Dogs Are Magnets

Not for everyone, of course. But pups in particular magnetize many of us the way any body of water summons Labrador retrievers to plunge right in. For fiction readers, too, certain possibilities magnetize. Most prominent of these is name recognition. Until you’re famous yourself, you can’t do much about that one. Not to worry. You can choose among plenty of other magnets.

~ Concept.

The actual definition is simply an idea. But screenwriting has elevated Concept much the way it elevates everything else. The concept is A Big Idea. BIG! Not a skirmish—a world war; not a failed romance—a love or death dilemma, not just intriguing— but ensnaring. Concepts differ across genres. The Concept might involve a new way to think about baseball (Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding) or art (Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch), or genetics (Richard Powers’s The Gold-Bug Variations).  But whatever the genre, the idea must feel BIG.

~ Scenario.

Whether or not you liked Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the scenario’s unbeatable. Murder. Secret sects. The Holy Grail. Sex. The Louvre. This doesn’t mean you should ever write something only because it might sell. Who wants a write for the market? After all, by the time you finish your Vampire Trilogy, space might be the new thing. However, if your heart lies with parent/child relationships, it helps to have the integrity that The Memory Keeper’s Daughter offers. Where’s the gold in your own scenario? Seek it, and you’ll strengthen not only your novel’s premise and marketability, but the novel itself.

~ Darkness laced with levity.

For whatever reason, many people adore that forbidden underbelly in the venues of tabloid, gangster movie, True Crime, and memoir about victims defeating catastrophe. If you’re willing to plunge into those murky waters, do it. Probe the dark secrets of whatever you’re writing about. The intrigue of nightmare, childhood memory, and buried fantasy resides in those depths. But! Unmitigated darkness reeks of gloom. How to balance it? Irony, wit, humor.

~ Triumph against all odds.

People love heroes. Also underdogs and people who help themselves.  Probably most of all, people love the athlete who wins despite disability; the insecure guy who lands the huge contract, or the singer who emerges from the woodwork to become an international phenomenon. Leave your protagonist room for an arc. But never start with a protagonist arc that’s under the cellar.

~ Truly sexy sex.

Unsexy sex bombards us. Nakedness rather than nudity, crudeness rather than innuendo. What about that flash of Ginger Roger’s ankle beneath her long, twirling chiffon dress? Or Matthew McConaughey’s half-open white shirt? Hints generally seduce better than blatant exposure.

~ Dogs.

As a last resort, you could always add some sort of puppy. At least for this reader. Works every time.

Tip: Write the book you want to! But if you want readers, magnetize them.

The Economics of Fiction

Lots of fiction centers on money: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (banking), David Liss’s A Conspiracy of Paper (how banking created the mess Dickens described), or the endless array of novels touching on wealth, power, class, and the interaction between them (Tracy Chevalier, Jonathan Franzen, Chad Harbach, Hilary Mantel, Fay Weldon, and on and on).

Aside from that, novels, like everything else in the world, have value. Time it right, and you can win it all with sharks, a boy wizard, a noble adolescent girl, or the decoding of a religious mystery.

But too early or late, too similar or different, and the market isn’t there. Neither are the readers. This makes second-guessing pointless.  If you could predict the market, you could publish not only your own novel but everyone else’s. Since you can’t, and since a novel is a lot of work, write because you love the work—not because you hope to love the result of all that work.

Keep your day job. Then assess credits and debits in your fiction.

Like any other account, put in more, and you can take out more. It’s just that this particular economy runs on details, ideas, and words used to capture them.

Of course readers disagree about credits or debits. Genre and voice play a huge role. Yet certain fictional elements consistently tend toward + or – .

Debits!

• Backstory. If it already happened, it’s slowing things down.
• Setting. Unless it’s new and vibrant, it often competes with plot.
• Speaker attribution. We have to know who’s talking, but “said” is no more invisible than any other word.
• Psychological analysis. What the characters think and why—can flirt with “telling.”
• Stereotypes. Been there, done that.
• Explanation. Readers need context. But we don’t always love what we need.

Credits!

• Tension. It’s often the way to balance any item from the list above.
• Characters. They make fiction fiction.
• Clues. Engage readers in discovering what you tantalizingly hint.
• Sex/romance. You already know why it belongs on this list.
• Archetypes. Allusion adds depth and richness. It gives novels heft.
• Electricity. This could be plot, characterization, scenario, voice, or all of them.

Most novelists have an ulterior motive, like roaming with dinosaurs, uncovering racism, celebrating Impressionism, making music, or condemning war. Want readers to follow wherever you want to go? Stuff the vault with scenario, plot, voice, imagery, and characterization .

Tip: Use your novel’s assets to balance whatever you want to express.

That Tricky First Sentence: Individuality and Integration

Every opening—for each chapter and scene—is crucial. But the first is most crucial of all.  Along with the familiar openings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, haunting openings usually need  no context at all:

They shoot the white girl first. – Toni Morrison, Paradise

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. – Gabriel García Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. – Ha Jin, Waiting

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. – Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Yet, as Chad Harbach observed in The Art of Fielding,

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.

Sentence Revision Exercise 1

Just for fun, model the first line in your book after the structure of an opening sentence you love. Now transform your sentence into something that actually works, perhaps a combination of your original sentence and the one from this exercise. What did you discover? Can you apply it?

Sentence Revision Exercise 2

View your first sentence as the launch pad for everything else. Is it powerful enough? Does it hint at what’s crucial and set up the climax? Revise until it does, to improve not only that essential sentence, but your understanding of your entire novel.

Tip: The opening sentence must stand on its own and foreshadow every sentence to come.

Taming and Training Your Voice

That’s already a contradiction. If your voice sounds caged or restrained or even as if you worked on it, it’s not working. So how can you train your voice?

You can’t proceed the way you’d attack plot or metaphor or an unfortunate addiction to adjectives. Still, you can get out of your own way, giving your voice every opportunity to come out and flash something appealing. Because voice is a bit wild—and should stay that way. But wild can also mean running amuck, and you don’t want that, either.

Here’s a start on taming and training.

1. Think about your audience—and only your audience. Nothing else.

Contrary as it may seem, the more you think about anything related to ego or how good or bad you sound or the effect you want to achieve or how many books you will (or won’t!) sell, then the more you damage your voice. Be yourself. Let yourself sound like yourself. That’s how your readers get the real thing. You can always polish. But you can’t polish what isn’t worth polishing because it isn’t real.

2. Ignore the superficial, obvious, or clichéd. What do only you see? Know? Value?

This necessitates risk. But gems are rarely scattered on the surface. They’re down deep. That’s what you—only you—can say, so you’ll have just the right words for it. The poet Muriel Rukeyser calls it “Going diving.” She’s talking about poetry, of course, but for any writer, “If you dive deep enough and have favorable winds or whatever is under the water, you come to a place where experience can be shared, and somehow there is somewhere in oneself that shares.”

3. Embrace tradition, then transcend it. Revere, but without losing individuality.

Use everything you’ve read and discovered to identify your place among your literary predecessors. Not so you can imitate them, of course, but so you can perfect the voice you developed because the authors before you made you who you are—a blend of yourself and those who made you yourself.

Where would Claire Messud be without Ralph Ellison and Charlotte Bronte, or Chad Harbach without Merman Melville, or Alice Hoffman without Emily Bronte? And that’s just the short list.

Obviously, these folks can generate their own scenarios or voices. Yet neither ideas nor the words for them spring out fully formed, like Aphrodite on the sea. Even Aphrodite came from somewhere, as do our thoughts and expression of them, which reflects both idiosyncrasy and tradition. As Cormac McCarthy put it, “The ugly fact is, books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

Tip: A great voice reflects the canon preceding it while striking a chord that resonates with both past and future, with both who we are and the forces—and voices—that created who we are. 

The Art of Chad Harbach

On Tax Day at Lakeland College, the author of The Art of Fielding talked openly about what writing means to him.

Tip: “You become a writer because you need those books that seem delivered by gods.”

He wrote one of them. In many decades of one novel after another, his was the only time I reached page 512, started anew at page one, and read straight through. How did he do it? Well, yes, a ridiculous amount of talent. But also beliefs useful to every novelist.

~ Tradition offers a solid foundation.

His novel harnesses the archetypal to elevate college, winning, losing, and growing up to something much, much more. “What does a [baseball] team do when going off on a quest together?” The team’s star is “coming into consciousness. With The Fall come the complications and pains and joys of being a conscious human.” Mythological structure can support and augment nearly any novel. Are you using it to full advantage?

~ All the major characters matter—and are developed.

Harbach said that his “five central characters carry equal weight…I never felt more interested in Henry than in the other characters.” Do you give each major character enough attention for full complexity?

~ Readers want plot and characterization—not pre-digested themes.

“You’re in dangerous waters if you think a lot about thematics…Explication feels like a sort of defense.” Though his subject was explaining fiction, the observation applies elsewhere. Are your characters and images expressing whatever you want to say?

~ Nothing worthwhile comes cheap.

Harbach’s novel explains why “Writing is hard work”: “It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.” Hmm. Are you working hard enough?

Harbach writes longhand, but you needn’t. Whatever it takes to achieve “a deeper state…surprise—a direction that the really intellectual mind isn’t going to go.”

That’s it. The formula for a book that “doesn’t even seem like it was written by a human being.” He was talking about Moby Dick. I’m talking about The Art of Fielding.

Psyche and Nike

The common meaning of “psyche” is soul—spirit. But its source is a complex myth about the relationship between soul and body, the antidote to another goddess’s envy, and the union of two beings. What’s relevant to the contemporary novelist, though, is the equally complex relationship between “self” and story.

Enter psyche. What makes a story matter is the revelation of an individual spirit. Maybe you love being Irish or Hmong or Norwegian and this story brings your culture to life. Maybe your relationship is so happy that you want to write a romance where every dream comes true. Maybe, like Chad Harbach, you love both "Moby Dick" and baseball and want everyone to see how much they have in common. Psyche provides a way to express “self” through story.

Some consider psyche the “true” self and ego the false one—overly focused on goals, materialism, arrogance. Whether or not you agree, you might think of psyche as the source of your story and ego as the engine driving you to complete that story.

  

Few novelists can survive without a healthy dose of ego. After all, if you lack confidence in yourself and what you have to say, even the quickest, worst first draft ever is a ridiculous amount of work. If neither you nor your story is worth anything, why bother? Ego—i.e. confidence, gets you started and keeps you motivated through all the revising and strategizing needed to find an agent, a publisher, or a do-it-yourself plan.

~ Only your psyche can originate a novel people want to read because you alone could write it.

~ Only your ego can generate the fortitude to strive until your novel is good enough for people to read.

Ego and psyche are twin sources of strength. At its worst, psyche breeds amorphous images meaningful only to their creator. At its best? Psyche weds individuality to commonality, lets you transform subjective imagination into community property.

At its worst, ego generates the kind of defensiveness that rationalizes away useful critique: You’re always right, of course, and the reader (Why listen to this dolt?) is simply too foolish to see why you had to “tell,” introduce twenty-six characters in your first four pages, or bury any shred of plot or tension beneath exquisite description. But ego also inspires the confidence to strive for excellence, often best achieved by welcoming and implementing intelligent feedback, even when it’s painful or arduous. Ego can actually let you put your story before your “self.”

And Nike? Athena’s sidekick symbolizes flight, glory, victory, triumph. She represents ego, not egotism. You needn’t be a winged deity or fast-mover who relishes competition and hungers for fame. But you do need the energy that unites spirit with ego.

Tip: Those folks are exactly right: “Just do it.”

The Novelty of the Novel

Does the contemporary novel require a facelift ? Major surgery?  Kenneth Goldsmith, who teaches Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the Museum of Modern Art’s first Poet Laureate, asserts that the novel is no longer original enough:

Creativity is about the most worn-out, abused concept that used to mean something remarkable, something that differentiated someone, something that made them special...What was once creative is now uncreative.

Rather than coming up with his own analysis of why the Man Booker Prize is unoriginal, Kenneth Goldsmith quotes Craig Dworkin:

we don’t think of the Booker Prize Finalists as unoriginal, or uncreative, or plagiarized, despite the fact that they have close precedents and that we can imagine confusing them with another work.  Take ‘a story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality’: a quick Google search (conducted last fall prior to the announcement of the winner) reveals that these are the exact words used to describe Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”; Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”; James Joyce’s “Araby” (and that’s just the first page of results).

     Nor do we think of these works as unoriginal, or uncreative, or plagiarized, despite the fact that just from the one paragraph synopses on the Man Booker Website we learn that 4 of the 6 shortlisted novels advertise themselves as featuring immigrants negotiating the difficulties of a strange land; 5 of the 6 hinge on the dramatic turn of a murder; 4 of the 6 reveal secrets from the past that come unexpectedly to light (half of them through the surprise arrival of a letter)…

…and so on. If the point is that all prizes are unsurprisingly and unappetizingly unoriginal, well, this isn’t news. What might be news is Goldsmith’s remedy:

Calling a practice uncreative is to reenergize it, opening creativity up to a whole slew of strategies that are in no way acceptable to creativity as it’s now known. These strategies include theft, plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition. By employing these methods, uncreativity can actually breathe life into the moribund notion of creativity as we know it.

Hmm. Fortunately we have writers like Tracy Chevalier, Chad Harbach, Alice Hoffman, Ian McEwan, and Barbara Kingsolver—to name a handful—unconcerned about their “uncreativity.”

Like a rose or a football or the aurora borealis, a novel has certain characteristics that—happily!—make it a novel. How much can you change while retaining something with fragrance (rose), star power (football), and plot (novel)? If you add pictures, then you’ve changed what words contribute. Is that good? If you keep typing yesterday’s Times (as Goldsmith has proudly done) instead of engineering a solid storyline, is that good? If you shrug off the essence of creativity because we live in internet age, is that best of all?

You can’t tell a brand-new story. Too late. But you can craft the characters, interweave the symbols, shape the arcs, foreshadow the ending, build the backdrop—choose the words—so that ever could or will do it this way. Original. Creative. Meaningful. Yours.

The novel thrives. People read them; people write them. Many, many people. Today’s best novels are as good as any novels ever, maybe better. Yes, today’s stories recapitulate Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Kate Chopin. Of course they do. After all, how many human stories are there? That there’s a finite number doesn’t mean it’s time for “plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition.” It means that today’s novelists have the honor—and the obligation—to reinvent the novel more and better without making it a comic book, a tone poem, or a psychological experiment.

Tip: The novel has been good enough since its inception. Still is.

To Haunt: Novels that Last Forever

“Haunt” displays an intriguing variety of meanings, especially when applied to novels. It’s a “hangout”—a place where the minds of novelist, readers and characters meet. The word also means “preoccupy”—to take hold of you in a positive way. Other definitions include “revisit,” as in repeatedly reappearing or to “inhabit,” as in permanently entering your mind, even soul. In contrast, there’s to “plague,” making you notice, remember, or understand what you’d rather ignore. The really good novels stay with you both for what you love and what you reluctantly understand or accept that you didn’t before.

What makes a novel haunt? It’s not the plot. Those details quickly disappear. What lingers?

·         Characters more gripping, complex and poignant than anyone you know.

·         Emotions real and familiar, yet startling in their complexity.

·         Ideas that you always knew but didn’t know you did.

Most novelists keep a mental list of the novels that haunted them. My most recent addition is Andrew Winer’s “The Marriage Artist,” the most haunting novel I’ve read since Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding.”

Why does Winer’s novel haunt?

Characters: Dysfunctional and deeply flawed, yet empathetic.

Plot Intertwining: The fate of Jews in 1928 Vienna and the contemporary N.Y. art scene.

Symbolism: The graphic imagery that gives the novel its title.

Insight: Big issues, like religion, terror, marriage, art, jealousy, compulsion. 

Secrets: Dispensed with exactly the right amount of detail at the exactly right moments.

Texture: As reviewer Betsey Van Horn put it, “Saul Bellow meets Stephen King.”

Your details will obviously differ completely. But whether or not you read this novel, you can use similar characterization, plot, and other techniques to make your own novel haunt.

Where do you start? Try visualizing three or four of your favorite novels. What do you remember? Why do you remember it? Decide what’s memorable about your own novel. Change, add, or enrich as needed.

Tip: Identify the aspect of your novel that readers will never forget. Remember not to forget it while writing and revising.

Thematic Plotting/Plot-Driven Theme

You’ve heard it before: Characters acting as mouthpieces for ideas read like stick figures. Yet character and theme interconnect at the deepest root. Use theme to understand characters better and you complicate plot. Use the fate of your characters to illustrate theme and you needn’t state it. You can build story from either direction.

Dilemma. Start with an event that closes off protagonist options and emphasizes theme. In Kim Edwards’ “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” a doctor hopes to protect his wife by institutionalizing their newborn daughter, who isn’t “normal.” This event instigates a journey revealing the themes of love, memory, selfishness, humanity, and forgiveness.

Tip: Your first event should force characters to cope with the difficulty of living out your theme (instead of just idealizing it).

Backstory. “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach is less about baseball than the game of life. Pella plays this game poorly because her closeted dad unwittingly deprived her of the self-reliance a bright, talented, and beautiful teen would otherwise develop. Her bad choices arise from lessons she must unlearn and habits she must break.

Tip: Backstory adds if it clarifies character motivation and advances plot.

Climax. Ideally, the culmination of your plot dramatizes your theme. In Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” the novel’s hero is literature itself, or Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” to be specific. In a clever twist I won’t reveal, poetry rescues a family from theft, rape, and possibly murder. An ironic sort of hope saves or at least elevates everyone, including the “bad guys.”

Tip: Make the resolution of your plot signal your theme. This eliminates the temptation to insert a “And now, dear reader…” passage in your last few pages.

Intertwine plot and theme to build an organic novel: Better plot, deeper characters, more convincing themes.