A Model (Paradigm) For Your Novel

(All these articles are my own thoughts. There are plenty of books on each of these subjects, and I suggest you read them, which means I add nothing by merely regurgitating that information.)

A Model (Paradigm) For Your Novel

 You've had your idea, you've jotted down some scenes you want to write, and perhaps you've even hammered out a rough outline. That's fantastic, really. You're farther along than you think, and probably quite a ways ahead of the person who sat down to write Chapter One/Page One with no real idea where they were heading after the opening.

Now what?

Good question.

If you've been thinking about your novel for a while, I hope you've also been reading books of a similar type, and reading them like a writer (at this point you might want to go back and read the relevant University of Georgia Seminar posted on this site). With luck, you've read a few books that feel comfortably familiar, written in a style and structure you can imagine using for your own story.

If so, that's great, because you're at a good place to divert some attention from your outline and deconstruct those novels (perhaps reverse-engineer is a better term), noting the structure, tense, number and role of main characters, story flow, turning points, places where the drama rises and falls, how it builds to a powerful conclusion, and anything else that stands out. Don't steal the words or style or story, and for God's sake don't plagiarize a word of it, but feel free to use it as a guide

I started out wanting to write thrillers because it was a world I knew pretty well professionally, the subject interested me, and I enjoyed reading them. So when my mentor, Sterling Watson, to whom I'll always give lots of credit, gave that same advice to me, I'd already read most of Ludlum's books. I'd also seen a movie called Three Days of the Condor and decided to read that book by James Grady (titled Six Days of the Condor).

In the end, I applied Robert Ludlum's story concept to the structure and style of Condor and another book, Marathon Man, by William Goldman, using them as paradigms. I read and studied all of them several times, and aimed for that collective target. That doesn't mean, however, that I was a slave to them, or that you should be a slave to another writer's style. The opposite is actually true; you need to write your book so that no one but you could have written it.

And, of course, while studying those books I kept getting ideas and jotting them down. I didn't work off an outline back then and so my notes were terribly disorganized, but the point I want to make is that studying a paradigm will inspire new ideas for your story, advancing that process. It's not a static endeavor in which you abandon your own novel to study another's.

If you read Ludlum or Marathon Man or Six Days of the Condor, and then any of my books, you'd see almost no similarity at all. But if I hadn't studied them, my books would look entirely different than they actually turned out (and you might not have gotten a chance to read them because they might not have even sold to a publisher). So, to increase your chances of writing a successful first novel, and to cut down on time-consuming mistakes and rewrites, please find a paradigm and study it.

One other thing: I don't want to make a big deal of this, but I know some of you are thinking you don't need to study other works or learn the rules of writing because it's your intention to write with liberation, freed of the constraints of an industry longing for that brave new style and unique new voice. To you I say: I hope you are that new voice.

But everyone who's broken the mold and poured the molten lead of their talent into a new and exciting casting has first learned the rules, and then learned how to break or expand them.  If you have that amazing voice inside you, I'll bet a drink against a dung heap that you'll never get it down and recognized until you first learn the rules. Further, in my own case, my "I'm a new and fresh talent" egotism was largely motivated by laziness, and perhaps a lack of commitment that sought to short circuit around the hard work of learning the process. Sound familiar to any of you?

And yes, I hated it when I was told the same thing :0.  (BTW, smiley faces/emoticons are like exclamation points. If you feel you need one, then you probably chose insufficient words to truly carry the meaning of your sentence.)