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Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyze her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader totally by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.
A great many plot problems that show up in unpublished manuscripts can be resolved with a single strategy. Know what the chase is, and cut to it.
Many writers kill their plots in their infancy with an ill-conceived premise or an unreadable opening.
The central dilemma of a novel should be important enough to change someone’s life forever.
One of the first stumbling blocks a novelist must overcome is the misapprehension that what is of interest to him will necessarily be of interest to anybody else.
Pick a pivotal action scene and start your novel in the middle of it, introducing your character when he is already in the midst of some gripping conflict, to get the reader instantly involved.
because you create your world from scratch, everything in it is a conscious choice, and the reader will assume that there is some reason behind these choices.
In real life, people are riddled with chronic problems that are not addressed for long periods of time, if ever. But in fiction, all problems are just the opening chords of a song.
But subplots can easily start to spread and take over your novel. Often you would do better to focus your reader’s empathy on the problems of your main character.
If your novel is feeling a bit thin because too little is going on (see “Monogamy,” chapter 2), the addition of a decent red herring can lend it some substance and depth.
Always make sure your red herring is an integral part of the story. When you perform sleight of hand, every movement should seem natural.
And when your red herring no longer serves a purpose, do not simply drop it, leaving a frustratingly loose thread. When the lover is rejected, we want to see his reaction.
If a problem is worth creating, it’s worth hanging on to long enough to make the reader care. Most are worth hanging on to until the very end, when all loose ends are cunningly tied together in a rousing climax.
Do not reassure your reader that everything is going to turn out all right. Sometimes even a sense of confidence in the hero can amount to a tip-off that the happy ending is a foregone conclusion. The hero is better off considering the odds to be almost impossible—but resolving to try, even if it means losing his life.
It is always a good idea to avoid letting the reader know what is going to happen before it happens. If a character details a plan of action before executing it, blunders or unforeseen circumstances should always arise, causing the plan to go awry.
When there is a plan, things cannot go according to it. If they do, the plan becomes a spoiler, the action becomes dull and predictable, and the reader’s plan to finish your book is what gets derailed.
When a writer proposes an unlikely event, we buy it or not based on whether the writer has managed to create a world in which the event is interrelated with everything around it, so it appears to the reader something that might naturally happen.
What might appear to the characters as amazing good luck should for the reader have a certain feeling of inevitability. We are made to understand that a character behaved in a particular way because of the person she is; she does not suddenly break character to do the one thing that is most convenient for the author.
So, in a good novel, the writer strives for a balance of likelihood and contingency: the more unlikely an event, the more deeply rooted and widely integrated it should be into the chapters that came before it. Above all, the writer does not assume that an event in his novel is believable simply because “it really happened to this guy I know!”
THE BEDRIDDEN SCENE Any scene in which a character is shown waking up in bed or getting into bed is deeply suspect, unless there is someone new in bed with her.
The Benign Tumor is a scene, chapter, or entire section of a novel that can be neatly excised without any harm to the surrounding organism.
A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.
NEVER use two scenes to establish the same thing. We do not, under any circumstances, want a series of scenes in which the hero goes to job interviews but fails to get the job, or has a series of unsuccessful dates to illustrate bad luck in love. This works in the movies, where three scenes can pass in thirty seconds, but not in a novel. Unless a new character or plot element is introduced, once is enough.
Here everything reminds the point-of-view character of something else. It’s like trying to leave the house with someone who keeps realizing they’ve left something inside. Then something else. Then something else. With this constant application of the brakes, the plot has no chance of ever getting where it’s going.
This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina, which is French for “Are you fucking kidding me?”
speculations about the author’s participation in whatever
Remember: blonde, brunette, and redhead are not personality types.
Writing is not like figure skating, where flashier tricks are required to move up in competition. Ornate prose is an idiosyncrasy of certain writers rather than a pinnacle all writers are working toward.
Anything that draws attention to the author at the expense of her novel is bad parenting.
This point is worth repeating: don’t reiterate.
There is no substitute for saying something, and the reader should be able to discover what it is you are saying without having to call and ask you in person.
“Tragic? Is that all you have to say?” she said, angry at his lack of further things to say.
“Tragic? Is that all you have to say?” she said, angry at his lack of further things to say.
Many beginning authors seem to believe that contractions, like sexual intercourse, began in 1963, and nobody before that year ever said “I’m” or “don’t.”
While dialogue is not exactly like speech in real life, it will work only when it creates the impression of actual conversation.
since publication isn’t an issue, you have all the room in the world for this meticulous realism.
But fiction that hews too closely to the specifics of the author often lacks the alchemy that transforms a personal wish-fulfillment fantasy into escapism satisfying to others.
Generally, any point of view that lasts for less than a page should be cut.
Sometimes an author replaces dramatic events with dramatic reactions to mundane events.
emotions in themselves, furthermore, do not constitute action in a scene.
The writer should not count on dialogue like “Yikes!” to get the point across.
Unless the main point of a thing is the character’s experience of it, give us instead the thing itself.
While an occasional reflection can be useful as a segue into a scene, or as a note within a scene, it should never itself be a scene.
The beginning novelist, being the sort of person who wants to write a novel, tends to come to the job with a backlog of thoughts and feelings, years and years of minute observations, exegeses of Conan novels, elaborate and detailed scenarios of how things should be.
Here the weary author, who can no longer deny the awfulness of what he has been writing, attempts to deflect criticism by acknowledging the glaring flaws in his novel.
“Call my patent attorney!” cried Thomas Edison. “I have invented the telephone!”
A variation on this is the rebellious protagonist who questions the never-before questioned values of a society, from the point of view of the author’s never-questioned contemporary American values.
Many beginning writers say, “But publishers have copy editors for that! Who cares about those superficial details if the story is really good?” To which we say: we all want to be loved for our true selves, our inner essence, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take a shower and look in the mirror before we go out on a date.
