In the preface to their recently published writing guide, Writer's Companion, Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller state, “we set out to compile everything a creative writer needs to write well into a single reference volume.” Over the next two months, Open Book will be posting the first chapter of the guide, “The Nuts & Bolts.”
CONTEST: To enter our contest to win an e-copy of Writer's Companion, send an email to clelia@openbookontario.com with the subject line “Writer's Companion.” A winner's name will be selected in a draw each month.
Read Part One of "The Nuts and Bolts."
__________________________________________________________
1.2. FRAMEWORK/ THE NOVEL
Every novel is a structure with layers, like an onion. There’s a conceptual plan for the story, with actors peopling a series of events:
The villain captures a damsel. Enters the lovesick hero who kills the villain and elopes with the damsel into the sunset.
We have a protagonist (the damsel or the hero) an antagonist (the villain) a conflict (which is vital!), a climax (or outcome of the conflict), and a resolution.
The second layer is organizational. We need to marshal the events into chunks we’ll call scenes, further arranged into larger bites we’ll call chapters.
The next layer is technical and comprises scores of issues: characterization, setting, plot, pace, POV, atmosphere, etc.
The final layer is the law. There are rules to obey, conventions to follow, usage, and formats to respect.
But we’ve left out the most important layer, the one that supersedes the others in importance. How must a novel work to succeed? What do readers demand from a novel? Notice that genre, plot, contents, and characterization are secondary at this point, for the primary essential is the intangible capacity to satisfy a reader.
Perhaps we can use an example from Carlos’s childhood. He recalls that when he was young, tables were different.
How can that be? A table is a table: a round, oval, or square flat board on legs.
Yes, a table is a table, but its use changes with time which, in turn, alters its shape, and even its soul. The writer penning these lines remembers that in his infancy, tables were exclusively round.
They had a round top, four legs, and another flat board attached to the legs three or four inches above the floor. This second board had an eighteen-inch round hole in its middle. A thick cloth was draped over the top of the table, and it dangled all the way to the floor. A brazier of burning charcoal fitted in the hole. The family sat around the table and arranged the cloth so the legs would benefit from the brazier’s warmth. Tables needed to be round; else, those sitting at it wouldn’t have equal access to the brazier.
The use of the table was also different. We had no television, central heating, or even much food. We had a radio. So, the family sat at an empty table to keep their legs warm, listen to the radio, and forget their rumbling stomachs.
Fiction writing has shared the changes of that table remembered from childhood. Books are still square, with numbered pages, chapter divisions, and lines of letters printed in them. There the similarities stop. Novel structure and its very soul are not the same. Whether we view the changes as evolution or involution depends on the way we understand the world we live in.
The table changed because its users changed, as a consequence of social pressures. People no longer gather around a table unless it’s laden with food. Although, in many households the table is only used on special occasions, its owners preferring a tray on the couch or standing around the new kitchen’s totem: the fridge.
We’re not suggesting that cinema and TV stole the table’s soul, but it certainly recast the way we read.
A fiction book is a commodity. As such, it’s governed by the same forces that shape other market products: purpose, fashion, and usability.
Our first concern is to determine what the reader expects. We’re not referring to contents — which we’ll discuss later — but usability. Failing to take usability into account results in books nobody wants to read.
“But my novel is fantastic; the plot is awesome and the writing... move over Virginia Woolf!” a disgruntled writer might cry after the umpteenth rejection. This may be, but perhaps the novel’s framework and conceptual structure doesn’t fulfill the reader’s expectation of what a fiction work should be. Our writer will rave about literary merits and characterization and a devilishly clever storyline while the manuscript gathers dust.
We propose a simple experiment. Imagine a novel about shape-shifters, the Roman Empire, or the antics of a platypus named Daisy. The plot is unimportant but the genre is. Browse through a film library or check what’s available on cable, or rent a film from a supplier. The film must be of the same genre as that of your intended novel.
Settle down before the screen with a handy clock. Check the time and start the film. Don’t bother about color, setting, décor, the heroine’s legs, or the hero’s abs. Concentrate on the moment when the action starts. Analyze the moment conflict sets in, the moment the film hooks you. It may be an explosion, a passionate glance, burned toast, or an alien bursting from an egg and fastening to a spaceman’s helmet. Glance at the clock.
If the film was any good, the minute hand will have moved fewer than ten times. Ten minutes. That’s the time a scriptwriter has to hook his audience.
Next, imagine discovering a film where the conflict doesn’t set in for twenty minutes. Again, settle before the TV but gather a few friends and family. Instead of watching the screen, analyze the body language of those watching. Observe fidgeting, pouting mouths, furrowing foreheads or, (horror of horrors!) drooping eyelids. Glance at the clock.
Restlessness and danger signs of disinterest will have set in around the ten-minute mark.
Films and TV have changed the way we assimilate narrative. In bygone times, before readers watched TV and traveled wide, a writer spent thousands of words outlining setting, background, and atmosphere to immerse the reader in a given world. Now, thirty-seconds of imagery will convey the same effect.
Characterization remains unchanged. The reader needs time to learn what makes someone tick, to understand her goals, her motivations, and the conflicts she’s likely to face because of personality. However, it is unnecessary to provide the painstaking description of unblemished skin or the silk petticoat with tucks at the waist, ruffles, and a dainty appliqué of Rosaline on an organza bustier that a film can accomplish in a single image. Description should reveal character and not exist for its own sake.
We live in a world that expects instant gratification, instant communication, and instant thrills. In a couple of hours, films deliver a barrage of images and sounds painstakingly engineered to keep the viewer’s gaze riveted on the screen. Unfortunately, readers expect to gather a similar experience from a book. The medium is different but the writer must telescope time and configure the prose to sustain the reader’s immersion. In many ways, holding a reader is far harder to accomplish than keeping a movie watcher seated before a screen. A writer must conjure images from words without the benefit of film and projection equipment. Simple words must sustain the same level of interest to compete. Furthermore, the writer knows (or must know) that the reader will stop somewhere, perhaps at the end of a chapter, to go to sleep, do the next chore, or get off the bus for work. He may not return to the novel for a day or a week. When this happens, the writer must hook his reader again.
The first layer of our onion structure addresses the shape of the novel’s cardiogram, its crests, valleys and spikes, its rhythm and beat. We can no longer start with a flat reading, or else the patient may never recover.
In 2005, Noah Lukeman, a literary agent with a towering reputation, wrote The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. The title says it all: Five pages is all we have to ensnare our reader, though we must confess Mr. Lukeman is an inveterate optimist when it comes to the astringent evaluation process of manuscripts from unknown writers. Often, the first five paragraphs, or sentences, or even clauses, will send a manuscript to the trash can.
Before we begin structuring our new project, before we condense a nebulous concept into the sentence that will start it all, and before creating the characters that will bring our plot to life, we must think of the outer onion layer. We must acknowledge that the reader expects immersion from the moment he opens the book, and structure the manuscript accordingly — from page one.
Novel structure pre-planning
Our first task is to set the tone of the story: solemn or animated, comic or tragic. This must occur in the first paragraph.
The reader wants to know the identity of the narrator. Who is telling the story? Who is talking? In whose head does she find herself? Unless we are writing in cinematic POV, we have the first couple of paragraphs in which to plant the POV and give the reader perspective.
The reader needs a platform: Where are we? What season? Who are these people? We have ten, perhaps twenty lines to establish the background.
Readers (and agents and editors) want to know what’s at stake right away. Opening a novel with exposition is risky. It can be done, as many successful writers can confirm, but they probably knew what they were doing or relied on an adoring fan base to accept it. We must root plot and conflict within the first five pages.
“But I need to establish lots of background leading up to the first moments of overt conflict!”
Perhaps, but a novel — and to qualify as such — must have a certain length, usually eighty thousand words or more. There’s plenty of space for exposition and detail. We can fill in the background later, perhaps with a flashback in chapter two or, better yet, dosing it out over the following chapters.
Wherever we turn, the bellhops of exception carry on about some writer who does things differently, or they’ll denounce a novel that starts with twenty pages of exposition and sells zillions. There are flukes, and there’s no good reason to imitate them, for the real world is more pragmatic and cruel. The blurb on the jacket promises a payoff, and the reader expects to cash it in from the first page. That’s reality.
"The Nuts & Bolts" is an excerpt from Writer's Companion (2011) by Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller. Reprinted with permission.
Post new comment