Category: Week 3

“All human happiness and misery take the form of action,” Aristotle wrote.

If you’ve gotten this far, you know I have a thing about not outlining your novel too early. I think an outline before you begin can stifle the process and force you in the wrong direction.

Now, however, three weeks in, is a good time to get a kind of outline down on the page. This is about the shape of your story.

Write this down:

• Your inciting action: the first thing that happens in your book, the even that sets off everything else
• Background: List three events that happened before the action of your novel, three events that explain how your protagonist came to be in this situation
• Development: Take the scenes that you’ve already written, and put them in order an order that makes sense.
• End: Write how you think your novel should end (this can change, but get something down).
• Now: what’s missing? Make a list of scenes that still need to be written to get your protagonist from the inciting action to the end of the book.

That’s quite a bit  of work for today, but if you made quick work of it and your writing window hasn’t closed, choose one scene from the “What’s missing?” list and write it.

In addition to identifying certain subjects in your work, when you look back over what you have already written, you will notice certain themes emerging. Theme is important in a novel because it ties the various elements of plot and character together. If a plot is the sequence of events, the theme is the big idea of the book.

Theme is at heart of that all-important truth about fiction: we get to the universal by means of the particular. While your theme can be expressed in broad, universal terms, it must be revealed through your specific characters in their very specific and particular situation.

Maybe you novel actually began with the big idea: you wanted to write a book about how we hurt those we love, or a book about good triumphing over evil, or a book about how the truth is so much different from what it appears to be on the surface.

If you already know your big idea, write it here. If you have more than one, that’s okay. Write down as many as you have. You can narrow it down later.

The big idea behind the book is:

Additional themes worth exploring are:

Now, take the BIG IDEA and write a scene that bears that theme out.

For example, if the theme is, “We never really know the ones love,” and your protagonist is a married man, you might write a scene in which a man discovers something about his wife that makes him realize that he never really knew her. Whoever your characters are, they are the vehicle through which you will reveal your theme.

There comes a point in the writing of every novel when you discover what intrigues you, and what doesn’t. By now, you’ll have found that some of the scenes and characters come naturally, while others feel completely forced.

Now is a good time to return to those 500-word writing prompts. Which short pieces should be expanded into longer chapters? Identify the pieces and write three or four sentences about what you might accomplish in a longer chapter based upon each piece.

1. In a longer chapter I would:

2. In a longer chapter, I would:

3. In a longer chapter, I would:

 Now, choose one of the 500-word prompts that intrigues you and expand it into a chapter of at least 2,000 words.

Today, have your protagonist meet someone you never planned for him or her to meet. Play the scene out in dialogue. Set us in place and time. What brings them together? What tears them apart? Is it a scene of conflict, or intimacy, or both?

A plot operates as a series of switchbacks. If the switchbacks are too obvious, the reader can predict what happens next and is less inclined to keep reading. The plot shifts should arise naturally from situation and character, but should still be surprising.

Yesterday, you took a break from the main storyline to provide your reader (and yourself) with a breather. Today, we’re getting back into the thick of it.

On Day 17, you listed three obstacles that stand in the way of your protagonist obtaining the object of his or her desire, and you wrote a scene in which he faced off against at least one of those obstacles.

Today, return to what you wrote on Day 17. Pick up where you left off: have your protagonist make a decision that shifts the novel in some way.

Readers need breathers. Why? Breathers give the reader a chance to stop and meditate. A breather allows a reprieve from the primary action of the novel. A breather slows the pace. Sometimes, you have to do that. Going at breakneck speed from page 1 to page 400 is generally not advisable.

A breather may take the form of a subplot (see Day 10), but it may also be something smaller. In The Year of Fog, Abby is a photographer. Her search for the missing child is broken up with brief episodes about photography and memory. While Abby’s work is not a major subplot to the novel, the brief chapters–only a few paragraphs each–dealing with photography serve to allow the reader to take a break from the intense search; they allow the reader to breathe. Ideally, your breathers will be thematically consistent with the central question. Abby wants to find Emma, the girl who went missing on the beach, but she can’t remember enough of what happened that day to piece the puzzle together. Her work as a photographer is grounded in image, a form of recorded memory. So even when we’re taking a break from the search, we’re reminded of it.

Haruki Murakami is the master of the breather. His novels are spacious because the plot is not entirely the thing. He meanders, he philosophizes, he reminisces. In all of Murakami’s novels, the narrative breaks away from the main story line and comes back, again and again and again.

Take The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In a suburb of Tokyo, Toru Okada is on the hunt for his wife’s missing cat. Simple enough: a search. There is great potential in a search. But the stakes of the search multiply exponentially when Okada begins searching for his wife as well. From the publisher’s description:

As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute, a malevolent politician, a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old girl, and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a mystery? Is it a political novel? Is it a love story? Is it a picaresque? Is it a fantasy? It is all of these things. Few writers have what it takes to pull off such a feat, but Murakami does it elegantly, enticingly, and beautifully. His novel is an intricately patterned masterpiece. The moment you think you might be losing the thread, he pulls you back.

I encourage you to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. You should also pick up The Death of a Beekeeper, another masterfully patterned work of fiction. Gustafsson’s book is a novella, very short, and yet within its sparse pages one finds numerous subjects, arranged in a series of notebooks.

I would love to see these two novels laid out in pieces on the floor. It must have been quite a task, figuring out which pieces went where. The arrangement of each work—Murakami’s vast, sprawling novel and Gustafsson’s small, exquisite novella–creates moments of intense suspense, while allowing for stretches of thoughtful repose. Just when you think you’ve had enough suspense, the narrative moves into a slower phase; just when you think you’ve had enough philosophy, we return to the suspenseful plot.

Today, think of a way to let your book breathe. One place to begin is your protagonist’s profession. In Homing Instincts, by Karen Guzman, Seth Hingham is a wildlife biologist. His appreciation for a knowledge of the natural world gives readers a break from the main action: his attempt to put his life back together after his divorce and his father’s death.

What is your protagonist’s profession? Today, think about how the profession connects thematically with the main storyline of your novel.

Now, write, 1600 words about what your character does for a living. Use the language of the profession. If you don’t know it, do research!

For an in-depth exploration of breathers, pacing, structure, and plot, get The Paperclip Method: The No-Outline Novel Workbook.

By now, you’ve established conflict and point of view. You know your central question. Your character is in trouble. You’ve written some scenes, and you’ve written some summary. You’ve made sure the stakes of the novel are clear. What next?

Now it’s time to complicate matters.

You must introduce a series of events in which the conflict is played out. Development is the series of attempts made by the protagonist to resolve his/her conflict. These attempts should increase with regard to drama and/or suspense, and ideally, each step in the development should tell us a little bit more about the protagonist.

In Lydia Nesbit’s amazing debut novel, Shine Shine Shine, the narrator’s husband is in space on a rocket that has fallen out of orbit. The narrator wants two things: for her husband to come home, and for her surreal suburban life to have a kind of order and meaning. There is a tremendous threat to both of these desires. At one point, she has a car accident, and during the car accident her wig flies off of her head. Suddenly, she is exposed to her friends and neighbors, and to the reader as well; at this moment, we learn something significant about her that we did not know before. This is a woman who has been keeping secrets for years. When her secret is revealed, will she be an outcast? Will her carefully constructed life fall apart? How will she respond to this crisis?

The best novels reveal some new complexity at every turn.

When I say complexity, I’m not talking about cheap shots (“Damion is Gerald’s baby!”), but about subtle inflections that alter what we know of the characters and the world in which they operate.

Whatever type of conflict drives your story, the two sides of the conflict should be uncertain enough to keep the reader engaged. That is, they need to be paired in a way that does not make the outcome easily predictable. If your reader knows what’s going to happen, there’s no point in finishing the story.

As the novel moves forward, new complications must be introduced. Characters must be revealed as flawed human beings. Tension should rise. Subtle (or not so subtle) shifts should take place in your protagonist–internally or externally.

Today:

Make a list of three things that threaten to keep the protagonist from achieving his or her desire.

Then, write a scene in which the protagonist comes up against one or more of these obstacles. How does he or she react?

In this scene, we should learn something about your protagonist we did not know before.