Melissa Donovan's How to Develop Your Best Novel Writing Ideas (Writing Forward) has me thinking of what I have done with "Love Stinks" (which as of today, everyone hates) and "Chasing Ashes" (which is still coalescing).
By identifying your passions, you can figure out what makes you tick, and that’s a great start to your quest for novel writing ideas that you can really sink your teeth into.
All your past and present obsessions hold the clues to your future commitment to your own novel. Pay close attention to your preferences for genre, theme, setting, style, character archetypes and above all — emotional sensibility. Make lists of what you love about your favorite stories, and soon you’ll see the shape of your own novel start to emerge.
"Love Stinks" hides my interests in history and memory and epistemology behind a love story of my version of the Bickering Bickersons.
"Chasing Ashes" has become more autobiographical over the past 15 years, and even something more political, more philosophical. A man comes home from prison trying to understand his place in America.
The impetus for "Love Stinks" came from reading reviews about writers writing unpleasant characters, from the idea that two people might love one another and never be wholly comfortable with each other, that a marriage maybe a redoubt from which to face the world.Actually, story ideas are everywhere. The trick is to collect a variety of ideas, and let them stew while you decide which one is worth your effort. Here are some quick tips for generating ideas:
- Hit the bookstore or library and jot down some of your favorite plot synopses. Then rework the details to transform these old plots into fresh ideas for new stories. Try combining different elements from your favorite stories. And use movie synopses too!
- Load up on fiction writing prompts and develop each prompt into a short (one page) summary for a story.
- Harvest some creative writing ideas from the news.
- Grab a subplot from your favorite movie or TV show — a story line that wasn’t fully explored — and make it the central story problem.
"Chasing Ashes" comes out of trying to understand my life and how I could put it together after having done my best at destroying myself. There is the question of what history has wrought and my place in it. There is plenty of the news influencing it direction.
The best ideas rise to the top. These are not necessarily the bestselling ideas or the most original ideas. They’re the ideas that are best for you. Those are the ones that will haunt you, keep you up at night, and provoke perpetual daydreams.
These are the ones worth experimenting with.
Both novels are experiments, the success of either is doubtful.
In truth, the experimental phase is when you start writing the novel — just like the test drive is when you start driving the car. But you haven’t committed yet. You’re still open to the idea that this is not for you. This might seem like I’m nitpicking over semantics, but you’ll find that discarding partially written novels wears on you after a while. If you play around with your story with the understanding that you’re experimenting, and if things don’t work out, you can always walk away without feeling guilty or like you gave up. Go back to your idea stash, and start tooling around with the next one.
How do you experiment with novel writing? I’m so glad you asked. There’s a lot you can do. Start by brainstorming. Sketch a few characters. Poke around and see what kind of research this novel might require. Draft a few scenes. Write an outline. If you keep going through these motions and can’t shake your excitement, then you are finally . . .
I like the optimism here, it feels like permission to make a fool out of myself (well, even more than I have done so far in this life).
Many (or most) of your novel writing ideas might end up in the trash or in a bottom drawer. But every one of them will be worth it when all of that idea generating, planning, and experimenting finally pays off. Every idea that doesn’t work will pave the path to the idea that will set you on fire.
Speaking of ideas, here is an example of finding an idea, Finding Briseis: On Resurrecting a Forgotten Woman from Homer’s Iliad (Literary Hub).
As for ideas and what purpose to put the novel, let me suggest Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Did Not Write to Be Agreed With. He Wrote to Awaken by (Electric Literature):
Where once I had accused Ngũgĩ of ideological overreach, I now began to perceive instead a kind of consistency, the rigor of a writer who refused the division, beloved by privileged literati, between aesthetic subtlety and moral clarity. Ngũgĩ’s fiction did not flatter the reader’s intelligence with ambiguity for its own sake. It confronted one with the burden of truth-telling in contexts where equivocation had long passed for sophistication. Ngũgĩ was not attempting to redeem history through art, as so many of our idols had attempted, but to insist upon literature as the record of history’s cost. Not the decorous gesture of memory, but its reckoning. Not sentiment, but responsibility.
From this essay, it sounds as if the truth-telling is brutal; certainly not genteel. What American would think of writing like this?
Ngũgĩ’s satire is not escapist; it records the surreal logic of dictatorship, where buttocks become protest and court flatterers chant nonsense with liturgical zeal. In such a world, absurdity becomes the most faithful mode of realism. That the novel remains free of bitterness is its most withering critique. It laughs not to soothe, but to expose. In its grotesque clarity, Wizard of the Crow speaks more truthfully of African postcolonial life than realism bound to interior psychology ever could.
I am struck and stuck by "interior psychology". Is the inability to write like Ngũgĩ is our American individualism. That we filter the culture through ourselves without being able to see the culture for itself? Or is inferiority our literature's defense against cinema's lack of interiority?
To read him seriously is to be reminded that literature, particularly in postcolonial societies, is not an indulgence but a duty. Ngũgĩ gives us no refuge in cleverness. He demands, rather, that we remember. That we mourn. That we articulate our condition not to explain it away but to expose it to light.
He is, I now see, not a writer one outgrows, but a writer to whom one returns—chastened, wiser, more exposed. The kind of figure who, like an elder too easily dismissed in youth, proves with time to have been speaking the truest language all along.
Gore Vidal wrote often enough of American's historical amnesia, he may be right. We now be paying the cost of that amnesia, and its counterparts, hagiography and mythology. Then I think of Toni Morrison's Mercy. Maybe Huckleberry Finn, even if I can think of nothing mourned by Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer putting an appearance muddled this novel for me). The possibility exists for us. We may need to take it up.
These traits predict 90% of failed novels
4 Critical Things Every Novel Must Have
9 Signs the Beginning of Your Novel Looks Promising
10 Novels Agents Have Seen a Billion Times, and How to Make Yours Stand Out by Kate McKean (Electric Literature) will be of use to you who want to write a popular novel, following a trend, but I found it worth my time.
Ocean Vuong is a name making the rounds right now. I have read an essay by him, if memory serves, and, if I did, I liked what he had to say. Tom Crewe's My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure (London Review of Books) savages Vuong's novels. I put it into this post for what it has to say about the writing of novels.
... In order to support them, Hai, who has started using opioids again, but not in a way that causes much trouble, takes a job at a fast-food joint called HomeMarket. (Vuong once lived with an elderly woman with dementia called Grazina and worked at a fast-food joint called Boston Market.) That’s pretty much it, in terms of movement – and this is Vuong’s intention, since he claims (again, overestimating his novelty) to be doing something radical in breaking from the Aristotelian emphasis on catharsis, representing instead the great fact of ‘stasis’ in American working-class life.
Once again, the success of the novel hinges on its mode of presentation, and Vuong proceeds to exhibit all the same tendencies. Once again, there are hundreds of incoherent sentences and images.
***
Vuong has repeated the same observation in other interviews. Something he insists on in this context, while declaring that it is out of fashion (another dubious proposition), is the literary value of his own ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’. But the presumption that someone’s first impulse would be to leave their co-worker’s car stuck in a blizzard is that of a cynic (‘Writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is,’ he has said. ‘I’ve been in dicey situations in my life where I realised early on, I just don’t have it’). This explains his strained attempt to communicate to the waiting world his discovery that people can be nice. V.S. Pritchett called sincerity ‘that quality which cannot be obtained by taking thought’. But Vuong’s sincerity is self-conscious and willed – he is constantly stoking it by shovelling on more and more words. It is why, despite his close identification with his characters and their class situation, he turns them into parodies (and their enemies into grotesques). He doesn’t imaginatively enter these lives, but stands outside them, waving for our attention so he can tell us what they mean.
Defending himself against the (generally indulgent) criticisms that have so far been made of his prose, Vuong has attributed his style – he claims, blasphemously, that it is a ‘19th-century’ style – to his sincerity, expressed as an opposition to ‘dogmatic values about clean lines, minimalism, restraint, control, rigour’. On the podcast Talk Easy, he suggested that these qualities ‘are the privileges of the wealthy’, whose sanitised, smoothed way of life ‘denies the corporeal reality of the body’....
***
An extravagant sentence can certainly be a thing of beauty; style is often by its very nature excess. But no writer can expect to be taken at their own self-estimation, and this emperor is wearing no clothes.
Decide for yourself if these words are helpful or not. Not having read Vuong's novels, I cannot say if they are an accurate criticism of his work. That did not really concern me when I was reading the review. I have read much touting sincerity and authenticity in current writing; those qualities can be false. The falseness seems to be in either presentation or substance. There was a controversy some years back about some Anglo writer writing as a Mexican. This was considered inauthentic. But what if a Mexican writer tells a story that misses capturing the truth of our existence that the Angl writer captured? Which one is the more authentic? Sincerity should come out in style. The Good Lord knows Theodore Dreiser was sincere; so was Upton Sinclair; neither is known as an exciting stylist. However, I cannot imagine a style like Marcel Proust would make them equally sincere. As for Proust, how he captures emotions would not be served writing like Dreiser. Personally, I like what Vuong describes as the qualities of his prose. It reminds me of what Nelson Algren wrote in Nonconformity. However, what I read in the review of Vuong's prose does inspire in any desire for emulation.
Not pitched directly to novel-writing, but that is its actual trajectory:
This post shambling along to this point is far past long enough - or far from long enough - and whatever good sense remains to me says finish this now, for now.
Okay, I have said this elsewhere: the presenter in the Book Focus videos is a bit intense; that does mean you will not learn from him. It may be that I have read several of the novels mentioned, and that I will stand with anyone who promotes Tom Robbins' Still Life With Woodpecker. The title for the following is Top Ten Transformative Novels That Break All The Rules.
sch 6/22
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