Your First Novel Read online

  Of course, fine storytelling is more complicated, but for the outline stage of your novel, you want to cover the basics: suspend disbelief, make the readers care about someone, and make them want something that might not happen or make them dread something that might.

  SETUPS AND PAYOFFS

  If there is a scene card near the end of your story that needs to be set up or explained, make sure there's a scene card earlier that takes care of this. For example, if at the end of your story your bookworm accountant defuses a bomb, you'd better have a scene card earlier in the outline that explains why he has this skill. If you want to play a card like that, you'd better set it up. And a half-assed setup won't help much. You can't just slip in a scene where the main character says, "My favorite hobby? Why, I enjoy a good bomb defusing!" If you can't make it believable and interesting, have someone else cut the wires. Or have the bomb go off.

  If there is a scene near the beginning that needs to be followed through, look for the scene card near the end that is your payoff. If you write a scene early on that endears the main character to us because she is looking for her lost dog, you'd better find a place later in the story to include the dog again. Did she find him? Did she give up? Is he dead? Where's the payoff? There needs to be a reason we were introduced to the idea of that dog near the beginning, or it needs to be cut.

  NONCHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINES

  Now, if you like, you can mix up the scene cards and look at them in a different order to see how if feels, but number them on the back chronologically so it will be easy to put them back in order if you want. It's possible you might like telling the story out of order. Often a story starts at the most significant point of action, and the background gets filled in afterwards. Sometimes a character tells us about her childhood or how she met her husband or what her son was like when he was little by looking back at a significant moment.

  Sometimes we have two sets of time we visit alternately. In Stephen King's The Green Mile, the story goes back and forth between the protagonist's days as a prison guard and his present life in a retirement home. It's fine to rearrange your scene cards to create a nonchronological outline, but have a good reason for doing it. Don't do it just to be different or artsy. Look for the right form

  for your particular story. (Obviously, if your plot is about nonlinear time, like Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, or The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, you will not leave your cards in chronological order.) Pause and ponder: What order will be the most satisfying for your book?

  CHAPTER BREAKS

  Novels have all different styles of chapter breaks. Some have dozens of short chapters, some have a few huge chapters (often called parts or books), and some have no chapters at all. The chapter break should be placed strategically. If, while constructing your outline, the thought of separating your plot into chapters confuses you or saps your energy, don't make chapter break decisions yet. Write a first draft of the whole novel, then come back to this section to place your chapter breaks with intention during your rewrite. But if, as you think about your story, the discussion of chapter breaks stimulates your imagination, construct your outline with chapter breaks included.

  Take a look at your favorite novels. How did the author break up the story? The most important thing is that at the end of each chapter the reader should be craving the next chapter. Make the reader want to turn the next page. An old-fashioned cliffhanger is not required (though they still work), but tension of some kind is essential. End not where the action lulls but where it is the most dynamic. Give the reader new information right before you cut him off. The following are examples of strategic chapter breaks.

  BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, BY HELEN FIELDING 14 CHAPTERS, 271 PAGES

  At the end of chapter "April" Bridget hints that she might be pregnant and then tides the next chapter "Mother-to-Be"—again, we have no self-control. We must read on. It's especially easy to keep reading Fielding's novel because the diary entries are often short. Just one more, we tell ourselves. It's addictive.

  LULLABY, BY CHUCK PALAHNIUK 44 CHAPTERS, 260 PAGES

  Chapter six: The hero tries a killer poem out on his unsuspecting boss. If it works, the man will be dead before daybreak. Instead of ending the chapter with news of the death, Palahniuk stops right after the hero decides not to try to explain the experiment to his employer.

  "We both need some rest, Duncan," I say, "Maybe we can talk about it in the morning."

  Of course we can't wait—we have to start chapter seven.

  THE PRINCESS BRIDE, BY WILLIAM GOLDMAN 8 CHAPTERS, 399 PAGES

  Chapter five: We know one of the characters has spent his whole life trying to track down an anonymous nobleman with six fingers on his right hand. At the end of chapter five another character notices that the man who is about to torture him to death has an extra finger on one hand! It doesn't matter that chapter five was one hundred pages long, or that chapter six is fifty-nine pages long; we have to turn the page.

  CLIFFHANGERS

  Cliffhanger is a term coined from its own best example—if you want to make sure the reader is enthralled, when you have your hero chasing the villain toward a cliff and you want to change scenes (or chapters), have the hero fall off that cliff and leave him dangling there while you show us what's going on back at the ranch. Cliffhangers can be psychological as well as physical. Perhaps your hero has just found out her true love is already married, but the chapter ends before we hear (feel) her reaction. A cliffhanger means something huge is at stake, and we are made to wait for the outcome at the most suspenseful point in the action. You can see why cliffhangers are good chapter closers.

  To pinpoint your cliffhangers (or to create some), look at your story lines. Where are the moments when an action and reaction might be separated? As a basic, albeit corny, example, let's say a car flips over and your hero tumbles out alive. The separation point would be, of course, between the flip and the tumbling out alive. Let's say your hero goes to answer the door and instead of her ally being on the welcome mat, it's the villain, who comes in and attacks her. The separation goes between seeing it is the villain and having him enter. Perhaps your hero has been tracking a murderer with a certain nickname and, as he's listening to a voice mail from his girlfriend, he overhears someone in the background call her this name—now he realizes his sweetheart is the killer. You might separate the chapters between hearing the nickname and his reaction—it drives readers crazy (in a good way) when they think they know of a danger before the hero does. This all goes along with the idea of ending each chapter with new information.

  Make that new information so important to the reader that he will slap the page open to the next chapter and read on. Even at two in the morning on a weeknight with a head cold.

  WRITING DOWN YOUR OUTLINE

  Now copy the scene cards on paper, leaving about two lines blank between each entry. Use one page for each chapter. Go through the outline again in this format and fill in the blank lines with new ideas that come to you as you read the outline aloud to yourself. New scenes for expanding your story will continue to bubble up in your mind. For a first novel, having one page of longhand notes per chapter should be the right amount of planning.

  Now you have a page called "chapter one" that will help launch you into your novel, but first you have to decide who will tell this tale.

  POINT OF VIEW

  The point of view (POV) is from whose eyes we see the story. You can certainly have multiple POVs, but let's start with a single POV. Whose perspective are we taking? Through which glasses are we filtering the story? Most of the time, your main character, your hero, your protagonist, will be chosen for POV. For instance, it is Scarlett's, not Melly's, POV in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind because it is more fun to be Scarlett than Melly. In Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, the POV is that of the murdered girl, not of the girl's father or the homicide detective—if the story wasn't told by the victim, it would be just another murder mystery instead
of a trip to the other side of death. John Knowles's A Separate Peace is told from Gene's POV instead of Finny's because it's more heartbreaking to be the one who shook the tree than the one who fell from it.

  There are cases when the central character is not the POV character. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it is not Jay Gatsby but his neighbor Nick Car-raway who provides the POV. Gatsby is out of touch with reality in such a way that the story needs a normal perspective to provide insight and empathy. Though Atticus Finch is the central character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, his daughter, Scout, narrates the story that he himself would be too humble to tell. The narrative voice of a woman looking back at her father, filtering the story through her memories of childhood, provides the perfect POV.

  Think about your own story. Which POV will be the most effective? Whose take on reality do we need? In whose heart will we feel most alive? You should never tell a story like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone from the Dursleys' POV—they are not central enough and they're depressing to be with. If you were brilliant you might be able to tell Romeo and Juliet from the Friar's POV, or Hamlet from the ghost's POV, and make it work, but most stories are best told through the character who has the most to lose, who has the biggest adventure, who will save the day.

  When you know who your POV person will be, you still have to decide what "person" or tense to use: first, third, or second. (I put second last because it is not recommended.)

  First-Person Past: I walked into a bar with a chicken on my head.

  Third-Person Past: She walked into a bar with a chicken on her head.

  Second-Person Past: You walked into a bar with a chicken on your head. (See? Not recommended.)

  There is also:

  First-Person Present: I walk into a bar with a chicken on my head.

  Third-Person Present: She walks into a bar with a chicken on her head.

  Second-Person Present: You walk into a bar with a chicken on your head. (Don't do it.)

  Future tense? I will walk into a bar. She will walk into a bar. You will walk into a bar. Don't even think about it.

  First and third, past or present, are the most common POV choices. Try them for a scene or two—see how they feel with your story and characters. Present tense might add a certain urgency to the action, but it might not match the tone of your story. Past tense is more common than present tense and is a natural way to repeat a story: In the beginning there was the Word. Try it for a scene. How does it feel? First person can be effective for making the reader bond with the narrator and his emotions and thoughts, but it is limiting in that only things the first-person narrator can see and hear may be included in the action. Experiment with this one as well—does it create problems for your story line? Take a look at a few examples:

  THIRD-PERSON PAST

  He broke out the window with a Rockette-worthy kick. —Runaway Heart, by Stephen J. Cannell

  FIRST-PERSON PAST

  The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born. — The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving

  THIRD-PERSON PRESENT

  They shoot the white girl first.

  —Paradise, by Toni Morrison

  FIRST-PERSON PRESENT

  I'm just about to ask fox a little clarification on the peeing thing when her cell phone rings.

  —The Nanny Diaries, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

  You might have noticed from the examples that first person is more intimate, but not every protagonist makes a good first-person narrator. Scrooge would not have been able to tell us his story first person given the attitude he carried for the first half of his story.

  TYPES OF THIRD PERSON

  Third person can be effective for observing characters from the outside and reflecting on their behavior, but when you choose this POV you must decide which kind of third person you will use: omniscient third person, inner limited, or outer limited.

  1. Omniscient Third Person (or Unlimited)

  With omniscient third person, the storyteller can look into the hearts and minds of anyone and everyone in the novel. Omniscient is tricky because having the godlike power to experience the plot through any number of characters, at any moment in time, can lead to a lack of focus. We might not feel as strongly for the protagonist if we are constantly being dragged out of his feelings to dart into the heads of his cab driver, his neighbor, and even his dog.

  If you do decide to write your first novel in third omniscient, stick to one character's head per scene unless you're writing a confrontation between enemies or lovers. If you want to use omniscient only because you want to show the villain hiding the pill bottle under the candy machine when he's by himself, while the rest of the book works better told only through the eyes of the hero, find some other way to get that candy machine into the story. Use omniscient consistently, or not at all. E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime uses omniscient third. Notice how these versions of greeting a morning, the first from Mother's point of view, the second from Father's, have very different tones.

  Mother: Ah, what a summer it was! Each morning Mother opened the white curtained glass doors of her room and stood looking at the sun as it rose above the sea.

  Father: Now every morning Father rose and tasted his mortal being. He wondered if his dislike of Coalhouse Walker, which had been instantaneous, was based not on the man's color but on his being engaged in an act of courtship, a suspenseful enterprise that suggested the best of life was yet to come.

  2. Inner Limited

  Grammatically written in third person, inner limited is similar to first person in that the storyteller is looking at life through only one character's heart and mind. As you tell the story from one character's experience you can use the vocabulary and thought patterns of that person or you can use a contrasting style. Not all protagonists make good narrators. If you think it will make your novel better, you can write about a king with the language of a peasant or tell the story of a coal miner using the voice of a philosopher. In a scene with two characters, you can certainly let us know how both are feeling by way of gestures and words, but only one person's thoughts and feelings can be tapped into through narration.

  In this scene from James Joyce's The Dead, a man and his wife have a conversation about her first sweetheart, but only the husband's inner thoughts and feelings are revealed.

  "And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?"

  "I think he died of me," she answered.

  A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.

  3. Outer Limited

  With outer limited, the storyteller gives us only what can be seen and heard, not what the characters are thinking. If you are smart, you can make this style work for you. Choose the perfect situations and setting, the precise gestures and dialogue to touch your reader. Be careful, though. If used incorrectly, this style lacks the emotion needed to keep readers involved. If readers can only see and hear what the characters say and do, the way a camera films a scene in a movie, be sure the heart of your story is on your sleeve. The following passage is presented first in third-person inner limited and then in outer limited:

  INNER LIMITED

  "I gave her up," said Dee, never releasing the photograph.

  His chest cramped as if his ribs were breaking on the left side. He tried to focus on the image. She was telling him that he had once had a daughter and that he had missed her completely. Dee was only giving him a tiny glimpse of her, this amazing being with blue eyes, a little creature that he would never smell or lift from a crib or hear speak his name.

  OUTER LIMITED

  "I gave her up," said Dee, holding out a photograph toward him.

  He caught a glimpse of a little face with blue eyes, four teeth, and a dimple in her right cheek. He held out his right hand toward the picture, his left hand clutched his heart.
But Dee never released her grip on the photograph. She simply waved it past him, letting the glossy surface brush his trembling fingers, and then tucked it away again in her purse.

  Remember, outer limited is what you might hear and see on stage during a play. Third-person omniscient is more common than either inner limited or outer limited.

  MULTIPLE NARRATORS

  A novel can have many narrators. In a first novel, I don't recommend this approach. Multiple narrators are hard to manage effectively, but here are some tips followed by some examples of multiple narrators that worked.

  1. If you decide to use multiple narrators, choose them well. There should be a reason you decide to have both the man and his father narrate your story. They should contribute different insights, different information, or at least a different understanding of the same information. If you are writing a romantic comedy, you might want to let both your lovers be narrators. If you are writing a thriller, you might want to let both your detective and your killer be narrators. Perhaps even your victim. But ask yourself this question first—is your novel truly made better by it?

  2. If you decide to use multiple narrators, don't choose too many. Two or

  three, perhaps even half a dozen, if that's how many members there are in the rock band, or nuns in the lifeboat. But all twelve jurors are probably too many.

  3. Define where one narrator ends and another comes in. Use separate chapters, a different type font, or another device, like three asterisks in the center of the page.

  4. Give your narrators unique voices. If your multiple narrators all sound the same, write your story in third omniscient instead. The only reason to have multiple narrators is because there is contrast between the ways in which they tell the story. You can have them all in first person, or all in third limited—any POV you'd like—or you can have one written in this style and one in that style. The important thing is to make sure they sound like themselves and they serve your story well.

  Multiple narrators worked well for William Faulkner when he wrote his brilliant novel As I Lay Dying. The chapters alternate—narrated by the family members and acquaintances of a woman named Addie. Depending on which narrator is speaking, Addie is either dying or dead. One chapter is even narrated by Addie herself. The chapter headings indicate who is telling the story. Notice how distinct the voices are from one another: