How To Write A Novel

I have this crazy notion that I used to write novels without planning them overly, that I was guided like some seer, by the character and their predicament and the story unfolded before me as I sat down to write it. 

That's about 10% true.

I probably did write my first two unpublished novels that way; the ones in the drawer.

I was obliged to plan my first novel because I had a few daft runs at it to work from.

My second novel was planned with military oversight, I had the theme of the thing, a key scene, and then I worked out the story, had a pinboard with places and characters and spent close to a year researching and writing to the programme (plot) I'd set myself.

The Classic Course takes you step by step from idea to planning and you leave it with a beautiful plan based on the lessons of all-time bestsellers. The Ninety Day Novel course plans alongside you, for writers who've got started, got stuck, got half an idea, got a bad idea. If you've no idea but you love to...

Fiction is not mathematics. Yet, when we work at a draft a number of times it starts to feel that way. We write a novel step by step the first time, then we go over it at second draft to check how each chapter serves the story, each paragraph, each sentence, we look at how one thing leads to another and how they add up. Yes, this is how to write a novel, but no it is not everything. Sometimes addition can become subtraction.

You have to be really careful not to lose the mystery, those non-linear lines in your fiction which defy logic. These are the curious sentences whispered to you as you fall in and out of dreams and daydreams. They are the very soul of the novel.

With my first novel, I had a sentence which haunted me and it was really the 'x' that marked the treasure for me writing that novel 'Becoming Strangers'. That sentence was 'I am coming to you for help, I don't know why.'

I set it in a dream sequence in which my hero, who is dying of cancer, sees...

Autumn Term Begins Here.

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

Albert Camus

For those of us in our prime, Autumn is the season of making good. A season is, according to Stephen King, the right time frame to write a novel. So, it's time to push your novel to completion using our novel school methods:

• Choose a hero text to guide you in your writing and remain faithful to it while writing your novel. You will ingest the narrative arc almost subconsciously and learn pacing and patience by mirroring the act of writing with the reading of just one novel in depth during the season of your writing. Stay true. On the second and third reading you will see the techniques used more clearly. One of the first things we do at The Novelry is to have you choose the right text for you. A full list is available when you opt in to our mailing list and get a seven day free trial of the warm up to the course. You can find a list of virtuous teaching novels here too.
• ...

There comes a time when every writer has to face the awful thought that they may have to kill their manuscript.

 “Often when I sat down to work,” wrote Michael Chabon about a novel he ditched after five years of work. “I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.” 

It's hard to be sure for a while, then when it becomes clear, axing that book feels like a release.

Nothing is ever lost. You learn, you get better. Sometimes, as with the plot a novel, you have to go through a few ordeals to learn to turn and face the enemy. The enemy, in novels and life, is so often internal.  But usually, there's a blind spot. Clarity, vision, can come a little later than you'd like.

If you have more than a niggling feeling that something's wrong with your novel, if you're worried it's not showing any signs of life, here are some clues...

I'm delighted to announce the publication of our very own Kritikme Krew member's novel - The Light Between Us by Katie Khan -  which scored a five star review in Heat this week and is romping up the fiction charts. 'A bold new talent' says Matt Haig.

Published by Penguin's imprint Transworld this month, Katie began writing her novel with Kritikme in August last year.

As Katie said in her speech at the book's launch party at the Owl Bookshop last night - she was nervous about the 'difficult second album' but found it all came together. She thanked her family and friends and agent for support and has very sweetly thanked us in her acknowledgements too.

A writer needs a solid daily process, inspiration, encouragement and support.

Katie has a big day job, and writes bold and inspiring novels. You too can write like Katie - make sure you get the support you need!

“I want to write something new - something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."

That was The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald began in the wake of wild times had with his wife Zelda, their friends, and total strangers in New York City and on Long Island in 1922. Fitzgerald wrote steadily through 1923, and had a first draft of the novel finished by April 1924.

'Trimalchio' was the title of the finished novel, which he submitted to his publisher, Max Perkins, in October 1924.

Maxwell Perkins enthused about the novel's glamour, (you can read their exchange of letters below) but was uncertain about the way Gatsby's character was revealed. 

In 1925 Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, spent six weeks in Rome and on Capri, where Fitzgerald revised the book to meet Perkins's recommendations and in April of 1925, six months after the initial draft had been sent, The Great Gatsby as we now know it was published.

The Great Gatsby...

When I was reading Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, I was struck by the name of the male character, the romantic hero, 'Nick Conway'.

I thought - 'Nick Carraway'?

You will know that is the name of the narrator of The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, and when I started to compare those two books, I began to think about the prose and structure of both side by side. Then I began to compare the roles of the characters in the great classic Gatsby with Conversations with Friends. In Gatsby, Nick Carraway observes the romantic hero, admires him and his beloved Daisy. In Conversations with Friends, the narrator Frances observes and admires most of all Bobbi, who has no love object. This little matter creates a bit of a dead end in the structure of the book; it turns out on closer inspection. Bobbi is self-sufficient in a way I guess many of us would wish our daughters to be; the ultimate modern woman. You may argue she loves Frances, but not the way Gatsby loves...

Sally Rooney is my writer of the year. 'Conversations with Friends' is my book of the year.

At just halfway through the year, and with Ms Rooney just 26, you may think this is a moment of ill-considered or reckless admiration on my part.

Worse, you may think I'm really stretching things to claim she is the heir apparent to Hemingway, based on one novel.

But I will make a case for that based not just on that novel but the short story 'Mr Salary' for which Rooney was Winner of the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. I should add that with her new novel 'Normal People' being published next month, Ms Rooney is not a one-book wonder. 

Sally Rooney writes with such a painstaking candour and more as I will show below, that I am sure we have great things to come from her. 

It is the case that the 'truth' will set you free as a writer, as Hemingway himself practised sp robustly, and Sally Rooney purveys the same...

If you are a woman and you are a writer, you are not allowed to be angry.

If you feel angry about something and write with high feeling, you may be described, as a former agent once described a piece of my writing, as 'hysterical.' 

She did not mean -  'very funny'.

Hysteria: extreme fear, excitement, anger, etc. that cannot be controlled.

- an old-fashioned term for a psychological disorder characterized by conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization) or a change in self-awareness (such as a fugue state or selective amnesia).

- "characteristic of hysteria," from Latin hystericus "of the womb," from Greek hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb

Hysteria was a psychological affliction presenting exclusively in women during a period of greater individual freedom and migration in the Victorian era in the United Kingdom with a developing urban industrial economy...

Most 'big' books will have a theme and that's what I mean by politics.

This is not to say that theme belongs to a party-driven agenda - a book should not be in my opinion a vehicle for an organized group. Party = partie, in French, parted or departed, divided, to one side. Taking a position which is aligned to any established group degrades the author and the reader. (I hate to see authors' politics trumpeted on social media, it puts me off reading their books. No one wants their nose pushed into the swill of the trough.) Readers are intelligent people who form their own opinions and many will have experiences and opinions quite different to yours and if you only wish to speak to those who agree with you, then you should stick to social media and keep hitting the unfriend button.

'Big' books fast-forward our collective thinking, usually by crushing or condemning a commonly accepted truth or way of life. They trample on convenient, fast-food commonplace ideas. 

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