Your First Novel Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART I: WRITING YOUR NOVEL

  BY LAURA WHITCOMB

  CHAPTER 1: Preparations

  CHAPTER 2: Beginning to Write

  CHAPTER 3: The Bones of Your Story

  CHAPTER 4: Fleshing Out Your Story

  CHAPTER 5: Making Your Story Vivid

  CHAPTER 6: Being Unforgettable

  CHAPTER 7: The Nuts and Bolts

  CHAPTER 8: Repairs

  CHAPTER 9: Making It Shine

  CHAPTER 10: Preparing to Be Read

  PART II: PUBLISHING YOUR NOVEL

  BY ANN RITTENBERG

  CHAPTER 11: What a Literary Agent Does—and Why

  CHAPTER 12: Before You Submit Your Manuscript

  CHAPTER 13: The First Steps on the Path to Publication

  CHAPTER 14: Query Letter Babylon

  CHAPTER 15: The View From the Other Side of the Desk

  CHAPTER 16: Becoming an Agented Author

  CHAPTER 17: Working With an Agent Through Thick and Thin

  CHAPTER 18: Getting to Yes

  CHAPTER 19: Becoming a Published Author

  CHAPTER 20: Publication Day—and Beyond

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE:

  preparations

  LISTENING FOR THE IDEA_

  In the beginning there is only the idea. If you are reading this book, you want to write a novel. If you want to write a novel, you already have an idea, whether you realize it or not. When the first storytellers stood up in their caves and moved closer to the fire, when they looked into the eyes of that first audience and said, "Now listen to me," they did so because they had a story to tell. This is the time to call your idea out of the shadows. Even if you've never written a line of fiction in your life, you can start now. Begin by writing down your idea. So far, it might be only a single sentence, but write it down all the same.

  Your idea might be a character you want to follow, a setting that haunts you, or a scene that keeps playing in your mind. A writer gets ideas from everywhere—by watching people pass in the crosswalks, by elaborating on childhood memories, by retelling nightmares, or by taking pieces of history and contemplating alternate outcomes. Inside you there is already the seed of a story that drives you to move closer to the fire and speak. Give it a name. Not a title—that comes later. Just name it, so it will know its master. "Hunted preacher" it might be called, or "Underwater schoolroom."

  Your idea might be an overview of the whole tale or just a glimpse. Michael Crichton conceived of The Andromeda Strain by reading a footnote in one of his college textbooks. Most of my ideas start out as a single moment: A man waits in the woods for his beloved. A child sits in a bush listening to fairies no one else hears. A woman watches the farmhand praying. If the moment is meant to grow into a whole idea, it will follow you around and beg to be picked up.

  Stephen King came to write The Dead Zone by imagining the last moment in the story—a lone gunman attempts to assassinate a popular presidential candidate. Under what circumstances could the assassin be right? Be the hero? Your idea could be the last moment of the story, or it could be the first. You see a man answering the phone, a ransom must be paid or his wife will be killed—only he has never been married. It could be a climactic moment from somewhere in the middle of the plot. You don't know why, but a woman in uniform is running through a stream, trying to get to her village before the enemy arrives.

  Some ideas start as a character or a set of characters. You keep imagining a healer who is haunted by a past failure, three sisters building a bridge, the husband of a woman on death row who writes notes on the backs of their wedding pictures because she will not speak to him. You keep seeing your character and picturing her in various situations or imagining him telling his story aloud.

  Some ideas start as a setting—a place so vivid in your mind that you can smell the damp hay, hear the submarine engines humming, or taste the volcano ash in the air. If the little desert town you grew up in, or the South American nightlife you adored on vacation, or the sinister factory where your aunt worked for thirty years keeps creeping into your daydreams or nightmares, it might become the setting of your novel. Of course, you don't need to have visited a place to write about it. You can create settings from scratch. J.K. Rowling conjured up Hogwarts as she stared out her train window somewhere between Manchester and London.

  As a writer, you should always carry paper and pen. When your idea shows up, write it down. More pieces of the story will follow if you welcome the first. Write everything down. Don't worry about fitting the elements together yet. Just take notes. Your muse is brainstorming.

  Once you get in the habit of collecting ideas, you'll find that they will come more often and more clearly. Sometimes ideas wake you up in the morning, nagging to be written down. Ideas open up like flowers in the steam while you take a shower. They evolve into other species of themselves while you drive to work. Ideas hide at the back of your mind, then slide forward when you hear a certain strain of music or smell burning leaves.

  I like ideas that sit next to me during a play and nag my pen to scratch notes in the program margins, dictating phrases that help me recall the idea later. "Confuses cat with dead son," it will whisper. "Write that down."

  I like characters who loiter on top of the television or under my seat at the movies and tell me how they would behave in the same situation—"Not me. I could never walk away from a crying woman," says my character. "And, by the way, I've never been able to wear a wristwatch. They stop working or run backwards. Why do you think that is?"

  I like settings that keep house behind my eyes, appearing like ghosts when I blink, that can be heard like a phantom ocean in the cup of my hand. I like settings you can smell as you fall asleep—the creek of the bamboo in a tropical cemetery. The scent of hot wax floating from the cathedral doorway. The red ember of a cigar throbbing like the eye of a cyclops in a darkened office.

  Often ideas come from seeing something in a new way or combining two elements you had never pictured together before. While watching a movie you might hear a line of dialogue spoken by a priest and imagine it spoken by a prostitute. What if those words from the lips of a serial killer came from the lips of a four-year-old boy as his mother tucks him into bed? What kind of story would you have if a Rhett Butler type wasn't coupled with a Scarlett O'Hara but a Boo Radley? Imagine Sam Spade locking horns with Eleanor Roosevelt, or a partnership between Lady Macbeth and Joan of Arc.

  Think about the kinds of moments you love best in your favorite novels. If you read mostly mysteries, you might love the moment when the first clue contradicts the current theory of whodunit. If you read romances, it might be the first physical contact. If you read horror stories, it might be the satisfaction of stopping the monster/alien virus/psychopath at the last possible second. This is what I call the "that oughta do it" moment. One of my favorite moments is the first time our protagonist (or main character) comes across something that can't be explained without the introduction of the supernatural—the "wait a minute now" moment. Another favorite of mine is the moment when a character reveals something about herself that makes her real, a surprise expansion into three dimensions.

  If you have a favorite kind of scene in the novels you read, that might be the place to start with your own story. Ask yourself, "What is my 'that oughta do it' moment? Where is my 'wait a minute now' scene?" If you are starting with a character, imagine what that character wants the most, then imagine the failure and success moments for him. If your idea is only a setting so far, imagine what kind of problems that setting might imply—you see a garden between two skyscrapers in Chicago. Does someone want to buy the space from the reluctant owner? What is growing there? Who designed the stepping ston
es? Who was married there? Who hides there? What is buried there?

  Write down every idea and make a file folder or envelope in which to keep them safe. These are the fragments of your novel that will fit together later. Imagine taking a story and ripping it up, tossing the scraps like confetti. It's like that, only backwards. You are gathering the bits of the story you will one day hold in your hands.

  PREPARING THE LEFT BRAIN_

  You have a split personality—everyone does—your right brain controls your creative side, and your left brain controls your logical side. Some people call them the writer and the editor. Or the artist and the critic. Whatever you call them, you'll want to keep them on good terms with each other because you'll need them both.

  When you prepare to write, you need to satisfy your left brain's desire for organization, correctness, and good old-fashioned work ethic. When your left brain is given more than half the control, though, it becomes judgmental and starts calling your right brain an undisciplined dreamer, doomed to failure. You want to keep your left brain in line, but you don't want to kill it. If it weren't for your left brain, you'd rarely get any work done and what you did produce would be unstructured and riddled with mistakes. You don't want to shut down your left brain—you want to keep your left brain happy so it will allow your right brain to fly free.

  THE NECESSITY OF READING

  Reading feeds both sides of the brain. To the right brain, reading is the air, the water, the rich soil where your spirit grows. Your right brain reads to escape into worlds unknown and fall in love with people who don't even exist. It's magic.

  To your left brain, reading is exercise, analysis, and research. The left brain likes the cerebral calisthenics of reading. But remember, you are what you eat. If you only read bad writing, your brain will unconsciously give out what it's been given.

  Read the kind of novels you admire. The more your mind hears what great writing sounds like, the better equipped you'll be to produce great writing of your own. Some beginning writers wonder why they have to read at all. Why not use that extra time to write? Warning. If you are the only writer you want to read, you will be stumbling over your ego for months and years to come. Get a grip. We can all learn from other authors.

  The left brain also likes to analyze what works and what doesn't in the fiction you read. When you read a novel you love, write down some notes on why it got to you. You fell for the hero. You were so scared you stayed up all night to find who murdered the nun. You couldn't get those foster children out of your head because they were so sad and funny.

  When you read a novel that disappoints you or drives you crazy, try to figure out why it failed. Where did the author go wrong? Usually you'll know exactly why. The love story was not believable. The dialogue was awkward. The protagonist wasn't likable. The ending has been done to death.

  Go into detail: Why was the hero unlikable? He didn't care about the wounded woman. He was dishonest with his partner for no good reason. He did everything for his own benefit until the last three pages—by that point it was too late, you already hated him.

  When you write your own novel, you will now have these notes in the back of your mind. You'll write protagonists who are worth caring about because you'll remember how author A succeeded and author B failed.

  Read novels in your chosen genre—novels written for the audience to which you want to sell your own story. If you want to write romances, read the best romance novels. If you want to write Westerns, read them. You need to research what's out there and what is doing well. You should always write the story you feel called to write and write it the best way you can, but you should also be well informed on what your potential fans desire.

  Give yourself permission to close the cover halfway through if a book is doing nothing for you. Give up and start something else. Life's too short. You will never read everything, so choose books that are giving you the most help. You don't need to put off starting to write your own novel until you've read every bestseller in your genre, but if you haven't been much of a reader so far, start now, read every day, and never stop.

  PRACTICING THE CRAFT: LEFT-BRAIN EXERCISES

  Only about one out of every billion humans will sit down one day, having never written a word, and produce a masterpiece. Writing is mostly practice. Think of the number of laps a track star runs before she breaks a record, or the number of hours a dancer spends at the barre before he's ready for a performance. There's nothing wrong with hoping your first draft will be brilliant—hope is required—but know that it's normal to need to practice before you succeed.

  Some baseball coaches use a training trick on their players, a machine that shoots tennis balls at 150 mph. Each ball is painted with a colored number. The player at bat has to call out the label on the ball (red three, blue seven) before he swings. This exercise improves one's batting average because it

  brings back the basics—keep your eye on the ball. The player stops thinking about every detail—his grip, the distance to the pitcher's mound, the angle of his shoulders, the turn of his hips, or the spacing of his feet. Writing exercises do the same thing—they give you something else to focus on so you don't trip over this word or that comma. You want to keep your eye on your idea.

  Here are some exercises to warm up your right brain and satisfy your left brain's desire for a workout.

  • Timed Writing Sessions. Find a timer—your watch alarm, an egg timer, but not an hourglass—you want it to make noise so you don't break concentration by glancing up to see if you've gone on too long. Set the timer to fifteen minutes and start writing. It doesn't matter what you write—no one need ever see it. You can write about your characters or what you dreamed the night before. The trick is to keep your fingers moving on the keys or your pencil scratching on the paper. Don't worry about spelling or punctuation. Don't stop to think or rewrite. Just write at full speed. Now read it. You might end up with a great sentence or idea for your novel, or you might have nothing you want to save, but it doesn't matter. The point was to warm you up.

  •Journals. Write in a journal or diary each day before starting to work on your novel. It doesn't matter if you write a list of what happened the day before or your innermost fantasies—the act of putting words on paper is warming you up.

  • Vocalization. You can literally talk aloud to yourself, or you can dialogue with yourself or your characters on paper. Talk to your novel. Ask where it hurts. Don't be surprised when it starts answering back. Play truth or dare with your hero. Play twenty questions with your villain.

  • Books on Tape. You can turn your commute to the office into a grown-up story time. Browse your public library. Look for research materials, novels in your genre, writers who inspire you.

  • First Lines. Take a stack of novels and read only the first sentence of each.

  The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.

  —The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

  I grew up in a small southern town which was different from most other towns because it contained an insane asylum.

  —Lilith, byJ.R. Salamanca

  The church was all heat and white sunlight, dust and the smell of dry grass and manure pushing in through flung-open doors.

  —The Blackbirder, by James L. Nelson

  Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. —Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

  —Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

  Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder; last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me.

  —Without Feathers, by Woody Allen

  Randomly opening a novel and choosing any line can also work, but the magic of first lines is that the author is setting the stage for you and trying to hook you in. As you
prepare to start writing, think: "What is it about my own story that will draw the reader in?"

  • First-Line Story Starters. This time choose a novel, copy down the first line, and continue to write your own version of what comes next. Go for five minutes. Again, no one needs to see it but you, so let your imagination run wild.

  • Word Association. Write down one word and then write down another word that the first word brings to mind, and create a chain of single words or phrases in this way. For example:

  novel, book, shelf, cupboard, hiding place, stowaway, tall ship, storm, tempest, magic, curse, secret, clue, code, puzzle, joke, seltzer bottle ...

  Often this process leads to an idea for a scene, as in this imaginary list for Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

  Snow, winter, Christmas, high spirits, ghosts, the past, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the ghost takes Scrooge to his childhood, Scrooge sees his classmates but they can't see or hear him, he sees himself as a child sitting alone and unwanted, the schoolhouse is not quite deserted—a solitary child, neglected by his friends is left there still.

  • Back Reading. Reread some of what you've already written before you start writing for the day. Hemingway used to read everything he'd written the previous day before he'd add any new material.

  RESEARCH

  Research is not only a good way to pacify the left brain; for most novels it is a necessity. You might be writing a veiled memoir from your high school days that needs no research, but even then there will probably be at least one thing you'll need to learn about to make the story more vivid. One of the characters might be into something you don't know enough about—reptiles as pets, chess tournaments, making model castles. Details make the story come alive.

  Often research involves a broader scope. Unless you're already a Civil War buff, if your story takes place in South Carolina in 1864, you'll need to research it. And some research needs to be done in advance. You will probably not want to start chapter one of a book about a carpenter in nineteenth-century China if you know nothing about that world. On the other hand, it's fine to start writing about your high school days before you start researching model castles.