Novel Writing

 I have been trying to write a novel since 2012 - this does not count what I tried doing in 2010 with "Rock and Roll Stew." Lately, I have been working my way through short stories, but that has more to with the lack of a laptop for most of 2022. I am typing more than I am writing. What accumulated during my stay in prison is 4 complete novels and 2 incomplete ones. I still do not know if I have a clue what I am doing. Philip Roth is all that keeps me going - he said when he started a new novel, he had no idea what he was doing. 

It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again. Philip Roth

In short, I am still learning, but also I am not giving up. I try not to make the same mistake twice.

 Nathan Bransford has a post on dialog, How to write good dialogue in a novel. Some people think I write good dialog when all I do is transcribe the voices in my head. Mr. Bransford writes:

Dialogue cannot be everything, and, in fact, it’s almost always best when it’s used judiciously. Even novels that appear at first blush to be almost entirely dialogue are clever in the way they weave in other crucial storytelling elements, particularly motivations, physical description, inner thought processes, and context and exposition.

Yes, to all of that. If I knew all of this before, it was reading a lot of plays over the years. It seems to me that reading will teach us all that. I started re-reading Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, I had liked them when a teenager and then dropped them, in prison and found them to be very good for dialog because he does more than just talk for the sake of talking - he explores ethics and other ideas in his dialog while not crimping the action. Even more illuminating was Robertson Davies, who had started out as a playwright. As a lawyer, I read enough trial transcripts to know how much talk is banal to the point of stupidity, hesitant, and meaning is all too often only a lucky by-blow.

Sometimes you’ll see characters in novels bantering back and forth in a way that is meant to be witty unto itself, reveal character, or just fill space. Unless it’s just so insanely unbelievably clever that the writer somehow makes it work, usually this aimless banter feels hollow and far less interesting than the author thinks it is.

A good conversation is an escalation. The dialogue is about something and builds toward something. If things stay even and neutral, and it mainly just feels like everyone has all the time in the world to chit chat aimlessly, the dialogue just feels empty. Weave cleverness into dialogue that otherwise has a point, don’t just show chit chat for chit chat’s sake.

Characters in a novel never just talk. There’s always more to it.

But I think dialog must be good for the ear. I think this I got from read George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare and see too many screwball comedies. Narrative should also be good for the ear; I doubt I do this so well.

Exposition and dialogue only really mesh when one character genuinely doesn’t know what the other character is telling them and it’s natural for them to explain at the moment they’re explaining it, but even then, try first to find a more active way for the character to make a discovery.

Otherwise, if you’re just trying to smush information into your dialogue, your reader is going to spot the artifice a mile away.

 If you think the following is bad advice, go find a trial transcript to read:

Having an “ear for dialogue” means being able to create an effective illusion. Do not insulate yourself from criticism by saying “but this is how people really talk.” You’re not trying to imitate how people really talk. You’re trying to write effective dialogue in a novel. It’s not the same thing.

In real life our conversations wander around all over the place, and a transcribed real life conversation is a meandering mess of free association and stutters. In a novel, a good conversation is focused and has a point. It’s like real life dialogue with the confusing bits stripped out. As my former client Jennifer Hubbard wrote, “good dialogue sounds like conversation, but is not an exact reproduction of conversation.”

I can abide only one writer who uses dialect - Zora Neale Hurston. She wields it like poetry, and this may be why I like reading her. Rex Stout taught me this lesson - I think it was in A Family Affair, where Archie Goodwin puts in a bit of transcribed dialog and announces he is giving up the effort and will just translate from that point forward. And if I want to do my own kind of Indiana novel, I want my distance from James Whitcomb Riley.

Human beings are not very articulate creatures, and we’re not wholly self-aware. Despite all the words at our disposal, words tend to fail us at key moments, and even when we know what we want to say we spend a whole lot of time trying to describe and articulate what we feel without being quite able to do it properly. We misunderstand, overemphasize, underemphasize, grasp at what we mean, and conversations go astray.

So when two characters go back and forth explaining precisely what they are feeling and/or thinking, it doesn’t seem remotely real. Good dialogue is instead comprised of attempts at articulation. There’s a whole lot that is kept back, because we rarely put our unvarnished feelings out there.

Again, it is my reading trial transcripts that tells me this is so right. Probably, too, all the failed communications I have had with significant others over the years. I do like the idea of conversations where meaning goes past the characters, that they have only partially formed ideas they need to express, or emotions they do not want to (or cannot quite) put into words.

There is more, I recommend reading the whole article for the examples given. These quotes are my Oh, yeah reactions.

Meanwhile, over at The Millions How to Write a Novel discusses the actual process.

There is a long-standing debate about a critical aspect of the novel-writing process. Currently and colloquially in some annexes of the writing community it’s been playfully termed the “pantsing vs. plotting/outlining/planning” debate. Pantsers fly by the seats of their pants: they write and see where it takes them. Planners, well, plan before they write.

Precedent and vehement feeling may be marshaled in favor of both approaches.

My first attempt was strictly by the seat of my pants. When I did outline, the thing went awry. Of going by the seat of my pants, I learned that I had to keep a close eye on my characters (like do not forget their names or relationships). Of the outlining method, I found that the plot was easier to outline, but that I needed to add what points I wanted to make about the action and characters. Oddly to my mind, what I have put into the novel form is what I think of as a conundrum of character, while what motivates my plays are ideas. I use Bertolt Brecht to justify my plays and Milan Kundera (well, today it is Kundera, and it could just as easily be James Joyce or Joyce Carol Oates or Nelson Algren) to justify my novels. The article gives plenty of examples of each method. Read them, do what you find works best for you. 

Planning in a sense takes place in both models. In the case of the planners, it’s a more explicit, thinking kind of planning, whereas in the case of the pantsers it’s an unthinking planning that takes place by way of that first draft.

You might also want to consider this from a different source:

For several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it, but when I read through the result I was far from impressed. “Good grief,” I moaned, “this is hopeless.” What I had written seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, yet it was rather boring and, as a whole, left me cold.

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From the outset, I had a pretty clear idea of the novels I wanted to create. It seems that I discovered my “original” voice and style, not by adding to what I already knew but subtracting from it. Think how many things we pick up in the course of living. Whether we choose to call it information overload or excess baggage, we have that multitude of options to choose from, so that when we try to express ourselves creatively, all those choices collide with each other and we shut down, like a stalled engine. We become paralysed. Our best recourse is to clear out our information system by chucking all that is unnecessary into the bin, allowing our mind to move freely again.

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Looking back, however, it strikes me that for an aspiring writer, writing “something that simple” may not be so simple. It’s easy enough to think and talk about ridding your mind of unnecessary things, but actually doing it is hard. I think that I was able to pull it off without too much fuss because I had never been obsessed by the idea of being a writer, so I was not hindered by that ambition.

If there is indeed something original about my novels, I think it springs from the principle of freedom. I had just turned 29 when, for no particular reason, I thought, “I feel like writing a novel!” I had never planned to be a writer and had never given serious thought to what sort of novel I should be writing, which meant that I was under no particular constraints. I just wanted to write something that reflected what I was feeling at the time. There was no need to feel self-conscious. In fact, writing was fun – it let me feel free and natural.

All the preceding comes from ‘I want to open a window in their souls’: Haruki Murakami on the power of writing simply

 Reading Why Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton’s Present Tense, I thought this passage makes a point I need to add here. That is the capaciousness of the novel (which Kundera hits on with his Art of the Novel):

The Custom of the Country is nothing if not a book about one white woman’s survival. Yet in it Wharton remains committed to representing how wretched survival can be, even when that survival features the most luxurious of fabrics, goods, and surroundings. The book ends without resolution, lacking in synthesis. The continuous present in which it started remains. Undine’s mother’s exclamation echoes: “Undine Spragg, how can you?” Readers are left only with a set of unanswered questions about marriage, gender, white womanhood, and social convention that remain important to consider today....

I distrust the neat ending. I prefer the dissatisfaction of The Maltese Falcon to the certainty of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Life is chaotic, incomplete, whatever resolutions we reach are temporary, we draw different conclusions from the same facts, and why should fiction not leave the reader to make their own decisions about whatever they have read?

Let us not forget revision. When I was young, I thought everything was a first draft. Duh. The first draft is nothing. I learned that practicing law. The idea hit in a different area, got reconceptualized in prison, when I heard the phrase "vomit draft." The following comes from LitHub's Accidental Craft: On Discovering the Right Way (For Me) to Revise by Sorayya Khan:

Sitting at the newly cleared desk, I wonder what I might have made of my road map had it arrived simultaneously with the idea for the book. I envy the writer who starts with an outline, fixed and exact, who embarks on a journey always knowing where she is going and where she has been. If only, I think, and then I catch myself. Although my map, changeling that it has been, is the only route to the book I’ve written, I would not have known how to read it without understanding the necessity of that route and no other, the countless possibilities tried and discarded along the way.

We find our own ways into and through the books we write, but the journey always involves opening ourselves up to possibilities. We experiment with a different word, a shorter line of dialogue, an additional scene, a new beginning until we stumble on the combination that best serves our story. In doing so, we see, we see again, we see differently. We reconceptualize.

As a beginning writer in that Syracuse classroom, I was a long way from understanding revision as re-conceptualizing or imagining that seeing anew might involve unmaking. It took time, but I was aided by kitchen scissors that hacked apart my drafts and bright colors that fused the pieces back together. Seeing my drafts on floors and walls made the difference.

These days, I’m more likely to focus on the hopefulness of revision rather than the sense of failure it once evoked. In the space that confronts us between pen and page, and one word or chapter to the next, lie myriad possibilities, one of which will be what is needed. Revising made my books—and makes all our books—possible. I may not be in love with revision, but I have made peace with it.

I do find wisdom in those paragraphs. What I found worked was to surrender myself to the obsession of the story - none of which are being written as I have sunk several hours into this post! We will see if anything gets published, to see if I know anything or just full of BS. See, I am still learning. This post has only one true purpose - to point you to where you can learn. 

One last thought from me, which I think applies to planning and to the actual words put down on paper (whether dialog or narrative), when confronted by the blank page the idea enters something like Clausewitz's fog of war.

And I will exit with Philip Roth:

That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

Good luck to anyone who tries their hand. Do not wait as I did.

sch 11/5/22