What goes into a novel

Here’s the link to my new book as promised. If you want to write a novel and don’t know where to start, here are some approaches you might like to consider. First, get into the following habits:

1. Carry a notebook and jot down words, phrases and ideas in it whenever they occur to you.
2. Try free writing, that is, writing without stopping, without judging and without editing. Don’t take your pen off the page.
3. Practise. Turn up at your desk regularly, or get your notebook out on the train.

In most novels, you’re going to find:

• Characters: made up people who act out the story in front of your readers.
• Story: a series of events that satisfy the readers’ curiosity somehow.
• World: a made up place (or a real place that’s been fictionalised) that your characters explore.
• Scenes: small amounts of action, happening in one place, at one time, from one viewpoint.

Various thinkers have written about the ways in which stories are constructed. From their writing we know that:

• We tell each other stories to make sense of the world.
• When you break it down, as I said in a previous post, we tell each other stories about people overcoming problems and some kind of change occurring.

These stories – the linear classic ones – tend to follow a particular pattern. Lots of people have written about it and come up with ways to explain story structure. Aristotle discussed it in the Poetics and, in the nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag came up with the a model of dramatic structure called Freytag’s pyramid. In the twentieth century, Carl Jung and Vladimir Propp discussed archetypal characters. Contemporary writers who’ve written about story structure include Nigel Watts in the teach yourself book called Write a Novel, Evan Marshall, Robert McKee and Christopher Vogler. So there’s a lot of material out there and many of the contemporary practitioners also give you practical help in applying the story structure to your own work.

I decided to try to make my own version of classic narrative structure as writer-friendly as possible and as specific as possible. (So often advice for novel writers can feel unspecific.) It goes like this:

1. The World.
2. A Problem.
3. WWOD.
4. Entanglement.
5. Climax / All is Lost.
6. Happily Ever After? (Or not)

WWOD stands for ‘What Would Obi (Wan Kenobi) Do?’ In other words, what is the main character going to do about the problem? Some writers call this stage ‘the quest’. I’ve called it WWOD because you need to treat your main character like a modern hero or anti-hero: he or she is not going to sit of the sofa eating crisps. Even if most people in the situation would do nothing, your main character takes action.

In How to Plan a Novel I go through the whole novel and give you writing instructions based on my writer-friendly version of classic narrative structure. Essentially I’m using the small steps method and applying it to novel planning. The idea is that you can use the six points above to plan your own novel, using the writing instructions as flexibly as possible.