by Michael Lydon
So You Want to Write a Novel?
That question, I know, sounds a bit obnoxious, as if I were asking, “So you want to climb Mount Everest?” or, “So you’re planning to win the Nobel Prize?” questions to which the most honest answer would rightly be a mildly sarcastic, “Good luck!”
But wait a half second! Don’t let wise guys with their oh-so superior attitude kill an ambitious project before it’s had a chance to live and breathe upon the page. Sure, the novel that you’re turning over in your mind now may never come to life, but on the other hand, maybe it will, and as my mother often said when I told her of my eager hopes for literary fame and glory, “Well, there’s no harm in trying!” So let’s take a brief look at what a novel is and how we can try to make one come to life.
First, all novels are remarkably similar. Each one tells a story, a coherent series of events that add up to a meaningful picture of human life. A short story may be twenty pages long, a novella one hundred pages, but a novel needs more substantial length, I’d say 150 pages at a minimum. Fat Russian and English novels like David Copperfield and War and Peace go on for six hundred pages or more, and linked novels like Theodore Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire—The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic—may end up at well over a thousand.
Novels needs beginnings, middles, and ends arranged to create curved arcs of dramatic intensity: the beginning introduces us to the novel’s world and its people; the middle relates their victories and defeats; and the end points us to the characters’ lives after they, and we, come to the last page.
How can we hopeful novelists write a novel? How, once we’re on our way, can we continue through the days, weeks, months, and years of hard work that a good novel demands? Having struggled for years over novels that so far remain unfinished, I have decades of hard won experience to back up my big answer to these eternal questions. And my big answer is, ta-da—!!
MEDITATE!
The novelist must meditate, must go for long walks or sit quietly at any hour of the day or night, must study and sketch and listen to the people and streets and houses and trees he or she sees in the world around them. If such observation is hurried or formulaic, the novel will end up stiff and superficial. Only when novelists let their pens follow the sweep and curve of day-to-day existence, then and only then will their writing come alive.
In telling his or her story, a novelist must answer five fundamental questions: who? what? when? where, and why?
Who? The novelist answers “who?” by creating characters, the beings whose thoughts and actions provide the life of the novel. Writers vary widely in how much detail they give their characters portraits. I like descriptions that are quick and clear. Here, from The Eustace Diamonds is Anthony Trollope’s portrait of Frank Greystock, a young lawyer:
Frank Greystock was at this time nearly thirty years old. He was good looking, but not strikingly handsome, thin, of moderate height, with sharp grey eyes, a face clean shorn with the exception of a small whisker, with wiry, strong dark hair which was already beginning to show a tinge of grey.
Dickens introduces the reader to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol without any reference to his physical appearance, and yet through Dickens’s deft sketch of Scrooge’s traits, the character comes to life for the reader:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
What? The answer to “what?” is whatever the novelist decides the characters would do given what they have already done. “Then John woke up, went down to the kitchen, made himself breakfast” makes good sense if the previous sentence put John falling asleep in his bedroom, less good sense if the previous sentence put John flying to Paris.
What? can be hugely inclusive—“After decades of war, came welcome decades of peace”—or it can be split-second actions.
Where? Humans live only on Earth, so when characters live elsewhere, we know for sure that we’re reading make-believe. I tend to like writers who set their scenes foursquare on Mother Earth. Here’s a bit of Mark Twain, a master of writing plain but convincing visual description:
…[a] big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut; bench by the kitchen door with bucket of water and a gourd; hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about; about three shade trees away off in a corner; some currant bushes and goose berry bushes in one place by the fence; outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cotton fields begin, and after the fields the woods.
When? All characters live somewhere on the curved arc of human history; they can be cave dwellers who hunt mastodons with bows and arrows on the frozen tundra, or they can be scientists who use computers to decipher how long that tundra will remain frozen. Fascinating characters may be drawn from all the ages—I recommend that budding novelists do much historical research so that the world of their story comes to life for the reader.
Why? Of these five questions, this last—why?—is the trickiest. We may often answer the other four simply consulting a map or a clock, but “why?” can spin us quickly deep into the uncharted depths of the human soul—here an example from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment:
His head felt rather dizzy; a sort of savage energy gleamed suddenly in his feverish eyes and his wasted, pale and yellow face. He did not know and did not think where he was going; he had one thought only “that all this must be ended today once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it…How, with what to make an end? He had not an idea about it. He drove away thought; thought tortured him.
So you want to write a novel? Writing a novel is a bold and noble ambition, and I hope you will think of me as a coach shouting and waving my arms on the sidelines, cheering you on to eventual victory.
About Michael Lydon
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.
