Anything over 50,000 words is regarded as a novel. Anything less, a novella. Unless it’s absolutely astonishing, publishers tend to shy away from a first book that's much longer than 75 or 80,000 words. My assumption is that the increased costs of printing makes a first run just too risky. A 50,000 word novel will be roughly 200 pages long, so 100,000 words would pretty much double the printing cost.
If 50,000 words sounds like a marathon, it is.
But imagine setting out on a marathon with no idea of where you’re going, where the finish line is, or how long the route is. What would your chances of enjoying the run be, let alone your chances of actually finishing?
It’s surprising (or not) how many wannabe writers simply sit down at the keyboard and begin bashing away wildly, with only the nub of an idea to work with. There are so many of them that they even have a name – “pantsers” – because they’re flying by the seat of their pants. Most pantsers run out of steam by around 20,000 words. They’re not even halfway through the marathon and they’re exhausted, lost, confused. It’s bound to happen when you don’t have a plan. I know. I’ve been there.
The first step in planning is to figure out your story.
THINGS YOU’LL NEED:
- An idea
- A computer – a laptop is ideal, because it means you can write anywhere
- Microsoft Word
Western story arcs typically have a three-part structure. It’s a good idea to stick with this, because it’s worked for Hollywood and just about every best-selling novelist you've read.
In the first act, main characters and their routines are established. Themes are introduced. And then you need a “turning point” or “inciting incident” that takes the story into the second act. This is the “hook” that convinces the reader that it’s worth continuing. It’s the reason for the rest of the story.
The second act unpacks what you’ve established. It introduces obstacles to overcome, expands on character, and moves the action forward. It culminates in a second turning point – generally, at this stage it appears that all is lost, and that your hero is about to be overwhelmed by the weight of what’s gone before.
The third act unravels this further. Your hero either gives in to the forces that threaten him or her, or he/she triumphs.
The final part of the third act consists of the denouement, or conclusion, where you show that your hero has morally conquered or succumbed.
Act I is around 20% of the story, Act II 70%, and Act III 10%.
It’s in the second act that things fall apart. It’s the longest, and throughout you have to ensure that it builds unfailingly, taking your reader to the climax that leads to Act III.
Your story comes down to three basic choices:
- Man versus Man: here, the villain is another person – Holmes’s Moriarty, Luke Skywalker's Darth Vader, Marlow’s Mr Kurtz
- Man versus Self: the villain is a collection of internal conflicts, doubts and fears (this was my choice in Theory)
- Man versus Nature: where the villain is a volcano, an asteroid, global warming or the Antarctic.
You need a villain. You need conflict, friction and tenstion – or else you'll end up with a bland porridge of words that will captivate nobody. Imagine Harry Potter without Voldemort - how could it have been anything more than a cutesy tale about some kiddie wizards?
Write out your story as a synopsis in no more than two pages. This is a lot more challenging than it sounds, but keep at it. It’ll force focus, and it will quickly point out weaknesses and illogical bits, and it will spark off other ideas on how to keep the thing moving forward.
Once you have an end-to-end synopsis that works, and which outlines a compelling story, you’re getting to the point where the real planning begins.
And that’s what we’ll look at next time.
Do you really want to write a novel? Because wanting is not enough.
You’re only a writer if you can actually write. In the same way that not everyone can do ballet, not everyone can do writing.
Yes, you need a good grip on grammar. But writing is not just the stringing together of words and punctuation. Its purpose is to reward and enrich, and to give your reader glimpses into characters and the world they populate in ways he or she has never before experienced. Its purpose is emotional – to move, amuse, scare, provoke. As importantly, to move them along from one page to the next. And all you have at your disposal is a collection of black marks on paper to achieve all that.
Ready?
THINGS YOU’LL NEED:
• A nice new Moleskine and your favourite pen or pencil.
• An idea.
Your idea needs to be a strong one. An original one. One that can be sustained over 50,000+ words.
How do you know it’s a good idea? You can write it down in a sentence or two. If you need a page to explain it, it’s not a good idea.
Here’s the idea that led to Theory: A wealthy man’s mid-life crisis manifests as a crisis of identity. But the more he pieces together his past, the more his present unravels.
Here’s the idea behind Wasted: A socially inept young guy has taught himself to forget certain aspects of past. But his forgetting has been so effective that he now forgets everyday things unintentionally, and this leads him down a path he had no intention of following.
And the idea for the unpublished The Same Deep Water as You: Three strangers, a man who has just murdered his father, a woman whose own father died a thousand kilometres away at exactly the same moment, and a little girl who refuses to speak are thrown together by fate.
You’ll note that these are simply ideas at this stage, not full-blown synopses. That’s because you won’t know what the story is just yet.
EXERCISE 1: Practice identifying the ideas behind your favourite books and movies and write them up like the examples above.
EXERCISE 2: Write your idea on the first page of your Moleskine. If you don’t like it, scratch it out and put down another. Keep going until you have a fantastically brilliant idea.
DON'T understimate the power of a strong, clear idea.
Some hints: Keep your ideas within your own range of experience. Don’t try a medical thriller if you’re not a doctor. Don’t try historical fiction unless you have the time and capacity to do the research. Don’t set your story in New York or Rome, unless you know the locations intimately. Consider if your idea is something that you might want to read yourself.
Next time: turning your idea into a story.
It took me a long time to write my first novel. I’d guess around thirty years. That’s because, in my teens, I was convinced that I would write one. One day. Too bad it took me three decades and hundreds, if not thousands, of pages to figure out how.
Once I finally wrote it, I got lucky. After eighteen rejections (or thereabouts – I lost count) my manuscript was one of the 2% or so of unsolicited manuscripts received by SA publishers every year actually to get published.
It's pointless to try to describe the feeling when you finally hold the finished thing in your hands, crisp and virginal and un-dogeared and smelling of paper and ink. Who was it who said that writing a book is the closest a man can come to experiencing childbrith?
It gets better when the reviews are flattering, and when O magazine chooses it for its Father's Day picks – and when the sales figures creep beyond the amount of people in your immediate circle of friends and family. But from the day I’d heard of its acceptance by my new publishers, I began to worry that I only had one in me. So I started the second while we were editing the first, and finished the manuscript (“ms” in the jargon) before the first went to print.
It took so long to get an opinion from James, my publisher, on the second one that I started and finished the third. Then I went back and read the second, and realised that, other than the first nine pages and the last eight, it was rather poo. No wonder James, usually so energetic and optimistic, had been dragging his feet. I put the thing down and rolled my eyes and mailed him and asked him to forget about the second and to look at the third instead.
Now my third attempt, Wasted, is being published as my second novel in August this year by a surprisingly excited publisher.
I’m excited too, of course. Especially as James strongly suggested we find an international agent for me asap. But more than anything, I’m relieved. Because I’m no longer a once-off – which, I’m led to believe, is what 90% of first-time authors are. Relieved because the thirty years I spent dicking around weren’t completely wasted.
It's said that everyone has a book in them. I'd guess that most of them have no idea how to get it down on paper.
If you’re one of them, here’s an idea.
Over the next while, I’m going to share my experiences and the lessons I learnt while writing my three manuscripts on this blog. The plan is to structure it pretty much chronologically, moving from the pragmatic to the more abstract as we go. Of course, writers all have their own strategy to slay the dragon, so you're not allowed to sue me if my methods don't work for you.
But who knows – they might just end up short-cutting the process by a few decades.
