Take Your Reader On A Journey
In my first blog for December, we talked about seat-of-the-pants writers, that rare breed of writer who sits down at a keyboard … and writes a novel, with little or no planning. I said they are rare, and later heard from a whole herd of them that they absolutely are NOT rare, thank you very much! Even so, most of the rest of what I’m going to say about how to write a novel will be directed at the larger group of writers out there who—like me—plan out what they write before they set to work.
So, where does that plan start? It starts with the plot. It starts with the story.
Two schools of thought on this. There are those who say you should go from simple to complex. And there are those who say you should go from complex to simple. Plan A makes the most sense to me.
Write down what your story is about in one sentence. Don’t go postal on me, here. I’m serious. If you can’t tell me—more importantly, if you can’t tell YOURSELF—what your story’s about in a single declarative sentence (without a bunch of clauses and phrases—that’s cheating) then you don’t have a clear enough understanding of your story to write a novel about it.
For example:
The Memory Closet: A woman risks her sanity and her life to remember her childhood.
Home Grown: A journalist declares war on marijuana growers to save her community.
The Last Safe Place: A novelist fights a deranged fan to save her son.
Sudan: A journalist joins a father’s desperate effort to rescue his daughter from slavery.
See, it can be done.
The next step is to expand that sentence (called a logline) into a paragraph. Then into a one-page synopsis. Then into a two-to-four page treatment, in which you describe what happens to whom, how and when.
One of my favorite activities after I finish a novel is to go back and read that original synopsis—and see how little resemblance it bears to the finished product. It is my belief that once you start writing, a story takes on a life of its own. My characters always hijack my story and take it in directions I never dreamed it would go. But you have to START somewhere, and that somewhere is a synopsis.
The other school of thought on this says you should write down everything that happens in your story—a treatment—and keep condensing it until you end with one sentence.
I can almost hear you howling in pain. I won’t bother to explain here that if you ever plan to get a book contract on your great American novel, you’ve going to have to be as good at condensing your story as you are at telling it. Most literary agents/publishers aren’t interested in plowing through an entire manuscript from an unknown novelist. They’ll read a synopsis … maybe even a treatment. If that impresses them, then they’ll ask to see the whole shebang.
But even if there were no publishing house mandate, even if you never intend for anybody but your immediate family and the guys on your bowling league to read our novel—YOU have to know what the story’s about—clearly and succinctly. That’s the bare bones of your novel and unless you can understand and articulate that clearly, you’ll wander off on all manner of rabbit trails and never engage your reader in the drama of your tale.
When you write that one sentence, when you boil the whole thing down to a handful of words, you’ll notice something. (At least you will if your story’s any good.) You’ll see that in its most elemental form, your story is about conflict. It is somebody fighting against something. When you write the longer versions you’ll see that your story is about change. If your main character emerges from the conflict the same man he was when he started, you have no story, at least not one anybody will want to read.
You see, the fine art of story-telling boils down to taking your reader on a journey. You drag him into the story by making your characters so real the reader cares what happens to them, and then the reader travels through the story at your character’s side, fights alongside him, changes along with him.
In the end, neither your character nor your reader, will ever be quite the same again.
