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A scene in a novel begs to be filled up with details, whether they be lines of dialogue, pieces of the setting, or a character’s point of view. The wealth of them determines how much the scene comes to life. It is hard for a reader to care much what happens until you fill out a run of pages—let’s say three double-spaced manuscript pages at a minimum. Anything less can be considered a narrative summary or a partial scene designed to set up a later full-fledged scene. Why does some arbitrary length matter? Why not just jump into a scene and let it rip? The reason I raise a caution flag is the effect of these blocks of scenes in the aggregate. While you’re immersed in a single scene, the juices are flowing. All is right with the world. Yet what happens when you’ve written 50 pages and you decide to read over those blocks in sequence? What can happen is a growing disenchantment with the larger direction of the novel. Your initial impulse to follow, for example, the dissolution of a meth addict starts off crisply, but soon the story is so depressing, you want to die. Just lay me out on my keyboard—that’ll be fine. Worse than the momentary gloom is the thought of all the work you put in. All those scenes with such well-plumbed details, and I end up with this? Depending on how misguided the project seems, you can pull back from writing more for weeks at a time. You have to make better choices about the blocks you immerse yourself within. You might have thought at first that the older sister would serve as a good measuring stick for the addict’s fall, and so you wrote out a seven-page scene when she first notices he’s acting psychotic. The idea is solid, but maybe that scene should have waited until she feels compelled to do more than the older-sister lecture that, frankly, sounds like a lot of other older-sibling lectures. You might be better off drawing up a plot chart. Write out a synopsis of each scene you’ve written in five lines or less. Then look at your initial notes, whether on characters or plot, and write down the gist of scenes based on those points. See if you can work out several hundred pages of projected material—or 20 chapters in your chart. That way you can more clearly tell how the steps into hell really progress. You can see if the sister really is going to matter later in the book. An outline changes as a novel grows. You’re not being pinned down. What you’re doing is setting forth relative dramatic weights of plot events and characters. That way you won’t be stumbling in the dark when a character suddenly grabs you by the lapels and demands that more be written about them. “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.” —Willa Cather Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When you wish to use touchstones from your own life in a novel, the most common come from relationships. In the early stages of a draft, you realize you want your best friend from high school, say, as a main character. If you keep a journal to capture haphazard thoughts—a highly recommended idea—you can jot down different episodes or shining moments or comments involving your friend. These can have emotional value for the book because the reason you remember them so clearly is you have deep feelings about them. The notes are a fine start, but at some point you reach a common hurdle in novel writing. Feelings are random unless they are placed in a plot matrix. A plot must be original, and that means going beyond what really happened. That is, you have to inject artificiality into the proceedings. Two kids lighting up a doob behind the barn contains a modicum of danger, but if they start laughing hysterically, the reader will become bored. Oh, yeah, I did that too, back then. Moving out of the comfort zone of memory lane may freeze your pen. No, your friend really wasn’t mad enough at their father to light the barn on fire, so how could I write about that? And I (I mean, the protagonist) am not the type of guy who glories at finding a can of gasoline. It’s a conundrum: how do you merge real with interesting? One answer is to focus on details. Any effective scene is buttressed by micro-fine images and at-the-moment thoughts. You take an idea jotted down: Lee said I would never become a rebel because I played by the rules. What if that becomes what the friend says to the protagonist when they find the gasoline by the wheels of a tractor? Lee really did say that, so it shores up the improbability of a sudden impulse to splash gas around. If you go on to describe the piercing foul smell, maybe the odd way that wet hay sinks to the floor, you have intertwined the familiar into the made-up proceedings. Exercise: When you review your initial notes, be ready to abstract them from their original context. What was a thought might be spoken aloud in the novel and vice-versa. The crisp lines of the moon witnessed while stoned might be used in contrast to flickering flames. Better yet, once the germ of a story idea seizes you, write down the extension of your note right on the journal page. Keep blasting away with how it could work until the glow of inspiration is spent. When you look at it later, you may have paragraph or a page that will work just fine. “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” —Simone Weil Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
In the previous post I covered some guidelines for researching on the web. In my own experience, the internet is broad but it is not deep. That’s fine if you merely need to establish a point here and there—e.g., a silk dress 100 years ago was likely worn by a rich woman. Yet if you are trying to present facts that are truly eye-opening, you need sources that go beyond what is commonly known. The first step in that direction comes from the back of a book. Within that term I’ll include the footnotes along with the bibliography, since many times they are aggregated in an endnotes section. A book you research in the early days likely is an overview of a topic. By now you probably already have initial probes in your notes that indicate what you really want to learn more about. The back matter of a general book will break down the categories covered into subsets. Professors rarely write broad books: they pick some aspect for which they can show more diligence than other professors. They’re in their own race to the top, and you are the beneficiary. Let’s suppose that you want to study 19th-century New York City theater. If you merely want to know technical aspects of what happened backstage, it’s possible that a book on a theater in Philadelphia is worth exploring. The guys who built that theater drew on British models, just like their confrères 100 miles northeast. Likewise, any book on theater gaslights will suffice. That’s because the specifics of one bygone theater you have settled on as a setting may be lost in the sands of time. The problem you may run into on a broader topic—let’s say, how a lower-class worker fared during the city’s rapid expansion up Manhattan island—stems from a lack of discernment in terms of the author’s discipline. A sociology professor will write a different book than a women’s studies professor. What is really right for the characters you are considering? Then too, many books on a topic, such as policing during that era, may focus more on the growing organizational apparatus of the police force rather than: how did a detective pre–Sherlock Holmes solve a murder? That’s because the author can access data recorded by the long-ago organization’s officials. You may be better off searching the footnotes for memoirs and magazines written at the time. Sure, you have to forge through the archaic language. Yet such accounts reveal more of how life was experienced at the street level. Just in their casual observations you may find a wealth of interesting details that would never be included in a top-down study. And, because memoirs are just on the other side of the nonfiction line, you may find that novels are the richest source of all. You want to know how thieves operated in that century? Try Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man. Mind you, I’m not advocating plagiarism, but a detail from a paddle wheel can be put into your own words. “The knives of jealousy are honed on details.” —Ruth Rendell Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Authors need to find the facts about a subject before including it in a story. That seems like a straightforward proposition until you start trying to find the information. What sort of research is being conducted, and how will the facts you discover be of any help to you? This post will cover the internet, since that is the first place anyone looks these days. Your better choice, books, will follow in the next post. The internet is right there at your fingertips. You don’t even have to get off your ass. You type in “New York City theater 19th century,” for instance. What such a search is likely to find breaks into several categories. The most common one is history attached to a travel guide. You read one all-too-short article on the difference between the theaters on Broadway and the Bowery. You click to the next entry, and you find pretty much the same stuff. Hey, the start of class warfare: Broadway vs. the Bowery. Beyond that, you may find sites that really are about New York theaters in the 20th century, but they do have one mention of the 19th century, in 1898. So that’s a waste of time. Luckily, you may become skilled in skimming the contents of the teasers on the search page. Before moving on to the most fruitful category, I will point out that pictures on any site can be valuable to you. Just looking at a drawing inside the Bowery Theatre gives you a sense not only of the entertainment offered but the audience adoring or hating it. If you compile a file of drawings and sepia photographs alone (in this example), you will have material you can study at a later date. Your best guess for info that will actually help you imagine your fictional world comes from the scholarly realm. A site like JSTOR is an incredible resource for articles that have appeared across a wide spectrum of academic journals. These professors are all digging in deep, so you may find such interesting material as: when did respectable women start attending the theater? Looking up the relevant topics isn’t easy, because their AI is a vast vacuum cleaner too, but at least when you do make choices, you get something out of your reading. Better yet, those articles have footnotes and bibliographies. You might discover the memoir of an actor who appeared often with 19th-century star Edwin Forrest. That gives you an on-the-ground view of someone who lived through those times. Florid language aside, you may discover all sorts of interesting nuggets. While it’s very possible that a site like Google Books will allow you to read such an ancient tome online, you may find yourself hopping in the car and driving to the library. (To be continued.) “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”― Marcus Tullius Cicero Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
An author tends to regard a novel from the point of view of the protagonist. That is fitting, because the most notes, sketches, and actual scenes revolve around the hero. Yet this prism leaves out subsidiary possibilities that can have solid emotional impacts on the reader. Take the concept of a supporting player. We know what their role is: to support the main characters. Yet because the #2 character in a book can also be a supporting character (to #1), you have to consider varying dramatic weights of roles all the way down the ranks. Are you bringing all of your forces to bear? Let’s suppose that you have two married couples who are friendly. One from each has an affair with the other. Your protagonist is one of the maligned, let’s say Perry, a husband. Your focus is on him, the deception of his wife, Claire, and the other husband, William. That’s the menage-à-trois. Later in the draft you realize that William’s wife, Evelyn, might be useful—if Perry and Evelyn met to commiserate. Good planning all around, right? Now consider emotional impacts. If you want the reader to root for Perry, how are you effectuating that? Through being wronged by both Claire and William, plus hearing Evelyn’s teary story. Now ask yourself: what about their children? You may have a scene or two where they run through the kitchen, but they are just kids. Sex is so far above their heads. You are evaluating the matter through Perry’s eyes. Yet you can make the world around him work for your purposes. What if you featured the children in both families more prominently? Choose Perry’s daughter, Wendy, age 10, and a girl from Evelyn’s family. They could have scenes with Perry as an active participant. Do you think girls of that age are dopes? They don’t pick up adult vibes? If Wendy finds out about her mother, now what does your emotional calculus look like? This knock-on effect can be employed in a wide range of scenarios. Even a minor character can contribute to creating a groundswell. You stage events so that you keep raising the stakes. Who knows? Aunt Brodie and her brownies might come in handy. Exercise: Review the manuscript looking for minor characters in a main setting. Not characters who already are featured in scenes with a main character. The ones below that, who function basically as part of the setting. Could they be given speaking roles? Maybe they could appear in three scenes spaced apart over the course of half the book. Now you have another viewpoint that can create friction around a main character’s transgressions. “Some women want the strong silent type, so they can tell him to shut up and rearrange the furniture. —P. J. O’Rourke Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
The rapid technological advances of our age are only the most prominent products of a results-oriented culture. We are all caught up in its tumult, infected by what we see rushing past us. When you have only your regular job to do, or regular texts to take care of, the frenetic pace is fun. Yet when you are trying to write, the clamor that invites you to do, do, do—don’t be bored!—can have an adverse effect. If you sit down for a writing session and you can’t produce, disgruntlement sets in. You are sitting in front of your screen, and the words seem like meaningless scribbles that might as well be cuneiform for all the connection you feel to them. You try to start, and you stop. After ten minutes you actually get down a sentence, feeling a burst of inspiration, but then you feel as arid afterward as you did before you managed that pitiful dribble. Your feelings of frustration are understandable. You have put aside the precious time, and nothing is happening. If these stale sessions occur too often, you will follow the pain and pleasure principle. If writing is so self-defeating, I won’t do it. Weeks may go by before you return to the keyboard. That novel is never going to be finished. What is the problem? You are trying to force the issue. You need to permit yourself to meander. Sometimes the way through is not full-steam ahead. You might have to waste time to make time. Of that hour you allotted for writing today, you may have to spend the first 35 minutes feeling unable to get started. Then you feel something gel inside and you knock out a page or two in the last 25 minutes. You have to follow a rule: You cannot move from your chair until the time you set for yourself is up. Because you can’t escape, you have to devise techniques to muddle through. You wait out your frustration, in other words. You can’t call up brilliance on demand, but you can wait for the Muse to come knocking. Exercise: Rather than staring at the page you planned to write, allow your mind to wander where it will. While you are focused on one thing, you usually will find that stray pieces related to the story pop into your head. You’d meant to research a minor point, for example, or you know you took research notes that you’ll use later in the chapter. Forget about what you planned to write. Get busy looking up that research bit. Write a sentence or paragraph on that point and paste it into the chapter. That’s progress. Even better, it may be what gets your writing session going that day. “’Keeping busy’ is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.” ― Joyce Carol Oates Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Boxcars are mechanical, books are works of art. How could the concept of the one possibly be applied to the other? As a way to begin, I’ll explain that I am using a boxcar as a metaphor for a plot line. This is true in the sense that any plot has a set number of scenes that take up a certain number of pages. If you bothered to count, you would see that your main plot is always the longest boxcar. Why is this concept helpful in the slightest? You can use it when you review a draft and sense that characters who were important earlier in the story seem to be forgotten later on. That might not be a problem, if the character was useful only at that stage in the protagonist’s life, or at that phase in the plot. But really, wouldn’t you prefer if all of your plot lines converged during the climax sequence to accumulate the greatest impact? The key is examining your time line. You might call it scheduling the boxcars, although now I feel I’m verging on Ringo Starr and Thomas the Tank Engine. When you parse out when major events in a plot line occur, you may find that you were merely focused on those events at a given point during your months of writing the book. Further, the crisis might have occurred in real life to your brother, say, when you were 12 years old. You are trapping yourself in a time continuum, and that’s stupid. In a novel, you can make up any time sequence you like. Why couldn’t the crisis occur when the protagonist is 16, when the large bulk of the novel’s events are taking place? You take the scenes you’ve written and insert them in between main plot scenes. Usually, you want a rhythm in your plot lines—breaking away from one and leaving the reader hanging for a chapter. So the brother scenes allow you that periodic break. Your boxcars—you knew that was coming back in—are now running in parallel, and you’re accumulating the power that derives from the tension contained in each one of them. Exercise: Review the manuscript for each of your main characters, and write down in a chart the pages on which they appear, in an active way. Once you are finished, study those numbers. Do you see groupings, which represent when they are important to the book? If you need the character as a force in the climax sequence, could some circumstances be changed so that the grouping slides back further in the book? “There is nothing permanent except change.” —Heraclitus Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A novel has been likened to a journey, and that entails at least the main character starting at Point A and moving to Point Z by the end. Along with movement comes progression, or building. That’s because a reader’s identification with a character deepens the more times they appear, and if the character isn’t developing in tandem, the reader starts to lose interest. If no one is going anywhere, why am I reading this book? Most authors readily grasp the notion of an arc, but their attention can be focused on the protagonist to the exclusion of others. In large part, that occurs because the author identifies most with the hero. Often the hero is the author at a younger age. While a singular focus can yield many riches, it can cause a problem with your supporting characters. I rank such characters in an upper circle, and most authors can only probe a half dozen to any significant depth—that is, making them stand out to the reader. To achieve that stature, they must appear multiple times during the course of the book. Here is where the problem comes in. They may represent a fixed entity that serves as an ongoing source of conflict with the protagonist. This is particularly true of adult characters in a realistic drama. Let’s face it: how much do people change past the age of 30? So what’s the problem? As the novel develops, the arguments and commentary that your protagonist engages in with a character that is static will after a while also become static. They fight about the same basic stuff. The protagonist’s thoughts about the character are the same. How could it be otherwise when that supporting character is fixed in their plot purpose? To correct that, you need to devise the novel’s structure so that person is also progressing. If the character is a stay-at-home mom, for example, why isn’t she getting on with her life? If the protagonist is old enough to retain the reader’s interest, at least an adolescent, is the mother really happy to be stuck at home while the kids fly the coop? More to the point, how interesting is that character to the reader? If the mother also is on the move—taking a job, for example—then the child has new reasons to argue, new resentments to stew over. That’s all I want: new explosions. Exercise: Review the manuscript with an eye on only one supporting character. For each active scene they have, or interior monologue about them, write a quick summary of what it’s about. Do you start seeing that later scenes are only an elaboration on what happened earlier? Don’t change the subject of the scene. Change the position of the character so that they are developing too. “Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.” —bell hooks Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When an author is editing a manuscript, the goal is sterling prose, sentence by sentence. Included in that effort is the hope you will find new twists in the ways you tell your story. That desire to be distinctive has drawbacks, however, when you are using a low level of diction, which is found in almost all popular novels. A character’s point of view might have the right cadence, but you’re trying too hard to swing the reader behind you. The most common error I correct during a line edit is repetition. This occurs over the course of any novel, of course, but what I find surprising is how often a word is repeated in the same paragraph or even the same sentence. For example: “He noticed the slim fingers that poked out of the fingerless black gloves.” The difficulty here is plain: they are a certain type of gloves that fingers stick out of. You have to follow a strict rule not to repeat any words. Adhering to that means you have to find an alternative, and in this case one answer is: “ . . . black workout gloves.” Part of establishing an idiomatic voice is using expressions that readers immediately grasp, and so often that means using clichés. While these do have a place in dialogue, when a speaker may well want to bring the listener into accord, I am harder on their use in prose. Take this example: “Getting dragged across hot coals seemed more appealing than going home.” The cliché reduces the character to anyone. Anyone could be dragged across hot coals, because the idea is so common. Why not pick out an expression that accurately describes your character? In this case, let’s say the character is a teenager. So maybe it is: “Spending days writing code seemed more . . .” This process of using the lowest common denominator also can lead to clichés employed in mixed metaphors. Let’s consider: “She had grabbed too many rungs up the career ladder to put up with his Tarzan act.” As far as I know, Tarzan does not use a ladder; he swings on vines. The author is trying too hard, seizing a worthy idea—women should be treated equally in the workplace—and trivializing it by pairing it with an easy grab. Easy tarnishes crisp prose. You have to be ruthless with yourself, even if it means stopping to close your eyes and think through what might be a fresh substitute for a common expression. Yes, it will take you extra hours, but really, what is your hurry? Unless you’re rushing to fulfill a contract on your mega-book deal, the first judge you should be trying to please is: yourself. “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” —Thomas Paine Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
The prospect of editing your manuscript is unwelcome, and the process is arduous. Nonetheless, you do it because either you or someone you respect has identified aspects of the book that are less compelling. You may have too much interior monologue, for example, on the part of your point-of-view character(s). You may have nonfiction-based content, such as a current social debate, that seems repetitious. Whatever you settle on, you have guidelines that tell you what to look for as you are editing the work. The process that most authors follow is one of trimming. You keep shaving, shaving, shaving—sentence by sentence, sometimes throwing out whole paragraphs or a few pages, depending on how deep the rabbit hole is. You find a ton of stuff that is pretty good, and you don’t really want to cut it. You may remember how great you felt about it when it first burst forth from the keyboard. So that stays. This process of accretion—little bit here, little bit there—is undoubtedly helpful in terms of how well the book reads when you finish. If you cut 10 percent of any story, the good stuff will stand out more when the dross is removed. The larger objectives, however, tend to be obscured by this approach. What did the person in the writing group really say? What was the literary agent’s real objection? You can forget that the real objective is to produce a book on a higher plane. While you’re cutting a lot of interior monologue, you also have to consider what might be better interior monologue. You have a grasp of your characters by now. If you look at each plot turn, could you catalogue, step by step, more deeply how they’re feeling? That is, maybe the objection to too much thinking may be because it was too slight or too event-oriented to allow us to know the character better. Skating on the surface can become tiring for a reader—who wants to be the character, inside. The same is true of that current debate you lectured about. Maybe the problem isn’t cutting down all the dialogue about, say, the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Maybe it’s the talk itself. Talk is cheap. What would happen if you cut it all? Instead you introduce a new character, a friend who infiltrated security and hoisted a brewski inside the hallowed halls? They brag about it to your protagonist. You follow a series of subplot scenes in which the FBI comes knocking. In each scene, you keep telling us: how does the protagonist feel about the friend? Exercise: When you draw any conclusions yourself, or receive any comments, ask yourself: what is the objection? Is it too much junk, or is the way I’m going about it? You may be discoursing when you should make your characters act. Consider completely different alternatives. Sketch them out. Write a few scenes in that new direction. Now what do you think? “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” —Ansel Adams Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Writing any book takes a long time. I occasionally edit authors who write at white-hot speed, but the number is not great and neither are the books. For most, with no deadline to meet, the writing can span months, revolving through numerous iterations, each of which adds a new layer of complexity. What is not as apparent in this involved process is how long a section may lie fallow before you turn your attention back to it. That gap in time can also be a tool in producing the best results. The process of writing goes through three broad stages: research and notes; the initial burst of creativity; and editing. If the process takes several years, let’s say, then Chapter 5 may not be revisited for months on end. When you return to it, you read almost as you are coming upon the prose for the first time. Yes, you recognize the general drift for the characters and plot, but the individual sentences, all the tiny steps of getting from beginning to end, are a source of surprised delight—and, if you’re serious, consternation. Let’s focus on that third stage, editing, which is so often in conflict with the second, writing new material. That’s because most authors face an ongoing problem of feeling blocked. You wake up on the wrong side of the bed for writing, and no matter how much you try to fight through it, you continue to feel listless. So you decide to edit what you’re already written. After all, you might as well get something done. And who knows? After a time the muse may finally come knocking. That’s fine as an expedient. One day sucks, okay, write that off. But what do you do when the blockage malaise extends over several days, as it so often does, or even a week and more? By that time you’re wondering if you’ll ever become a writer or, conversely, whether you’re all washed up. You may even find yourself whining about setting aside the time but nothing’s happening. The answer? You have to try harder, of course. No one cares if you never write a book, or another book. You’re the one who likes to tap into the flow of creativity. You must push yourself to write new material every time out. If you set aside an hour and the pen only flows for the last 20 minutes, well, the pen flowed, didn’t it? What you can’t do is settle into a routine of editing yourself. A book takes long enough to write. When do you think you’ll ever finish if you don’t make a little progress every session? Exercise: When you’re editing, don’t worry about getting everything exactly right. You’re only thinking everything’s right at that point in time. A writer is never satisfied. So put Chapter 5 aside. Sleep for a month on it, then come back. You’ll find more niggling things that need to be fixed. But during that month, if you force yourself to keep pushing ahead, you’ll have left that chapter far behind. “A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” —Franz Kafka Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Hours of intense writing sessions produce volume, if nothing else. The better the writer is, the harder it is to cut material after beta readers or literary agents advise that the manuscript is too long. The first impulse is to trim sentence by sentence. That way nothing major has to be sacrificed. Yet I know as a line editor that this approach is doomed if the manuscript is very long. You won’t gain more than 10 percent in savings. Instead, regard the manuscript as a series of steps from the top down. What are the major timbers? They are theme, character, and plot. So start at the top. How many themes do you have? Which ones, if you had to put them in order, are the most important? Once you have that list, a good first step is examining the book solely in terms of how well the characters and plot action support each of them. You may spot one or two that, while they seemed promising at the outset, haven’t really been carried through in the writing. Could you take out the parts supporting that incomplete theme? Next, because a character can embody a theme, judge how taking out a theme impacts the character(s) supporting it. Let’s say you have a teenager damaged by a brutal father that left the family a number of years ago. The only parent that plays an ongoing role in the book is the mother, with the father relegated to background stories and maybe a cameo appearance actively. Could you express the damage created in shorter strokes, cutting down on the back stories? Could you use the mother’s implied references to him to accomplish part of the theme? Does the father really have to appear in the story at all? Slashing in this direction could gain sizable chunks. Plotting is the last big element and often the one most amenable to cuts. That’s because a plot event can either be related in live action or in narrative summary. As you did with the themes, draw up a list of scenes related to each plot line. Which ones are vital to understanding the story’s passage? You may find a number of incidental scenes. Nice to have as stepping-stones, but they could be reduced from a scene to a paragraph or two. You may find, in the process, that you have scenes that overlap in function. How many times, to use the previous example, does the boy have to drive off for the evening with no destination known? Maybe save only the one when he nearly does drive off the edge. The most attractive target may be an entire subplot. That’s because, depending on its length, that plot line might be used as a head start on your next book. In that case, could you realign the background stories so that they fill the gaps left by the subplot scenes you take out? A reader can be left dangling at the end of a chapter merely by switching away from the present. “Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.” —James McBride Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When an author is searching for what to write about, certain touchstones from real life come to mind. What would the reading public be passionate about? At present, some people grumble about stupid anti-vaxxers, while their counterparts take livestock-related remedies advertised on social media. Let’s say you decide the contrarian point of view is more interesting. Your protagonist will at the very least use ivermectin during the course of the novel. So far, so good. Becoming steeped in the weird means you’re taking the reader on a new adventure. You can research what ivermectin is, the effect it has on cows, and the reported effects on humans using it as an alternative to a vaccine. This is all stuff the reader doesn’t know. Plus, you are creating a personal story in which the suffering takes place. Trouble may arise when you start to consider such factors as milieu. What sort of person would take it? What does that indicate about their environment and the people influencing their choices? Since most of the resistance is occurring in libertarian areas, that indicates such factors as: belief in God and distrust of government. Now you’re venturing into a realm where generalizations can undercut your good intentions. Do you understand how a rural community interacts? This is where an author can start to take shortcuts. What is really interesting is imagining you could be that person taking ivermectin and, by extension, people you know are the nexus around that character. So an aunt who in real life does go to church every Sunday becomes the mouthpiece for ordinary stuff like the creation myth and the coming of the apocalypse. The protagonist’s best friend, in that beery tone you know so well, starts spouting off political cant. You’re ignoring the fact that this sort of stuff is so well known that everyone, from both ends of the political spectrum, has read or heard the arguments so many times that eyelids slowly flutter and close. It is your job to keep all aspects of the adventure fresh. The aunt might start spouting out, but the protagonist’s mother tells her to shut up. She’s sick of that talk. As it turns out, the mother has her own very bizarre take on Christ. The protagonist cuts off the best friend before they can get started. I know that, and it sure is not going to change the investigation into who stole those grenade launchers. You stay in the vanguard on every front. That way the reader will keep on wanting to find out what you’re bringing next. Exercise: Review the manuscript for any lazy points you slipped into because they came so easily. If it was easy, it should be penciled out in favor of your digging into that point to see if there is a novel viewpoint you hadn’t considered. It takes a lot more time that way, but the reader will also be engaged all the way through. “Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” —Ambrose Bierce Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
One of the perennial difficulties I have as an editor is getting male authors to provide well-rounded heroes. Like men in general, these characters tend to work hard, play hard, and have difficulties understanding the opposite sex. Yet in an age when women dominate the editorial ranks at major publishing houses, the stripped-down hero usually ends up in the rejection pile. Guys, you have to deliver more of the goods. You might want to use connections. That is, create connections between characters. Although this process does further plot, in the sense that interpersonal dynamics produces friction, it primarily forces an author to focus on how the characters relate to each other. One of the aims is to help define what is different about each character, primarily the protagonist. If Malcolm is sullen, for instance, who in the book knows why? Who has been exasperated by it, and what consequences has Malcolm suffered because of it? Already you can start thinking to yourself: where was the starting point—that’s one connection. How has that played out in his romantic involvements—that’s possibly several connections, each different. Regarded by itself, sullen is an unapproachable island. Regarded in terms of connections, Malcolm is being pulled in all sorts of directions—and he may well wish he was less sullen. That is complex, interesting. An equally important function of connections is creating ongoing relationships during the course of the book. Too often I ask an author to address sullenness, and he responds with a quarter-page back story about an abusive mother. Yet a connection means that the abusive mother would participate in the novel: calling the hero about some persistent issue, getting in his way when he has important stuff to do, and best of all, forcing the author to reveal how the hero relates to his mother. Ask yourself: how do you talk to your mother? What secrets does she know that reveal how you tick? For what did she praise you? About what did she complain bitterly, unceasingly, about you, or maybe your father (and thus you by association, you male lout). That connection does not have to be a mother, of course. But you see what I mean. When you are forced to make the hero interact, on an ongoing basis, he’s going to reveal scars and warts—that make him stand out from his army. Exercise: Sit back in your chair, close your eyes, and think of the three most important traits your protagonist possesses. Write them down, leaving space below each to fill out. Now pick any of them at random, the one that grabs you right away. Do you have a supporting character who can help reveal that trait? Could you find 8-10 places during the course of the novel where that trait could be displayed, commented upon by another character, etc.? By conscious effort, you can add another layer to that character. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” ― Ray Bradbury Copyright @ 2020 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When you are writing nonfiction, you often need to use others’ material. Depending on the type of book, quotations from another author can provide an expert’s view that buttresses a point you are making. The more academic or technical the writing, the more you need to show that your work acknowledges the contributions of others. If you don’t back up what you say, you run the risk of a reader assuming that you are not presenting facts, but only your opinion. This imperative can be taken too far, however. Hunting for and gathering source material is meant to apply only to the first phase, when you are collecting a mine from which you can draw. When you sit down to write, hunting and gathering can lead to results as primitive as the stone age practice. In a much later era, with the advent of roads, we invented the sign post. For our purposes here, you can consider those signs posts as guides to the reader as to where the book is heading next. For practical purposes, let’s focus on a single book: a narrative about a homicide committed by a gang of moonshiners. All you have are historical records: testimony in the court cases, court records of various hearings and grand jury proceedings, newspaper accounts, and perhaps a diary of one of the felons. From these sources you can patch together a fairly cohesive chronological record of what led up to the murder and what came after. Yet each piece of source material was not written to fit within an overall whole. You have to link them with your sign posts. Sometimes you need a topic paragraph to provide an effective change in direction. At other times, when the source material follows a clear pattern, you need merely a sentence. If you are switching, for instance, between an arrest after a still is discovered by police to another occasion entirely where a potential witness was browbeaten, you’re probably going to provide a paragraph bridge in order to make the transition. If you are switching, though, merely between a grand jury finding and paying the subsequent bail levied by the judge, a sentence will probably suffice. Beyond simple direction pointing, source material can become balky when you are employing long stretches of it. In this book, the likely culprits would be snatches of trial transcripts. If you use two pages of testimony by witness A and then three pages by witness B, etc., the reader may start to feel in over his head. Oral testimony often segues onto tangents, despite a lawyer’s attempts to keep the witness on track. When enough of that occurs, anyone reading may become exasperated that he has to wade through trivia. A solid means of supplying more direction is breaking up the transcript into smaller pieces. You can take a section and paraphrase it in a narrative paragraph. While you’re at it, you can add in extra directions as to where the testimony that precedes or follows the paragraph is headed in general. That way you can corral your source material and bend it to a purpose that will please your readers. “To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.” —Robertson Davies Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
The original conception of a character may not stand the test of repeated writing sessions. Early notes tend to reflect broad ideas, not the least because you are thinking at that point of overarching themes. A sketch propels you forward into the first scenes. Be . . . like that. A novel, however, takes a different form when your hazy thoughts in the gloaming are transferred onto paper. You may find that perhaps a conception requires a more character-driven approach that you seem capable of writing. You’re ending up with a string of dialogue scenes that really aren’t accomplishing much of anything. So you switch gears. Maybe you add more plot elements to make up for your lack of penetration into the character. Let’s say you have chosen a teenager with a limp, Cal, because you want to write in a meaningful way about the challenges of being handicapped. You made him into a brawler, because he is teased so often about his limp—because it’s so obvious. Yet when you read over the first 30 pages, you find yourself bored. Amid a sea of what reads like complaints, the pugilism is the only interesting thing you’ve written about the guy. You decide that Cal, along with another character that you never get around to including, Yvonne, will solve a mystery. The handicap will be dealt with along the way to finding a murderer. What happens to the fists? You don’t really need them anymore. You were only trying to stir up story tension with them. So do your present fight scenes and projected ones all get tossed along with the whining? Not necessarily. Any plot element that produces friction can be repurposed. After all, one could argue that Sam Spade is better at being a tough guy than he is at solving mysteries. So maybe you use an early scene of taunting for a new purpose: to show Cal will resort to fighting to solve a problem. That will be helpful if you have a scene where Cal and Yvonne venture into the equivalent of a back alley and some thugs come out the back door. Even if Cal is overmatched, he can throw enough punches so they can get the heck out of there. The character purpose remains. Cal becomes mad when he is taunted, and his lashing out still feels like a natural trait of a handicapped person. Yet you have turned what was a defining characteristic into merely one of the tools you use to set him apart. The fact that you have downgraded it may also help to make it feel more realistic. “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses—behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” —Muhammad Ali Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
In any novel whose characters have enough depth to sway readers, how they are resolved relative to each other can have a sizable impact on how well received the story is overall. That statement sounds complicated, so I’ll break it down to a simpler concept: how they are ranked. The bigger they are, the more they will impact a reader’s satisfaction. How have you lined up your heaviest hitters at the ending? Most authors realize that the protagonist should occupy the most space at the end. That character has been leading a reader throughout the book, and that attachment can be marred if the final chapter features a #2 or #3 character. Why are we ending up with that guy? a reader might ask. I didn’t even like that guy. An exception can be made if the hero dies in the climax, but even there, you are wise to keep an epilogue short and sweet. The reader’s interest in the book declines rapidly once the arc of the lead character is completed. When you have an ensemble cast, in which 4-5 characters occupy your top circle, decisions about who ends where become more complicated. In this case, you have to determine who goes last by their dramatic weight. Several factors can help in the judging process. First, which characters reach a turning point because of the novel’s events? A corollary to that question is: how significant is the turning point to the novel as a whole? If Wendy, for example, decides to leave her husband, Mark, because she realizes that she doesn’t have to forgive his transgressions anymore, you probably don’t want to end on Mark blithely picking up another floozy. The reader most likely is rooting for Wendy. We will achieve resolution by finding out what she’s going to do next. Second, how many pages of coverage have you allotted to which characters? If the Wendy-Mark strife has merited only 100 pages and a second couple—call them Gail and Harv—occupy 200 pages, then Wendy’s victory is never going to amount to more than a minor accent. If she has the only turning point, she still might merit a penultimate chapter at best. Another consideration is lapping your major characters. By that I mean putting one in the service of another completing their character arc. Perhaps Mark, as your #4 character, should be killed off—heart attack with floozy—so that Wendy’s ending achieves more of a sense of completion. Her grief for her undeserving spouse gains a ring of finality. Now she truly can turn the page. Exercise: One way to weigh who is most important is your own feelings about the characters. As the novel has developed, who did you like more and more? Your allegiance will likely be transferred to the reader. In that case, review the manuscript to make sure that character has been set up all along to carry the dramatic weight of the ending. “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” —Jackie Robinson Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
If it is hard for a rich man to get into heaven, an author may want to reconsider how to position a rich character. The salience the biblical quote possesses stems from a very basic human tendency. Most of us dislike rich people. In America, that envy has been twisted into a perverted form of hero worship, but even here workers resent those who wear alligator shirts. The same feeling extends to fiction, unless the genre is clearly the perils of the rich and famous. As readers we can sympathize with a rich character who is troubled, but if we know all along they can buy their way out of misery, some of the edge is taken off. The general sentiment might be summed up as: you got problems I wish I had. While not every fictional situation can be converted to a version of Dickens, you can adjust the motivations of a character. A nouveau riche who buys a mansion with a high mortgage is different from a rich cat who buys it as a winter home. If a high-flying job ends abruptly, hopefully unfairly, we can enjoy watching someone as they plummet. A marriage can be wrecked, a family can split apart—that sort of predicament is fun to read about. You thought you were a fat cat, but you’re just a palooka like the rest of us. Revised positioning affects relationships in the novel as well. If your best friend is Alistair, who is positive that Groton is simply better, a reader may feel excluded from the camaraderie. Bermuda? Well, I went to . . . If the best friend is Eddie, who has never stopped smoking too much dope, now the clubhouse is big enough to embrace us. The contrast between what the lead character was and is now can provide a wide variety of tension points as well as comedy. Better yet, you can use the contrast by making a rich person the antagonist. The hero may have to hobnob with snooty jerks, but when one of them demonstrates pure evil, the reader roots harder for the hero. We all know what money is the root of. That brand of enemy also can possess unlimited resources to thwart the protagonist, making the obstacles more difficult. You have also, by this device, aligned your lead with all of us hoi polloi. Exercise: Falling from grace is a fate that everyone dreads. As such, it is an unsteady board that you can employ from page 1 onward. Amid the trappings of wealth you can plant seeds that alert the reader that doom is gathering to strike. Yes, splendid Porsche, but how soon will it be repossessed? Yes, knockout spouse, but how flimsy is the foundation of the partnership? “When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.” —Jean-Paul Sartre Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
What makes the first-person narrative voice compelling can in inexperienced hands prove off-putting. The immediacy of the style is its foremost lure. Merging with a character is easier when the words seem to come from your own mouth. You can be casual with readers, letting them in on your asides, wry or otherwise. What is often lost amid all the familiarity, however, is: something worth reading about. One way the trap of too much self-reference opens is because a writer who is bold enough to betray confidences may be used to carrying the real world by storm. That is true of many writers who turn to writing after a successful career. Along the way even a formerly shy teenager who felt most at home in a library may have shed that outsider skin after learning how to tell a good joke or acing the competition to a level that is well above respectable. All of those accomplishments are part and parcel of the insider approach. To a certain extent, they are beneficial. Readers need to grasp an ongoing onslaught of commentary, and citing experiences familiar to them smooths that path. Past a certain point, though, well-schooled patter must be abandoned in order to stake out truly new ground. I personally prefer that the process start on page one, but I’ll give an author 10 pages to show what’s up their sleeve. Can you get out of your own way fast enough? I don’t want, for instance, wry commentary on a gated community. I want one whacko who is actively causing trouble in the community. All of the intimate details of the I-voice may cause a narrative to unwind too deliberately. You may think that the jaw-dropping incident in Chapter 4 will rivet the reader to the page, but what if I don’t get to Chapter 4? What if I get tired of the narrator being such an excellent yuppie? A majority of writers would be better off choosing a protagonist that doesn’t resemble their life story at all. You have your take on the world that is going to flavor the story no matter what. Yet if you begin with what is foreign, you will have to follow the character’s strange ways—because you chose that starting point. Get to that jaw-dropper on page 4. Exercise: The protagonist will always be you. So at a very early stage, think through what you want your themes to be. How could your lead character exemplify those themes? If you pick someone too much like you, you’ll see right away if the story’s obstacles are too ordinary. Go way beyond that—and find a character who would actually do that stuff. “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” ―Charlotte Brontë Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Best-sellers make for quick, thrilling reads, but they can contain many poor examples for an aspiring writer. A primary focus of such books is exciting dialogue. That type of writing is not only easiest on a beach reader, but also for a beleaguered popular author, who may spend 10 months out of the year promoting a book before spending two months writing the next one. Effective dialogue, however, requires narrative interpolations. Commentary can add emphasis to certain sentences, or it can break up a spoken passage when a character wants to shift to a new subject. In order to maintain a fast pace, such work in between the lines needs to be easy to grasp. That is why so many of them feature the verbs: turn, look, stare, and nod. “He began to leave the room, then turned back” is a typical representative of this ilk. Even an author writing in white heat starts to realize that certain pieces of physical business are being overused, and that leads to attempts to disguise the repetition. The pieces are doubled: “He began to leave the room, then turned and stared.” Not exactly the same, and the writer doesn’t have to slow down to think of something original. Such a reflex can lead to bad habits, however. The author might start writing that a character looks at someone when doing anything else. “She sprang up from the sofa and looked down at him.” The problem is that such simple multiplicity forces the reader to wade through extra verbiage. If someone stands up, obviously she would be looking down at whomever she’s addressing. That part of the sentence isn’t needed. At times I feel like I’m editing a person who was as a child warned too many times to look before he crosses the street. I am witness to the adult scar that remains: always looking. The doubling can occur in other forms. “They stood and followed him out of the room” is another common example. If they’re following out a doorway, obviously they rose to their feet first. The extra piece of physical business is inserted to make a pedestrian sentence more complex—when it isn’t. It’s just wasting the reader’s time. When that process becomes a bad habit, the extra words can add up into the thousands. I know, because I usually trim a popular manuscript by 10 percent. Exercise: Review the manuscript with an eye toward eliminating the word “and” during dialogue passages. If the sentence is left feeling too plain, you need to focus more on the one verb you would like to use to drive it. Rather than a stage direction related to physical movement, try substituting a thought or a description of an item in the setting that arrests the character’s attention. That’s where you’ll find truly interesting variety. “Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.” —Anouska Hempel Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
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