NOTES, RESEARCH AND THE MENTAL PICTURE OF THE STORY
In the first instance, you need to be passionate about the story you want to tell because if you aren’t, you might well find that you grow tired of it in the middle and abandon it.
Do not be in a rush to start the writing process; think your story through in your head in as much detail as you can and develop your main character and other necessary characters as much as you can by thinking about them and envisaging them. Make notes about the novel at this stage in a book you keep with you for those spare moments when the work comes back to your mind. Some of these notes might be used in the final manuscript others might be abandoned, but just writing the notes down might inspire new thoughts.
If you know your novel will have sections of description, for example of cityscapes, streets, countryside, develop the habit of writing passages of description in your notebook when you are in such places. Although we suppose we will be able bring this kind of material out of our own imaginations when the time comes to write the novel, it is so much easier to have them at hand and insert them where they are needed. It might help also to divide your notebook into different sections, for instance, descriptions, details of characters, new ideas.
If you know research is required for your novel, you might begin this part of the process in advance of the writing – this preparation work keeps you focused on your intention, and gives you the sense that you’ve already begun the project, (well, you have). Keep a note of the publisher/author or website details of any research.
There may be gaps in your story that you can’t fill in just by thinking, but as long as these aren’t crucial to the shape of the story and its advancement you might find that while writing, it becomes clear what must happen at that point. However, endings are very important and so it’s risky to embark on a novel and not know what does happen in the end. Endings can be changed of course, and your editor might well suggest that it is changed, but if you don’t know where you think the novel is going in the first place, it’s like being in a strange city without a map, not impossible that you find you way eventually, but much harder.
When you think you can no longer add anything to your mental picture of the story, write it down on paper as if you were giving someone an outline of it. In other words, put it down in a form that is similar to the way you write a synopsis, i.e. by ‘telling’ the story rather than showing it as you will be doing when you start the real writing.
CHAPTER LENGTH AND A GUIDE MAP
Next, decide how many pages you intend for each chapter. This is quite important because it keeps you aware of your progress and encourages you to go forward with the project. Were you to write the story first before making this decision, you could simply end up lost and not knowing quite where you were in the endeavour and this can be discouraging.
Now, divide up the told story that you wrote down into chapters. You are trying to create a guide map, but how much goes into each chapter will be entirely guesswork at this stage; you won’t be able to apportion the novel sections accurately. You are bound to have chapters in which the last part of the content must go into the following chapter, and/or in which the first part of the content of a chapter must be included at the end of the one before because that chapter falls short by too many pages.
The number of pages in each chapter might vary by a couple of pages either way, but if chapter length is too random it can adversely affect the reading experience, unless the author has designed the novel that way for some very good purpose.
Each chapter should attempt to do the following things:-
Move the story forward at a good and steady pace.
Provide vital information.
Have a reasonable degree of dramatic tension which inspires the reader to keep reading.
In the construction of each chapter you might find there is room to pad it out a bit with extra detail, or with a longer dialogue section, or in which vital back-story is told, but a chapter shouldn’t be padded out just for the sake of reaching the designated number of pages.
You’re unlikely to know how long the novel will really be until you’ve finished it or are near the end, but for an adult novel an expected length will be somewhere between 70 and 100 thousand words. If your novel turns out to be 50 to 70 thousand, you might want to think of it as a novella.
If your chapters are ten pages long on average and you have laid the pages out with double spacing, 3.5cm margins either side, and 2.5 margins top and bottom, [which would be the format you submit the manuscript in to agent or publisher], you will have written roughly 3 thousand words per chapter, [this estimate is based on a chapter with a quite a lot of dialogue laid out correctly on lines of their own]. Therefore, it is easy to work out that for a novel of 80 thousand words, you will be constructing around twenty six chapters.
If you are someone who types slowly and must keep their eyes on the keyboard, you might consider taking a touch typing course. You can get them online and sometimes free. Although the few weeks you spend learning this skill can be deadly boring, once you’ve mastered it you will not regret it, it’ll make all the difference to you in the writing of your novel.
FORMATTING THE MANUSCRIPT
If you intend to write straight onto a computer document, or even if you are someone who writes in longhand first and then copies the work onto a file, create your manuscript file right from the start in the correct format for submission to publisher or agent. If you do this you have a much truer record of your progress than if you do not.
First create a title page followed by a chapter contents page both with no heading, and not numbered.
Next, in the section where the novel actually begins, format the manuscript with margins as above and with double spacing. [However if you already know which agent or publisher you intend to submit the manuscript to, study their website and create your file in the way they instruct. You can always alter it later for a different publisher]. The wide margins at the side are there so that editors can make comments in pencil.
Number the pages where the novel begins in header or footer – to the right is probably the best choice. In the header, write your own last name and follow that by the title, or part of the title of your novel. [Because a manuscript is submitted unbound in loose sheets, were a page to become lost in the hands of the reader or editor, he or she can retrieve it and return it to its place in your manuscript].
THE WRITING BEGINS – FIRST DRAFT
My advice for the first draft of the novel – and there may be three or four drafts before submission and as many afterwards if you are taken on – is to plough straight ahead, looking back at the work as you progress it as little as possible. If you come to a section that causes you to hesitate and makes you think you can’t go on, write a note to yourself on the page so you know later why you hesitated, and then make yourself continue onwards.
You might suddenly realise that your character could make two quite different decisions at a certain stage, and both of them have equally interesting consequences. Don’t let this cause you to stop writing in mid sentence; choose one and write the other down in as much detail as you can, on the page itself I would suggest. Much later in another draft you might decide the rejected one is better, and then you would rewrite sections of the novel accordingly.
Don’t get too entrapped in fine editing at this stage. Your first draft is likely to be very rough, and don’t be put off the writing process at this point if you recognise crucial flaws in your logic or construction. You might realise that one chapter should have come before another to create a better structure. But this is not the time to worry about that. You could make yourself notes however on the manuscript in italics when such things do occur to you. Even if you have forgotten a detail from a former chapter that you must then reproduce correctly, it is better to simply put a couple of XXs or spaces and fill it in at a later stage, rather than tire yourself out hunting back through pages to locate that detail and as thus losing impetus when you were at that moment in full flow. The important thing at this stage is for you to feel you are making progress and that the novel is growing at a noticeable rate. This keeps you encouraged and inspired.
You will want to make the novel as perfect as you can in all respects before you submit it. In subsequent drafts you will be checking grammar, sentence structure, the strength of the storyline, whether the dialogue sections are good enough and do the work you need them to do, whether the novel is strongly enough structured, or whether changing the order of events might increase the dramatic tension etc. But a publisher or agent is interested in a novel if he or she thinks it has potential and will make money for their house, so sometimes, even if a novel is very faulty, they might take it on if they feel the writer is flexible and they can work with them – and to get your novel published flexible is what you want to be.
What is most important at this first stage of novel writing is to feel you are advancing with it and to watch the pages and chapters being completed. Integral to this however, is consistency. If you only work on the novel intermittently you will increase your chances of failing to finish it. Most writers have commitments and obligations other than writing. Most are employed in work unrelated to fiction writing, yet somehow a serious and committed writer finds the time to write every single day.
On some days your writing will be exciting and you will feel buoyant about it, other day’s writing will depress you because it’s plain bad or isn’t as good as you know it can be. Make a note to yourself on the manuscript – ‘awful writing, needs revision’- or something of the sort, but carry on regardless.
How many pages can you write each day?
Based on the idea of three thousand words per chapter of ten pages, suppose you could only complete three pages in the time you have given yourself, or the time that your lifestyle permits, you will be writing around 900 words per day. Then assume your novel will turn out to be 80 thousand words in length you will have finished the first draft in roughly three months. Depending on all kinds of factors, such as how much research is involved, how much you now want to re-structure it etc. the second draft might take another three months. But with consistent work you may well have a novel ready for submission in a year.
A good tip at the end of each chapter is to write down under the chapter heading exactly what does happen in that section, not in great detail in terms of characters’ feelings etc, but showing the main events that occur in the chapter. You can use these notes later to pick up the threads again or to find out where certain things happen in the story if you need to check a detail or fill in an XX or a space you have left in the novel. These notes can also serve another very valuable function; they can be the ‘map’ for the synopsis you will have to write when you finally submit the manuscript.
Rather than writing these notes on the day you come to the end of a chapter, you might want to write them in the next day before you start the new chapter, that way you have reminded yourself of where you have reached in the work.
If, on a particular day, you feel especially inspired and find that you are able to write six pages rather than three with great ease then go ahead and do it. You might well find yourself able to write more pages a day as you get into the novel and become more confident. But what is important is to give yourself a realistic target of how many pages/words you intend to complete each day. If you are someone who is lucky enough not to have other pressing commitments and you are able to decide how many hours you spend writing each day, you should still decide on a stopping point. You might discover this natural stopping point by recognising the moment you are feeling tired – your writing might begin to have less energy than those sentences previously written, or you might be writing more slowly. Perhaps your natural span of writing is four hours a day, after that you know you begin to lose energy, so stop then, and pick it up the following day.
Some novelists like to stop writing while they still have the energy to carry on; it’s a matter of personal choice. You will find your own rhythms. Once you do, don’t be distracted by outside matters that can be dealt with later, you have a commitment to yourself to finish that novel, and while you are at work on it, it needs to seem as if it is the most important thing in the world.
Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years. Having prospered so well, he urged his method on all writers: “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/14/040614fa_fact#ixzz1EV2Ski1D
Rebecca Lloyd. ©
