Write About Now

Tuning Your Advice Filter

Writing is a job, but not a normal one. Most people doing it don't get paid enough to keep at it for the money, so they need additional motivation. Thus support structures are born, communities of aspiration where writers can share their work (and their dreams) with each other. These communities inevitably take on a teaching role. In addition to support, new members are offered advice, plenty of it. I say, writer beware.

If you need to learn your craft, enroll in a class or pick up a good book like Stephen Koch's Modern Library Writer's Workshop. Better yet, read great books and pick them apart until you understand how it's done. A critique group composed of people you know and trust is also helpful. (And for goodness sake, if you have one, don't refer to its members as "beta readers," as if you're just another software developer cranking out code.) Whatever you do, don't join a professional organization, a local club or whatever to learn. You'll just end up confused and off track. People have a tendency to major on the minors, to pass along dictums they don't fully understand and generally spout off from a position of ignorance.

THE ADVICE FILTER
Join, but keep your guard up. New writers lack confidence, and are therefore especially susceptible to groupthink and bad advice. They tend to be the ones who are preyed upon most by the advice industry, too. All writers need an advice filter. You need to sort the good from the bad, and then re-sort the good -- what's good for me won't be good for you. And you'll have to distinguish between aesthetic advice and commercial advice, because the latter often masquerades as the former. I want to propose a few filtering questions to help out.

- Who's it coming from?

I have an MFA in Creative Writing from a top program, have published fiction and nonfiction, have served as an editor, have even been paid good money to "fix" problem manuscripts, and in spite of all that, I think you should take most of my advice with a healthy dose of skepticism. I could be wrong, after all. I frequently am. The only time you should take my advice is when it rings true (see below). That goes for most everyone else telling you what writing is all about, too.

Research and the Island of the Lotus-Eaters

"Write what you know" isn't a maxim for nothing. Teachers give that advice because it cuts out a potentially crippling phase of the novel-writing process: research. I know firsthand what a black hole research can be. In the mid-90s, I started writing a novel about the fall of Constantinople, and the more I dug into the history the more gaps in my knowledge emerged. Finally I found it all but impossible to continue. Will the book ever be finished? Your guess is as good as mine.

But a writer who knew much less about the topic than me could have written a perfectly convincing story about it. The problem wasn't ignorance. It rarely is. My hang-up was a lack of confidence -- and writing fiction (even well-researched historical fiction) is ultimately a confidence game, in both senses of the word. Novelists are constantly making things up when they don't have the facts, but to do that effectively you have to believe in the lie. You have to be innocent in a peculiar way.

I'm amazed when I look back at my earlier work. My grad school thesis included stories set in Cambridge and Nuremberg, and when I read them now, the most convincing aspects are the settings. I used what I knew and found reasonably clever ways to avoid what I didn't. Trying to do the same thing today would be much more daunting, because I've lost some of that early innocence, the confidence that whatever I write, people will believe it.

Hence research. The trick is not to let the research overwhelm the writing. I know authors who can't write a word without some solid research under the belt. Others can improvise and check the facts later. The key is to know how much you need. The danger is that, like a glutton at the table, you won't know when to say when. That was my challenge with Constantinople. I got to the point where I didn't want to make things up, when making things up was the whole point.

So for me, research is a problem. But it's a problem I resolve as I write, the same way other people work out their shortcomings with dialogue or description. On the one hand, I can't do without research. On the other, I can't allow myself the luxury of too much, or I'll be lazing around on the island of the lotus-eaters, oblivious to all deadlines.

Planning a Novel, Part 3: The Treatment

The thrilling conclusion of my series at The Master's Artist.

Planning a novel isn't rocket science. In Part 1, I discussed the conceptual grid that gives structure to your novel, and in Part 2 we turned to the topic of pre-writing, which solidifies the story world in your imagination. Now, let's conclude with the step that brings them both together: writing a treatment of your novel.

What's a treatment, and why bother writing one? Think of a treatment as a dramatized summary. It's more than just a bare bones outline, but less than a fully-fledged novel. Imagine you're fast-forwarding through a movie, stopping for the highlights, or skimming a novel for class the night before the big test. A treatment is like that. It gives you the major contours and pulls you in just enough to give a glimpse of what the finished book will be like.

Planning a Novel, Part 2: Pre-Writing

The second installment of a series I'm writing for The Master's Artist. Enjoy!

In Part 1, we considered the "grid," the conceptual landscape of the novel you're about to write. It's divided into chapters and scenes, and we superimposed a dramatic structure, which gave us a rough sense of what should happen when. (Or rather, what sort of thing should happen when, since we haven't quite reached the what.) You might think of the grid as an old-fashioned card catalog that's been emptied out for your use. It's a set of pigeonholes, nothing more. The real work begins when you try to fill them.

Sometimes a story writes itself. You begin on the first page, stringing one word after another, and before you know it the book takes on a life of its own. The planning, if there is any, happens subconsciously. The writing experience is ecstatic and it carries you forward to the rollicking conclusion. I'm guessing this is how many first novels are written, and some of them go on to be published, though not the vast majority. What happens, though, when you attempt a follow-up and the story doesn't magically happen? That's the dilemma I found myself in. My first novel, written in the heady days of college, was one of those late-night osmosis affairs. The stack of pages grew and grew, and it all seemed so outrageously simple. I was convinced I must be some kind of genius. Then, in grad school, I tried to knock out a more ambitious kind of novel, and I ended up stymied for something like eight years. I knew very well how to write a novel, but I didn't know how to plan one, so the more ambitious the story became, the less able I felt to grapple it down onto the page.

Planning a Novel, Part 1: The Grid

This is the first installment in a series I'm writing for The Master's Artist. I'll be cross-posting the material at Write About Now, since it's practical, writing-related stuff. If you have a comment, you can post it here or there, whichever you prefer!

Planning the Novel, Part 1: The Grid

In honor of National Novel Writing Month, I'd like to begin a series of posts about how to plan a novel. Notice I said plan, not write. Over the next few weeks, I want to consider the thought process that goes into the novel before the writing begins. I realize that, for many of us, that amounts to approximately nothing. We start planning a few minutes after we start writing! Even so, the things I'll be discussing might prove helpful -- if not as action steps, at least as a conceptual framework to keep at the back of your mind.

Planning a novel is not like drawing up plans for a house. You're not going to create a blueprint, perfect in every way, that can then be executed. Instead, planning a novel is like planning a military campaign. You're going to marshall your forces, get your supply lines sorted out, and do everything you can to make sure that, on the day, you can improvise as needed.

Like a battle, your novel has a landscape. It's going to take up space, so we'll start by thinking about the conceptual landscape of your book. I'm going to call this the grid, for reasons that will become clear in a moment. So, what's the grid?

Summary Execution

So you hate writing outlines, but you're tired of not knowing where your novel is going until you get there? I might just have a solution for you. Be prepared, though, because it involves the dreaded s-word: summary. Most authors I know hate summaries. We write them last of all, once the real work is done, and only because editors require them in the proposal. That little requirement bugs us, too, because of all it implies. Why do you need a summary of my manuscript when I'm sending you the manuscript itself? Can't you people just, you know, read it? Editors can, but not everyone is the decision-making chain is going to, so a good summary is important. But that's not what we're here to talk about.

What if you wrote your summary before you wrote the book? And what if, instead of a summary, it was really a treatment -- a fleshed-out, highlight-oriented narrative that suggests both the character development and plot arc of the finished novel.

On Advice

A good writer medicates himself. No, I don't mean he writes with a bottle of pills at his elbow. What I'm saying is, he's constantly diagnosing his shortcomings and prescribing solutions. Think of it that way and you understand why not all good advice is good for you. There's plenty of medicine behind the pharmacy counter that you simply don't need, because you're not sick in that way. Taking the wrong advice can actually make you sick when you were fine before. To guard against this, like I said, you have to be your own diagnostician. Look at the symptoms and make your own evaluation.

Case Study in Characterization

As I mentioned earlier, I've been reading The Best Crime Reporting 2007. My rationale for dipping into the book was to absorb the "mood" of true crime, so that I could create a more convincing facsimile in the novel I'm writing. But I discovered something unexpected: a case study in characterization. The anthology collects essays that appeared in some of the nation's top puplications, including The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Esquire. Ironically, in spite of the fact that this is crime reporting and the crime genre is supposed to be 'plot-driven,' these narratives live or die on the strength of their characterizations. Often, the authors must create a vivid portrait in just a handful of sentences -- a skill I envy and would very much like to learn.

Tom Junod's piece "The Loved Ones," an account of the mass drowning of elderly nursing home patients during Hurricane Katrina, is a perfect example. It balances a profound theme and a complex narrative. Above all, Junod brings the players to life. His portrait of attorney Jim Cobb, who's defending the nursing home owners against charges of negligent homicide, jumps off the page. Here's a taste in which Junod captures through physical description the essence of Cobb's character and struggle:

Cobb is fifty-three now. He's lived in New Orleans all his life, and with his trimmed gray beard, his textured face, and his wrinkle-centered, red-rimmed hound-dog eyes, he looks like one of those dissolute Confederate generals of legend who kept a flask on his hip but still managed to lead those boys up the hill. He loves his causes, and now that he's convinced that the cause he really represents by representing Sal and Mabel Magnano -- the cause of his beloved New Orleans itself -- is a lost one, well, the man will say anything.

Save It for the End of the Scene

You're writing a scene. The dialogue is crackling, the action is intense, and for everything you say you're leaving plenty more unsaid. You're in the zone. In fact, you're punching above your weight, writing better than anyone should be allowed, and loving every second.

And then it happens: you go internal.

You never made a conscious decision. The scene just veered off. And now, between every line of dialogue and every action beat, there are a string of inner questions, a chunk of each character's psychology plopped on the page. Every point is belabored, every effect overdetermined, and suddenly all the story questions are exhausted, all the suspense dead and gone. Your wave crested the moment you opened up your characters' brains.

Introducing an Unsympathetic Character

Simenon does something fascinating in the opening chapter of Le Fiancailles de M. Hire (1933) -- recently released by NYRB with the title The Engagement. Instead getting inside the central character's head, he starts off with the concierge in Mr. Hire's building. She delivers some mail to his apartment, sees something suspicious, and then hunts down one of the detectives who've been conducting surveillance ever since a dead woman was found in a nearby lot. The concierge and the policeman work each other up, and then Mr. Hire leaves the building, only to be followed by a second detective, who shadows him and then compares notes with the first.

In other words, before we meet Mr. Hire as a character, we're introduced to him as a suspect.

Hire is a quiet recluse. Maybe he's not the sort of guy to stir the imagination, but this curious way of introducing him changes that. The suspicions about him add a layer of mystery, insuring that the reader pays close attention to every little thing he does. It's an clever approach to the problem of introducing an unsympathetic character.