How to start a novel

I got a great – if slightly overwhelming – question recently about writing process.  I’m sure a lot of you will be able to relate to Stuart Hughes’ honesty.  As I look to my next project (that would be after the two I’m currently finishing) I feel exactly the same way:

“What process do you follow (from initial idea, to final draft) when writing a novel?

If I’m honest, writing 80,000 – 120,000 words that connect together and keep the reader interested seems like a mammoth slog right now. Any advice you can give me, to make the exciting prospect seem less daunting, would be gratefully appreciated.”

Well, isn’t that the ten million dollar question?  (And don’t you just love a British accent?)

And yet, the idea of trying to answer that as a fairly coherent, step-by-step process is an interesting challenge that I might actually be up for, especially because I’ve written about a lot of it before, it’s just a question of putting answers in a different kind of order and filling in some gaps.

(It also helps to know that I already have written my definitive answer, here:  Screenwriting Tricks For Authors.)

So I’ve been doing on my own blog – from picking the right idea, to getting a publishing deal.   In order, in detail, and together.  I need it just as much as anyone, right now.

I did six posts on the “idea” phase.   I could easily have done ten more.    This is a part of the writing process that people rarely spend enough time on, and is CRUCIAL if you want to develop a riveting book, even more crucial if you have any hope of being paid to write.  You are going to spend TWO YEARS of your life, minimum, on this book (and that’s truly a minimum).  Don’t you think you better be sure this is the right book to write before you start?

When people ask authors, “Where do you get your ideas?”, authors tend to clam up or worse, get sarcastic – because the only real answer to that is, “Where DON’T I get ideas?” or even more to the point, “How do I turn these ideas OFF?”

The thing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” is not the real question these people are asking.   The real question is “How do you go from an idea to a coherent story line that holds up – and holds a reader’s interest – for 400 pages of a book?”

Or more concisely:  “How do you come up with your PREMISES?”

Look, we all have story ideas all the time.   Even non-writers, and non-aspiring writers – I truly mean, EVERYONE, has story ideas all the time.   Those story ideas are called daydreams, or fantasies, or often “Porn starring me and Edward Cullen, or me and Stringer Bell,” (or maybe both.   Wrap your mind around that one for a second…)

But you see what I mean.

We all create stories in our own heads all the time, minimal as some of our plot lines may be.

So I bet you have dozens of ideas, hundreds.   A better question is “What’s a good story idea?”

I see two essential ingredients:

a) What idea gets you excited enough to spend a year (or most likely more) of your life completely immersed in it –

and

b) Gets other people excited enough about it to buy it and read it and even maybe possibly make it into a movie or TV series with an amusement park ride spinoff and a Guess clothing line based on the story?

a) is good if you just want to write for yourself.

But b) is essential if you want to be a professional writer.

As many of you know, I’m all about learning by making lists.   Because let’s face it – we have to trick ourselves into writing, every single day, and what could be simpler and more non-threatening than making a list?    Anything to avoid the actual rest of it!

So here are two lists to do to get those ideas flowing, and then we can start to narrow it all down to the best one.

1. Make a list of all your story ideas.

Yes, you read that right.   ALL of them.

This is a great exercise because it gets your subconscious churning and invites it to choose what it truly wants to be working on.  Your subconscious knows WAY more than you do about writing.  None of us can do the kind of deep work that writing is all on our own.  And with a little help from the Universe you could find yourself writing the next Harry Potter or Twilight.

Also this exercise gives you an overall idea of what your THEMES are as a writer (and very likely the themes you have as a person).   I absolutely believe that writers only have about six or seven themes that they’re dealing with over and over and over again.  It’s my experience that your writing improves exponentially when you become more aware of the themes that you’re working with.

You may be amazed, looking over this list that you’ve generated, how much overlap there is in theme (and in central characters, hero/ines and villains, and dynamics between characters, and tone of endings).

You may even find that two of your story ideas, or a premise line plus a character from a totally different premise line, might combine to form a bigger, more exciting idea.

But in any case, you should have a much better idea at the end of the exercise of what turns you on as a writer, and what would sustain you emotionally over the long process of writing a novel.

Then just let that percolate for a while.   Give yourself a little time for the right idea to take hold of you.   You’ll know what that feels like – it’s a little like falling in love.
List # 2:  The Master List

The other list I always encourage my students to do is a list of your ten favorite movies and books in the genre that you’re writing, or if you don’t have a premise yet, ten movies and books that you WISH you had written.

It’s good to compare and contrast your idea list with this IDEAL list.

This list of ten (or more – ten is just a minimum!) – is going to be enormously helpful to you in structuring and outlining your own novel.
Let’s go deeper into the film/book list.   Here’s part of mine, no particular order.

Rosemary’s Baby
Silence of the Lambs
Alice in Wonderland
The Haunting of Hill House  (book and film)
The Shining (book and film)
Room with a View (film)
Withnail and I
A Wrinkle in Time
The Witching Hour
Pet Sematery
Hamlet
Arcadia
Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
Notorious
Vertigo
Suspicion
Rebecca (book and film)
Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None
It (the book)
Bringing Up Baby
The Thin Man
The Little Foxes
The Children’s Hour
Pride and Prejudice
Bridget Jones’ Diary (book and film)
The Wire
Deadwood
Mad Men
I, Claudius
Fawlty Towers
Rome
Philadelphia Story
It’s A Wonderful Life
Groundhog Day
The Breakfast Club
Poltergeist
The Stand (book)
Carrie (book and film)

I included my favorite TV, and I could go into musicals, too, but I’ll spare you.   Well, except I have to mention Sweeny Todd.   And Phantom of the Opera.   And Chicago.   And…

And on the myth and fairy tale front:

Ariadne (Theseus and the Minotaur)
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Eros and Psyche
Beauty and the Beast  (all three of those last are the same story, essentially).
The Handless Maiden
The Yellow Dwarf
1001 Nights
Sleeping Beauty

Now, that’s a BIG list, of all-time favorites that I see/read over and over and over again, and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but I want to keep this manageable.   And on the surface, it seems to have a lot of disparate genres there.    But there are underlying commonalities that are very specific to my own taste (and I’m the only one who can truly say what those are, just as you are the only one who can say what your emotional preferences are).

What do I see about that list?

Dark dark dark dark dark…. Except for the romantic comedies and swoony Room With A View.

Lots of horror, but more psychological than gory.   Lots of psychological thrillers.   Some adventure fantasy and fantasy fantasy.   The Stoppard is about trippy extra-dimensional occurrences, plus he’s a genius.   Actually that goes for Shakespeare, too, extra-dimensionally.   Lots of psychology -  the Lillian Hellman plays are dramas, but very dark ones that explore ordinary and completely chilling human evil.    I especially like human evil so big it seems almost supernatural (as in Silence of the Lambs and Rebecca). Withnail and I is a flat-out drug movie, and has the British comedy of chaos I so love in Fawlty Towers.   Lots of sex, or at least, the sex is part of what I love about a lot of those choices.  (The Wire and Deadwood, for example…).  Lots of Cary Grant.   Oh, right, that would be sex.

What are some of the themes and subthemes of these stories?   (For me, personally, I mean, and not trying to be too analytical about it – just spew:)

Good vs. evil (and good usually triumphing, ambiguously).   Inability to distinguish the supernatural from reality.   Inter-dimensionality.   Erotic tension.   Loss of control (and that absolutely includes the comedies on there – Fawlty Towers, Bringing Up Baby, Withnail and I, are complete rollercoaster rides of hysteria.)    What is reality?   Man Must Not Meddle.   The deal with the devil.   What it means to be a hero or heroine.   Unlikely heroes and heroines.   Coming to terms (or not) with one’s extraordinary gifts.   Disparate people uniting to accomplish something as a team.   A man and a woman who don’t trust each other having to work together, discovering they are divinely matched.

And even more importantly, what FEELING am I looking for when I read and watch these stories?   What EXPERIENCE am I looking for?   This may be the most important indicator of what genre you’re writing in.

I like a lot of sensation in my stories.   That is, I want a story to make me experience a lot of sensation.   And not easy, light, fun sensations either, for the most part.    Fear, thrills, doubt, sex, urgency, loss of control, violent surprise.  I love the overwhelming feeling of having something huge, possibly supernatural, going on around me (in the form of the characters I’m projecting myself onto).    Something evil, even, but so powerful and mesmerizing I have to explore it, understand it.     And that can be a situation, as in Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining, or a person, as in The Children’s Hour.    I want a sense of cosmic wonder.    I want a sense that good does conquer evil, that good people can make a difference, but without sugar coating.   I like a lot of game playing, matching wits (Philadelphia Story, Thin Man, Silence of the Lambs).

So, what I write is psychological horror, or supernatural thriller, or supernatural mystery, or psychological thrillers with an extra-dimensional twist.   And while that sometimes makes my books frustratingly hard to categorize (in libraries, for example…) it also has branded me in a way that has been useful to me as an author.

But now it’s your turn – tell me.  What are you trying to make your reader or audience FEEL?  Horror? Thrills? The glow of romance?   The adrenaline and exhilaration of adventure?

- Alex

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Related posts:

How to write a novel from start to finish (part one)

What is genre?

What’s your premise?

The Price

What is High Concept?

The Dream Journal

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Screenwriting Tricks For Authors – now available on Kindle and for PC