The Three Rules for Writing a Novel

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My Rule: Don’t trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover. – Jimmy Breslin
All due respect to Somerset Maugham, there are three rules for writing a novel and I know what they are.
Now, it is quite common to hear, at conferences and in classrooms across our favored land, in tones pugnacious and pejorative, that when it comes to the art of the novel, quite simply and unequivocally, There are no rules!
I would like to test that enthusiastic effusion and establish the contrary position.
To begin the argument we must, as with all fruitful discussions, establish our assumptions. I am going to assume that I am addressing writers who actually want to SELL, be that to a traditional publisher or directly to readers via self-publishing.
I am also going to assume that a novel has a certain form. That form is a story. While we may differ on what constitutes a story per se, can we at least agree that what Jack Nicholson wrote in The Shining (1000 pages of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy) is certainly not a novel? (If you wish to call such a thing an “experimental novel,” I will have to take issue. That would be like calling Kim Kardashian an “experimental actress.” It just doesn’t make sense in any rational world.)
With all this in mind, here we go:
RULE # 1 – DON’T BORE THE READER
Can anyone disagree with that?  Doesn’t it make sense that this should be emblazoned across the writer’s creative consciousness as the most foundational of all rules?
If you bore the reader, you don’t sell the book. Or, at least, if the reader does manage to make it to the end, you don’t sell your next book.
It’s a rule. In fact, it’s a law, just like gravity.
Which leads to:
RULE #2 – PUT CHARACTERS IN CRISIS
Novels that sell are about people in some kind of trouble. Conflict is the engine of story. You can create “interesting” or “quirky” characters all day long, but unless they are tested by trial they wear out quickly (here I will issue a confession: I’ve never been able to get past the first 50 or 60 pages of A Confederacy of Dunces, and I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried).
Now, trouble can be generated in many ways. The narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine is simply trying to get from the lobby of his office building to the next level via an escalator. That’s the whole story, and the trouble is inside his head.
At the other end of the spectrum are the commandos in The Guns of Navarone.
The point is, every novel must have some fire, not just a layout of kindling and logs. That’s a rule.
RULE #3 – WRITE WITH HEART
I admit this rule is somewhat difficult to define. It’s a bit like what a Supreme Court justice once said about obscenity: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
The novels that not only sell, but endure, have something of the author’s beating heart in them. We could run off a list of such novels, from To Kill A Mockingbirdby Harper Lee to the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly.
In my seminars, when we work on voice and style, I mention two novels that were publishing in 1957. They were as different from each other as Arbuckle and Keaton, and challenges for the publishers. Yet they both became bestsellers and, more to the point, continue to sell thousands and thousands of copies today.
They are Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and On the Roadby Jack Kerouac. No matter how you ultimately come out on the merits of either book, what can’t be denied is that every page pulsates with the author’s voice and vision.
So put your heart in every scene of your novel. It’s a good rule.
Now, when a writer says, “There are no rules,” I suspect what he’s really saying is there is no one way to do the things we’ve been talking about here. And that is mostly correct. 
I say mostly because, over time, it has been demonstrated that there are fiction techniques that generally work better than others. A good teacher (or editor) is able to help students learn the things that tend to work and avoid the things that tend not to.
And then it’s up to the writer to make choices. If a writer decides not to follow a tried and true method, at least she should know why.
For example, we talk a lot about starting a novel off with a hook (or, as I like to put it, a “disturbance.”) But what if you want to start your historical with ten pages of setting and description? Well, you’re certainly allowed to. And maybe you’ll manage to make those ten pages so interesting that readers will wish they’d go on and on.
But the odds are you’ll bore them, as they keep on asking Who is this story supposed to be about? Why should I care about any of this?
You might then decide it’s better to use the technique of starting with a disturbance and dropping in details within the action. A technique you can learn and practice.
But there may be another, more insidious meaning to the “no rules” proclamation. The espouser may really be saying There is nothing to learn! Anytime you teach technique you’re limiting the writer, hemming him in, stifling all that is good and original!
To which I kindly yet firmly say, Bunk. Can you imagine George Gershwin believing that? Do you think we’d have Rhapsody in Blue if he hadn’t learned the scales as boy, then the classics under the tutelage of his mentor, Charles Hambitzer? Technique didn’t stifle Gershwin, it freed him.  
Quod erat demonstrandum.
These, then, are the three rules for writing a novel.  You can break them if you like, but do so and they will break your chances of success.

A Walk in the Park

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by Mark Alpert

This is my first post for The Kill Zone, so I want to talk about inspiration. Right now I’m starting a new thriller and looking for ideas. In fact, I’m desperate for ideas. I have no ideas whatsoever. So here’s what I do: I go for a walk.

Someone once told me that the speed of your thoughts depends on the orientation of your body. When you’re lying in bed your thoughts move slowly. You find yourself dwelling at length on unhealthy topics such as, “Why the heck did I become a writer in the first place?” When you sit up, though, your thoughts move faster. It’s easier to concentrate on your work in an office chair than in a La-Z-Boy. And when you’re walking, your thoughts are in constant turnover. Your mind flits from subject to subject. Sometimes you enter a kind of trance and wander three blocks in the wrong direction. Well, I do, at least.

I’m lucky enough to live in New York City, a great place for walking. My favorite spot is Washington Square Park. Usually I pace the rectangular perimeter of the park while I’m thinking of ideas for my novels, but when I’m in dire need of inspiration I stroll along the curving, bench-lined walkways. The park is right in the middle of the New York Universitycampus, so it’s always buzzing with students. I sometimes feel like I’ve entered a different country, the Land of Eternal Youth. There are so many young, beautiful people here!

Last week I ambled through the center of the park, past the Washington Arch and the famous fountain where the Deadheads stage their all-day jam sessions. I stopped near the statue of Garibaldi, which is a good people-watching location. The place was especially crowded that afternoon because some advertising company was shooting a commercial there, and that kind of activity always draws a crowd. The cameramen wouldn’t say what kind of commercial it was, but after watching them for a while I concluded it must be an ad for Intel. The actors — a gaggle of young men and women, dressed casual-chic — sat on a bench nearby, staring delightedly at a laptop screen.

But here’s the freakish twist: each actor wore a strange contraption over his face. It was a square black tray, about six inches on each side, strapped to the head in such a way that it jutted horizontally from the chin. It looked kind of grotesque, like those oversized lip plates that African tribesmen insert into their mouths. Two white balls, similar to ping-pong balls, were fixed to the tray’s corners. I think they were part of a motion-capture system, something the ad company will use to create computer-generated special effects. But that’s just a guess. The secretive cameramen wouldn’t say anything about it.

Still, it caught my attention. I think writers, especially thriller writers, are irresistibly drawn to weird, disturbing sights. (Well, I am, at least.) The odd, high-tech chin tray made me think of something I came across in a book not too long ago: a reference to the scold’s bridle, an iron muzzle used to punish women in England and Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Women accused of being gossips or shrews or witches were forced to wear the muzzle, which had a bridle bit that extended into the woman’s mouth. The bit was studded with spikes that pierced the woman’s tongue if she tried to talk. Unbelievable, right?       

I strolled toward the other end of the park, thinking about whether I could incorporate the scold’s bridle into my new novel. I tried to imagine what it was like to have the bridle clamped around your head while you were forced to parade through an English town in disgrace. (Some of the bridles were equipped with a ring and chain so the woman’s husband could drag her along.) And while I was picturing this scene, another strange spectacle unfolded right in front of me. A young guy, tall and lanky, approached a gorgeous women sitting on one of the benches. He stood a little too close to her and started talking in a low, urgent voice. Maybe it’s a drug deal, I thought. Washington Square Park used to be an infamous pot bazaar, but the cops cracked down on the dealers a few years ago. Curious, I took a seat on the neighboring bench and pretended to study my iPhone.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a drug deal. The guy was trying to pick up the woman and failing miserably. She would’t even look at him. After a while I heard him say, “Is it because I’m Dominican? Is that why you won’t talk to me?” Wow, I thought, that’s not going to work. He’s basically calling her racist. In the whole history of romantic entanglements, I don’t think that line has ever been successful. After another long silence the guy gave up and walked off. He joined two friends who were standing thirty feet away, observing his attempt. One of them said mockingly, “Ah, sucker!” and then they all left the park.

Thenit was time for me to go, too. I didn’t have any great brainstorms, but it wasn’t a waste of time either. Maybe some of this stuff will work its way into my new book. Or maybe not. It was better than sitting at my desk, at least.

Reader Friday: Knock Out!

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What’s the first book you can remember reading that really knocked you out? That carried you away into a story world that you didn’t want to leave? That got you hooked on reading?

I read The Hardy Boys as a kid, but the first “real” novel I remember getting hooked on was Tarzan of the Apes.

What about you?

Blogs vs. Vlogs

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by Michelle Gagnon

I recently branched out from “adult” novels to young adult, and with that transition has come a major shift in marketing strategy. One of the main differences is that a significant chunk of my book reviews have been done by vloggers: video reviews, in lieu of blog reviews.

I have to confess, I’ve only seen a handful of these. I don’t know if it’s a sign of my age, but I’m much more likely to read a blog post than to watch a video review, even if the blog post takes me twice as long to read as a vlog would take to watch. I’m not entirely sure why: I consume plenty of media, heck, I’m as guilty of wasting time on YouTube as anyone. I own an iPad, and watch most of the tv series that I follow on that, rather than on my tv. But for some reason, internally I draw the line at vlogs. Yet apparently that’s where the younger audience is.  Many YA authors actually contribute to group vlogs, rather than blogs.

In the interest of full disclosure, I actually attempted to compose a video portion of this entry to show the difference. Three times. And each time, I was more than a little horrified by how it turned out. In my humble opinion, one of the great benefits of my job is that I can sit in the confines of my home in my pajamas, hair unbrushed, face unwashed, and log in a full day of work. Granted, I occasionally frighten the UPS delivery guy, but over time he’s learned to squint and focus above my head while I sign for packages.
All I can say is that vloggers are brave souls. Or maybe they’re just better about their personal hygiene.
What do you think? Anyone out there prefer a vlog to a blog?

There’s Nothing like the First Time: Getting Published

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My critique group hit a double this week. Two members of the writing group announced that their short stories have been accepted for publication in an anthology. 

You could feel the pride in their emailed announcements. Both of these writers had been struggling over the months and years to refine their writing; they honed their craft, bringing in pages week after week with revisions. Finally they got the payoff: officially dropping the “pre” from “pre-published.”

The rest of us in the critique group are thrilled for them. That’s the way it is with writers. The rise of one doesn’t diminish the others–we simply spread the joy. 

So readers, let’s hear about your recent triumphs and struggles. Where are you in your own writing journey? And if you have any announcements, we hope to hear it here first!

Beach Reading

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

This week finds me sunning myself on a beach in Palm Cove so I’m effectively off the grid (and on mama duty) until I return. Next week we get to welcome Boyd Morrison who will be sharing Mondays with me and whose first post will be on the 24th – so I get also get an extra week of blog-vacation! I hope you will all join me in welcoming him on board.

In the meantime, I am hoping to read the latest Irish mystery by Tana French while I laze around – but as I am boarding another plane (this one bound for the States) very soon I’d also love to get more recommendations for great vacation reading. So, my fellow TKZers, what was the best beach read for you this year?

Now, back to the sun-lounger…

Writers and Coffee

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

What do you brew to do what you do?

For most writers through the centuries, it’s been the coffee bean, the seed of the genus coffea. Nothing like a good cup of joe in the morning to get the mind rolling, the fingers pounding and the mind coming up with stuff to happen in the scene you’re working on.
Perhaps the greatest exponent of the jamoke treatment was Honoré de Balzac. He believed its properties were magical, and proved his devotion by writing over 100 novels, novellas and stories on what was, essentially, speed.
His practice was to wake up around midnight and have his servants cook up the thickest coffee imaginable. Think tar with a little sugar. He’d down brew after brew, for up to fifteen hours, letting the stimulant feed his imagination.
He died of caffeine poisoning at the age of 51.
In more moderate quantities, coffee has proved to be universal in its appeal since its discovery in the fifteenth century. According to the definitive treatise All About Coffee (William H. Ukers, 1922):
All nations do it homage. It has become recognized as a human necessity. It is no longer a luxury or an indulgence; it is a corollary of human energy and human efficiency. People love coffee because of its two-fold effect—the pleasurable sensation and the increased efficiency it produces.
Coffee has an important place in the rational diet of all the civilized peoples of earth. It is a democratic beverage. Not only is it the drink of fashionable society, but it is also a favorite beverage of the men and women who do the world’s work, whether they toil with brain or brawn. It has been acclaimed “the most grateful lubricant known to the human machine,” and “the most delightful taste in all nature.”
Personally, I have found coffee to be as Kipling found a good cigar: Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes.
And a companion for every novel I’ve ever written.

So do you have any coffee rituals, favorite blends, or go-to coffee joints? If you don’t you have a speciality brew, you should look at websites like Little Coffee Place for some inspiration.
And if the coffee bean is not your thing, what is your drink of choice for doing time at the keyboard?

An Introduction; and Found in the Translation

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Please allow me to make an introduction. Next Saturday, September 22, as I make my way down to New Orleans for a legal seminar, movie role auditions, and a bit of urban spelunking, a gentleman named Mark Alpert will make his debut on this blog. He and I shall thereafter alternate in this space on Saturdays. Mark is one of those individuals who is the smartest person in any given room, even when he is several miles away from it. It’s a quantum physics thing, my friends. Mark is a contributing editor to a magazine that I am barely intelligent enough to read — Scientific American — and makes the incomprehensible understandable on a weekly basis. Mark has so far also published two thrillers, FINAL THEORY and its sequel, THE OMEGA THEORY. Both books deal with aspects of quantum physics, and what occurs when science and knowledge are used with evil intent. Pick them up, and prepare to lose several nights of sleep, reading and thinking and worrying.  Mark’s third novel, EXTINCTION, which deals with a hostile artificial intelligence, is on its way in February 2013. I hear good things about it already.  I am sure that in the interim Mark will keep us all educated, informed, and most of all entertained with his contributions here.
               *                                                    *                                           *
Let me now change direction. Does the name “Stieg Larsson” mean anything to you? It probably does, particularly if you are a fan of mystery and thriller novels. After all, it was the late Mr. Larsson who penned that famous trilogy of novels, the ones about the girl with the dragon tattoo who played with fire and kicked the hornet’s nest, which renewed interest in what is variously called Nordic Noir or Scandinavian crime fiction. You might also have read a novel or two by Jo Nesbo, such as THE REDBREAST or THE SNOWMAN.  You are undoubtedly at least nominally familiar with SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW by Peter Hoeg, and THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. But…have you read any novels by Reg Keeland? Or Don Bartlett? What about Tiina Nunnally? How about Alan Blair?
Keeland, Bartlett, Nunnally, Blair  and many other worthies I could name are the individuals who provided you with the opportunity to read Larsson, Nesbo, Hoeg, Sjowall, Whaloo,  and…well, many other worthies I could name. It was Reg Keeland who translated The Millennium Trilogy. Don Bartlett did, and does, the honors for Jo Nesbo. Without Tiina Nunnally, Smilla would have still had a sense of snow, but you probably wouldn’t have known or cared. And Alan Blair made sure that the policeman didn’t laugh to an empty room. None of these people are household names. I think they should be. I think that they, and at least a dozen other individuals, should get some credit for what they do and for how well they do it. I submit that there is much more to translating a work of literature than simply doing a word for word interpretation; you have to…you have to taste it, and get the recipe right. Leave out the spice, add too much of this, and too little of that, and it might be bland, or watery, or inedible. Or, indeed, unreadable. Put something into Google Translate and see what I mean. I adore Google Translate, and it does a good job, but more often than not what you get has to be interpreted for context. What Kleeland and a number of others do is much more than translate Swedish or Nordic or language foreign to English; they take what would be indecipherable to most of us and make it understandable, and insure that the end result is still suspenseful, mysterious, and magical.
Every time I pick up a book by an author whose native language is other than English, I make a point of noting the translator of the work, and for a brief moment, thanking them.  And so, to those who show and share us the magic of faraway places —those I have named, and those I have not — I thank you.

Reader Friday: I Wish I’d Written That!

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We’ve all read (or heard in a movie) a line we wish we’d written. 

Here’s one of mine. It comes from a classic hard-boiled noir by Dan J. Marlowe, The Name of the Game is Death:

I’ve been in front of X-ray machines that didn’t get as close to the bone as that woman’s eyes. 


Okay, now it’s your turn. What line do you wish YOU had written?

Five Key Ways to Make Your Characters Memorable

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by Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

On one of our first TKZ Reader Friday Posts, we asked for suggestions on posts you wanted to see. I went back to read a comment from TJC, a steadfast follower, and wanted to respond to this request:

I find the “first page” submissions and discussions informative and engaging. Any thought of other similar exercises, e.g. “character introductions”, “action scenes”, “backstory insertion” or other? ~tjc

I went back into our TKZ archives and found a post I did called “The Defining Scene – Character Intros,” but here are my thoughts on creating unforgettable characters.

Five Key Ways to Make Your Characters Memorable

1. Add Depth to Each Character—Give them a journey

  • With any journey comes baggage. Be generous. Load on the baggage. Give them a weakness that they’ll have to face head-on by the climax of the book.

  • Make them vulnerable by giving them an Achilles Heel. Even the darkest street thug or a fearless young girl with magical powers should have a weakness that may get them killed and certainly makes them more human and relatable.

  • Whether you are writing one book or a series, have a story arc for your character’s journey that spans the series. Will they find peace or love, or some version of a normal life? Will they let someone else into their lives or will they be content to live alone? Will a villain have a chance at redemption? Do what makes sense for your character, but realize that their emotional issues will cloud their judgment and affect how they deal with confrontations. By the end of a book, they should learn something.

2. Use Character Flaws as Handicaps

  • Challenge yourself as an author by picking flaws that will make your character stand out and that aren’t easy to write about. Sometimes that means you have to dig deep in your own head to imagine things you don’t want to think about, but tap into your empathy for another human being. You might surprise yourself.

  • Stay true to the flaws and biases you give your characters. Don’t present them to the reader then have the actions of the character contradict those handicaps. Be consistent. If they have strong enough issues, these won’t be fixed by the end of the book. Find a way to deal with them.

3. Clichéd Characters can be Fixed

  • If you have a clichéd character, you may not need to rewrite your whole story. Try infusing a weird hobby or layer in a unique trait/quality that will set them apart. Maybe the computer nerd writes porn scripts for a local indie film company with dreams of writing for a studio such as tube videos hd or the jock writes a secret blog under a girl’s name giving advice to teens on love and romance for the local paper. When that hobby is surprising and unexpected, that’s what will shine about the character and that’s what editors will remember.

4. Create A Divergent Cast of Characters

  • Portray your characters in varying degrees of redemption—from the innocent to the “total waste of skin” characters.

  • As in real life, not everyone is good or bad. They are a mix of both.

  • Sometimes it’s great to show contrast between your characters by making them do comparable things. How does one character handle his or her love life versus another character?

5. Flesh Out your Villains or Antagonists

  • Villains or antagonists are the heroes to their own stories—Spend time getting to know them.

  • Give them goals.

  • Give them a chance at redemption—will they take it?

  • Give them a unique sense of humor or dare to endear them to your reader.

  • The better and more diabolical they are, the more the reader will fear for the safety or well-being of your protagonist.

Character Exercise: A great way to explore what makes a memorable character is to analyze ones you see on TV or in the movies. Pull apart the layers of the depth of their personalities, warts and all, and share some of your favorites. Describe a character you found unforgettable and tell us why.