the “protagonist” faces a trial of some sort, helped (or hindered!) by an array of “supporting characters.” A mid-length novel may have twenty or more named and described characters, and it is of utmost importance that these be as true to life as the writer’s skill and insight permits. “Novels hinge on well-developed characters,” says the prompt introducing Write the World’s current novel-writing competition. “All the rest of it—the plot, the setting, the language—mean little if the reader doesn’t experience the fictional world through a character who feels real and relatable. The reader must detect a beating heart—feel that human connection—to care about the rest of the story.”
No wiser words have ever been written about the art of writing novels. To succeed as a novelist, a writer must make his or her characters human beings readers can believe in, humans who could be our next-door neighbors, the lady sitting next to us on a bus, the man behind the counter at the hardware store. Some years ago when in bed with the flu, I tried to pass long boring hours reading best-selling detective novels. In one the hero, gets a serious brain injury.
A few hours sleep and he’s back on the case despite a wicked headache. “How is it now?” asks a friend. “Better” says the stoical detective. And went on that same afternoon to solve a major crime.
“Wha..?” said I to myself, “this guy’s not human! Nobody could do all that the writer is making him do! I simply don’t believe it!” And with that, I flipped the book into the wastebasket; I’ve never read a novel by that writer again. Millions of readers may still be reading such thrillers, but I say, “Nonsense! I won’t read novels when I can’t believe the central character is human.”
The best novelists do more than make their central characters believable, they make the novel’s whole world believable. The great English novelist Anthony Trollope prided himself on being able to map each novel’s world, here his fictional county of Barsetshire:
I had it all in mind, its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts that rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches…. There has been no name given to a fictitious site, which does not represent to me a spot of which I know as though I had lived and wandered there.
Lead to a Satisfying Ending
With the end of a novel writer and reader say goodbye to each other and to the characters they have come to know and, often, to love. Endings can be comic or sad, noisy or quiet, agitated or calm; what matters most is that the reader closes the book with a sense of satisfied finality.
Perhaps the ending I love best of all from the countless books I have read is the end of The “Genius” by Theodore Dreiser. The “Genius” tells the story of Eugene Witla, an adventurous American painter who lurches from one affair to another, from commercial hackwork to great art, from obscurity to fame. After describing such a tumultuous life, Dreiser surprises us by leaving his hero with a hushed ending of unmatched poignancy. In the novel’s last sentences, Dreiser describes Eugene tucking his daughter into bed and stepping outside to look up at the Milky Way:
“Where in all this—in substance,” he thought, rubbing his hand through his hair, “is Angela? Where in substance will be that which is me? What a sweet welter life is—how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a colorful symphony.”
Great art dreams welled up in his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space.
The sound of the wind—how fine it is tonight,” he thought.
Then he went quietly in and closed the door.
About Michael
Michael Lydon is a writer and musician who lives in New York City. Author of many books, among them Rock Folk, Boogie Lightning, Ray Charles: Man and Music, and Writing and Life. A founding editor of Rolling Stone, Lydon has written for many periodicals as well, the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, and Village Voice.
He is also a songwriter and playwright and, with Ellen Mandel, has composed an opera, Passion in Pigskin. A Yale graduate, Lydon is a member of ASCAP, AFofM local 802, and on the faculty of St. John’s University.
