Eight Things I Learned While Writing My First Novel
Manuscript is DONE. I feel like crying, drinking wine, and then throwing the glass into the fireplace. Is that too Kathleen Turner of me? Whatever. I dig Kathleen Turner.
So not only did I end up with a sizable chunk of fiction, but a process for how to do this all over again when it’s time for Novel #2. For me, the goal is to get to the deep pool quickly, and I took notes on things I noticed were speeding me up or bogging me down.
Here’s what I learned:
- It’s a lot easier to start with grandiose spectacles and atmospheres and other such razzle-dazzles and then fill them in with the characters, rather than start with the characters with no idea where they’re going. This is probably because I find emotional nuance a lot easier to tweak than points of payoff. I feel a lot stronger going forward with the first draft knowing that whoever’s adventure this ends up being, it will involve a ghoul-infested graveyard, a high-end department store, and a blazing wreck on a lonely highway.
- Alternating between quiet scenes and loud ones works your atmospheres, by having different places draw new angles out of the characters. It keeps things lively.
- Don’t worry about having everything outlined down to every last detail before getting started. It’s good to have a sense of where the conflicts are going to boil along the way, but you don’t necessarily have to know how they’re going to happen, at start – just that there’s going to be a breakup, or a riot, or whatever. I keep finding over and over again that the story I start out writing is not the one I end up with. Leave room for things to take off in unexpected directions that are much closer to what you really want to say. For the thing I just finished – while the concept of demon groupies sounds ridiculously fun to play with, getting into a loud, ridiculous fight in a midwestern hotel over playing 70’s schmaltz in the piano bar is much closer to who I am as an author.
- Don’t read someone else’s reality and get distracted out of your own. Whoa, Hunger Games. Not only was this hundreds of pages away from my own writing time – well, OK, I read each of them in one night – but the arena’s a pretty potent world that took my mind over for a couple of days afterward. Best to keep lighter fare on hand while novellating.
- Spend as much time as you can with your imaginary friends. The most wonderful thing happened about halfway through writing the first act: my characters felt like real people around me. This has happened countless times through so many good books; it was incredible to get lifted up on that same suspension of disbelief, by my own work. It was amazing, getting really wrapped up in a good story – that I was still writing! Ending still unknown! Whoah! And hearing the characters’ voices, a feeling of greeting when getting back to the keyboard, and a definite feeling of sadness that my time with them was going to last only so long. (see Kathleen Turner tears, above.) Like a vacation, or a friend coming to stay for a little while, best to make the most of it while it’s happening. And get richer characterization for it.
- Abuse your music. I have a treasure trove of really good, evocative songs that immediately paint pictures in my head while I’m listening to them. Excellent for brainstorming: cueing them up on repeat, and then playing them over and over, like hitting a pinata until everything I can possibly bash out of it is lying in a heap of notes. In my iTunes, I’ve used the Genre column to put the “like” ones together – songs that seem like they’d belong in the same reality. Five different ways of looking at a cemetery, twenty things that are great for building forests, stuff for fight scenes, stuff for sex scenes, stuff for party scenes, etc.
- When describing music (I did this a lot, my novel’s all about bands), pick a theme and stick to it for the whole scene. Cooking, storms, fighting, outer space, etc. – giving it a set of monkeybars to smooth down the metaphors, so when you’re done describing percussion, you have something similar to reach for when getting to the bass.
- Real life ending up in the story is like a secret diary beneath the narrative. Remember, all is grist – bad dates, devastating arguments, opportunities for all kinds of growth can all be made fodder for gripping drama.
As always, please take all of this with the disclaimer of “this worked for me, it *might* work for you.” Now. Off for some celebratory whiskey.
