.png){kind=small}
If you read the previous posts about The Gnawing Call to Write a Book and How to Actually Write and Finish your Book, then you may have caught the hints that my first novel was not great. I thought it was at the time, I thought it was amazing. And honestly, I still think the writing was pretty good. There are some truly pretty passages that still make me smile to encounter and some characters I wish I could create again. But the book as a whole is bad. How is this possible? Easy, I knew how to write beautiful sentences but had no idea how to structure a book. Good books need both (and then some). In this blog post, we'll discuss all the things that were wrong with my first ever novel. Yay.
1. Scope
Scope refers to how large or narrow you want to paint the landscape within which your story will play out. This can include physical landscapes, which can be narrow for example, perhaps the story happens within one small town or the dormitories of a secluded boarding school or it can be very broad and span across continents. Similarly, the scope also includes the timeline and this can be narrow if your entire story takes place over the course of three days or two weeks. It can also be broad and span three generations. Scope, in a lot of ways, creates the soft shell of your book, a soft structure that can determine what kind of book you'll have. The scope of my first novel was too large. In terms of timeline, it spaned both too far into the past and too far into the future. I love books that do this well, but I did not at the time have the skill to pull this off. It was also too broad in terms of the physical landscape, I had my characters traveling across the continent which was exciting to do but, again, I lacked the skill to pull it off.
2. Character Self-Identification
This is a difficult one to admit. But I'm certain I wasn't the first and I'm even more certain (pretend it's possible) I won't be the last to commit this most atrocious of writer sins. In the book in question, I based my main character on myself, very closely on myself. Now, this happens, it's actually quite common among even the most accomplished of writers because if words are your truth, it's natural to want to seep in the depth of your own lived experiences into your characters. However, what a good writer has that I did not, is the awareness of this phenomenon as it happens. Being aware means you can identify when scenarios and characteristics begin to morph into memories on the page and pull back accordingly. Some writers even choose to create such a distance from themselves and their stories that this would never happen, not even by accident. I think mine was a mixture of accidental self-identification and intentional self-based character sketching because I somehow thought that was a cute thing to do. It was not. It actually left me feeling trapped within the character and I found myself bound by constraints that wouldn' allow me to hurt or in any other way taint the character because, well, it felt like doing it to myself. You can imagine how limiting this is when you're trying to create any kind of art. Add to that the genuine horror you must feel when people read the book and perhaps don't like the character that is really you. Luckily for me, this book never saw the light of day so this is only a horror I have to imagine, but some (especially new) authors aren't that lucky.
3. A Lack of Character Development
Another one I hate to admit, but it's true. The characters I created were lovely and I was so proud of them because they were interesting and diverse...they just didn't grow. Topically, yes, but not in the ways that I now I understand character development to be a vital device to drive and enhance a story. When you read a book (a novel anyway) and you really love it because it just resonated with you on a deep level, what you're really connecting with are the characters. Even if everything else is rock-solid; the stakes; plot, the writing, if the characters are flat then your book will be flat. My book was flat. I made them do things and I thought that was enough, it was fun to put them in situations and make them react to those situations but I never quite thought past that. I never asked myself, how is this situation affecting the character? In what ways does it cause them to grow and/ or change? What I didn't understand then was that my problem was not actually knowing the character, I hadn't taken the time to make them real.
Making a character real takes time, but the payout is immeasurable. The writer that I am today understands the value of this and one of my drafting excersises is character sketching. I like to ask myself a series of questions about each character and fill them out layer by layer until they are (in theory) a fully specific person that I could meet out in the world one day. There are no right questions, no limitations, but the more detailed and obscure the more nuanced and interesting it gets. What's their middle name? Where do they live? Were they born there? What's their relationship with their grandmother? Do they have scars? How were these attained? Any allergies? What age did they lose their virginity? How do they feel about mustard? As I said, this process takes time, but I enjoy it and more importantly, it's effective. With every question and answer, the character gains depth and nuance until eventually, they feel as real as you and me. No more flat characters.
4. Over-Protection of my Darlings
We've all heard the phrase 'kill your darlings'. It exists for a reason and it appears that in my first book I was determined to not discover this reason. I liked my characters too much, and as a result I didn't want anything bad to happen to them. As a direct result of this over-protection, my book lacked stakes. There was no risk because there was never any real danger. Just from reading that I'm sure you already know that that resulted in a boring book. Stakes are the pulse of a story, they create that frantic page turning effect in all good books. They create the space for the reader to hunger to know- what happens next? They keep you up past your bedtime to find out. Without stakes your book is dead. So to recap, my book was boring, had flat characters and it had no stakes. Yeah...let that sink in.
5. Not understanding What Editing Means
This may sound silly because you think, editing is editing. See a piece of writing, clean it up. Editing. That's what I used to think back when I was young and foolish. I thought checking for typos and missing words and optimizing the flow of my writing was adequate editing for my book. It was not and that book suffered as a result. I know, I know...that poor book. The upside, as always, is the lesson. I now understand editing to be that cruel art of taking a sword to your work and cutting out all that isn't excellent with the detachment of someone who didn't slave to write it in the first place. I learned the necessity of savagery when it comes to editing. Editing is seeing a section that doesn't quite fit and instead of trying to rework it, just throwing it out and rewriting it. From scratch. It took me a while to get here, but I am proud to say that I am now the kind of writer who will cut my characters and watch them bleed on the page.
Growth is a process. It certainly has been for me. Creating a methodology around my writing at first felt like limiting my passion or 'stifling my muse'. I wanted the freedom to write haphazardly when I felt like it, then gently dust off the result and voila. Perfection. I certainly can write like this, but what I produce will be a far cry from my best work. What I've learned is that discipline is sexy, and methodology creates the structure to house my muse so when that otherworldly spark of inspiration hits- I'm ready to capture it. With all this, I don't wish to imply that I am now a perfect writer. I'm far from it. I just know for a fact that I'm a (far) better writer than I was when I wrote that first book, and I continue to get better with each successive book. In the spirit of getting better and wanting to help others do the same, I created a Free 7 Day Workbook to help new and aspiring authors move their book idea from their head to the page by guiding them through the plotting process. In a detailed and thoughtful way, I guide you through avoiding some of the mistakes I touched on briefly in this post as well as a few others. While I can't promise you perfection, I can say that by the end of it you'll be ready to confidently start plotting your book. You can sign up for the Free Workbook here.
I hope this article can help you reflect on how you've grown as a writer or, even better, help you to avoid some of the mistakes that I made. Or maybe it just amuses you to try and imagine how truly awful my first book was. (It was very bad. It also had magic. I just remembered that and now I'm sad). Either way, thanks for being here, and here's to progressing in the things we love.
Talk soon,
Noni
Comments