Before You Write Your Novel

Essential Skills for the First-time Novelist

James McCreet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317286622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Previously available as "Before You Write a Word", Before You Write Your Novel sets out the essential techniques and approaches that lay the perfect foundation for writing your first novel. This concise and readable guide addresses the major stumbling blocks of fiction writing: the importance of planning and structure. This book covers the essential components of novel writing including narrative, story, plot, pace, chronology, character arc and engagement techniques, as well as research, story building, plotting and editing. Using an open and honest approach, feeding from his own experience as a published novelist and creative writing teacher, James McCreet offers a guide to the structural mechanisms of the novel, helping you plan a first draft through to a finished novel.

1 Readiness

When are you ready to attempt your novel?

It’s a good question, but evidently one that many writers don’t give enough thought to. My first editor at Macmillan told me that 99 per cent of unsolicited submissions are from people who simply cannot write.

Stop for a moment and consider the implications of that.

Perhaps the most frightening thought is that tens of thousands of people have managed actually to produce enough words for a novel without ever realising they couldn’t write. When we talk about the difficulty of getting published, we’re really not talking about the vast competition of numbers – because only 1 per cent of unsolicited manuscripts are of the minimum standard! Of that lucky 1 per cent, a large proportion will have written uninspired, generic, poorly plotted or otherwise unmarketable material that won’t earn a publishing deal.

When you look at it this way, you begin to realise that getting published is theoretically not that difficult at all. You only have to produce a well-written, marketable novel that stands out from the pile. If it takes so many months for agents or publishers to read your stuff, that’s mostly because they’re sifting through a mountain of mediocre or plain unusable stuff.

That’s brutal. But it’s true.

How is it possible that so many people have produced novels and submitted them without realising they were substandard? What led them to believe that their writing ability and the fabric of their material was in any way publishable? Blind hope explains a lot. Delusion affects many others. But I believe the main explanation is that many writers do not have a meaningful or practical appreciation of what it means to be proficient as a writer.

There are two broad strands to this truth. The first is a matter of basic craft: the handling of dialogue, description, characterisation etc. – even spelling and grammar. This kind of stuff is discussed in countless books, magazines, workshops, websites and classrooms around the world. It is teachable and learnable, but only through rigorous practice and serious feedback. The writers who don’t ‘get it’ have possibly not put in the required work (the hours and years at the keyboard) or have failed to get the kind of objective feedback that every writer needs. There is no shortcut through it. Even if you have the willpower to produce a novel, it’s almost certain to be rejected by a publisher if it lacks basic craft.

The second strand concerns the more complex requirements of idea, story, plotting, narrative, pace and overall structure. You might be adept at your basic craft, but your novel will be pretty much unreadable if you haven’t also mastered these things. ‘Being able to write’ encompasses them, but they are too often glossed over in courses or books. The truth is that they are difficult to teach because it’s necessary for students to produce tens of thousands of consecutive words in order fully to test these aspects of their novel-writing ability. I’d argue that at least 50,000 words need to be written and marked to give a realistic idea of proficiency in structure. That’s just too much marking for most courses – even MAs.

The result is that most first-time novelists end up using their first novel as a testing ground for their skills rather than a showcase of them. In some ways, this is an admirable and necessary endeavour. It’s a truism that one learns to write a novel only by writing a novel. This does not mean, however, that merely completing it is a sign of readiness. Most first novels are absolutely terrible and rightly remain unpublished. My own first book was not a novel but a travelogue set in Greece. I thought it was wonderful; no agent or publisher agreed. In retrospect, they were right.

In so many cases, therefore, the book that should be a pinnacle and summation of individual effort turns out to be a flawed and ineffective experiment. People don’t like to accept this. They (rightly) place so much hope, ambition and effort into their first novel that they become almost incapable of seeing it as anything other than a masterpiece. This is the delusion mentioned above. The essence of their mistake (which was also my own) was to see their emergence as a writer represented by the production of a single book: their triumphant first novel. This is quite wrong and potentially destructive. Every writer should be constantly looking to the next book and the next. Each book is an exercise in improvement.

In other words, you should pretty much expect your first book to be unpublishable. True, this isn’t much of a motivation to sit down and spend months writing it, but you should think of it as an apprenticeship. Approach it as a challenge, as an exercise. You can be justifiably proud even if you produce 100,000 words of very flawed material – you will have at least proved to yourself that you have the willpower. Maybe your second or third novel will be the one you send to a publisher.

This is the route most writers take, though usually inadvertently via a process of heartache and frustration, learning the hard way that the required standard is very much higher than what they are currently producing. Many give up. Who could blame them?

It needn’t be so hard. My second attempt at a book (my first novel) was published – not because I am hugely talented, but because I had put in many years of practice to hone my craft and because I applied a process that made writing a novel both easier and more reliable. This book is that process.

How do you know if you can write?

Of all the questions the first-time novelist faces, this is the hardest to answer. How can you know? We’ve already seen that 99 per cent of people submitting their work to publishers are wrong in their earnest belief they can write. If you can’t write, there’s not much purpose in starting a novel. Surely there are some rules?

Certainly, there are some benchmarks to consider (see list below) and some broad measures of writing proficiency. You need a functional understanding – the ability to do, not just say – of dialogue, description, characterisation, narrative approach and the rules of grammar and punctuation. You’d be surprised how many first-time novelists have not mastered even these basic skills. Beyond this, certain elements of style and voice come into play: setting tone with sentence rhythm, games with vocabulary and advanced experiments in narrative approach. Such things can all be learned in classes, in books and through reading.

Still, how do you know when you’ve ‘got it’? Is it enough if your friends say you can write? Your family? The people in your writing group? There’s actually a very simple way to answer the question. Let’s say you find an unexpected lump somewhere on your body. Would you trust your friends, your family or your peers to give you a reliable diagnosis? Let’s say the camshaft on your car fractures. Would you similarly ask these people for their uninformed opinion and hand over the car to them for the weekend?

The answer, of course, is ‘no’ (unless your friends and family happen to number among them an oncologist or a mechanic). It’s remarkable how readily we’re willing to welcome the opinions of people when they’re saying what we want to hear. What you need to hear as a writer is the unvarnished truth. Indeed, you should be looking for people to tell you what’s wrong with your writing and exactly how you can remedy it. Praise doesn’t help you improve. Criticism does.

Remember what we said at the start: you need to write as a writer and read as a writer. If your feedback is coming from people who read only as readers, they’ll be able to tell you that the book is slow or boring or funny or OK. What they’re unlikely to tell you is that you have an issue with narrative perspective, or that your sentence rhythm is repetitive, or that you need to vary paragraph length, or that you rely on cliché. These are the things you really need to know.

So who do you ask? Simply: somebody who is already proficient. Somebody who clearly and obviously knows more than you do. You ask a doctor about your lump, a mechanic about your camshaft, a writer/agent/publisher/lecturer about your writing. These people approach your writing as a patient or as a machine – not as a delicate piece of your personal sensibility. They have less interest in making you happy than your friends or family do. If your writing is broken or sickly, it needs fixing. No amount of glossing over the fact will fix it. No amount of praise from non-specialists will cure it.

When a genuine published writer, or agent, or publisher (or anyone else whose job it is to know the correct standard and whom you’re not paying to be nice) tells you that you can write, you can be pretty confident you can write. You are ready to attempt a novel. The only other way to be sure is to write a novel and see if it gets published. The line between confidence and delusion is transparent – something has to be the arbiter, and that something is usually publication.

Self-publication, however, is not currently an indication of ability or readiness. Putting your novel on Amazon or other sites proves nothing except that you think your novel is good. I believe that any serious writer will be willing to drop their work into the bear pit of ‘conventional’ publication in the knowledge that it is good enough to triumph. It takes time, and the market can be both fickle and short-sighted, but when an agent or publisher is willing to bet their own income on your talent, you can feel confident that you’re a ‘proper’ writer. You have proved it by winning over impartial and hard-hearted third parties. (Once you’ve proved yourself this way, feel free to upload your stuff and self-publish. Nobody can say you haven’t paid your dues.)

All of this sounds evasive, I know. Understanding your own ability requires you to stand outside your work and see it as a stranger: as a reader rather than as a writer. When we look at other people’s work in a workshop, we’re reading as readers. When we read our own work, we’re usually reading as the writer – blind to our own mistakes. It helps if you begin to think of yourself as a technician designing a ‘user experience’ for the reader. If you know how they should feel, when, and how this is achieved, it’s easier to judge whether you’ve succeeded or not.

Ultimately, it’s up to you who you ask and who you choose to believe. There are writers out there who live for praise and affirmation. They’ll take it from anyone, careful never to show their work to someone who might see the serious flaws in it. A serious writer wants to hear what’s wrong so they can put it right. A serious writer will understand that there is always something wrong, even if the book is published and earns universal acclaim. The effective and proficient writer is his own harshest and most perceptive critic.

Do not take any ‘advice’ on how to write from anyone who has not written and published a significant piece of work.

Jeanette Winterson (2014)

Some indications you’re proficient at your craft

• You understand ‘showing v. telling’ and can use both effectively.

• You maintain consistency of voice and pace.

• Your description is always commensurate to tone and purpose.

• Your dialogue says more than what’s written.

• You know how to create engaging characters.

• You can correctly differentiate the uses of semi-colons, dashes and commas.

• You know that the position of a clause changes a sentence’s emphasis.

• You no longer imitate your favourite writers.

• People say your writing sounds like you.

• You express yourself more easily in words than in speech.

• You’d rather write than do most other things.

• You no longer believe in mood or muse.

• You wake in the night with a better word.

• You’re unafraid of the one-line paragraph.

• You can write while watching TV or on a train.

• You know that your ‘best’ work is often the first to be deleted.

• You love your dictionary like a close relative.

• You recognise cliché and avoid it.

• You write almost unconsciously.

• You know when you’ve written too much (or too little).

• You know there’s no money in it, but still you persist.

• Your narrative unfolds automatically according to necessity of effect.

• You write almost every day because you feel compelled to.

• You have a voice (see below).

• Better writers than you say you’re good.

• People pay you for your writing.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann (cited in Earnshaw, 2014)

Your goal: objectivity

Knowing whether you can write is ultimately a case of being able to view your work entirely objectively – being able to read it as if you hadn’t written it. How do you do thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Readiness
• 2 The Idea
• 3 Building Story
• 4 Construction
• 5 Narrative Approaches
• 6 Case Study: Plotting a Novel
• 7 Troubleshooting
• 8 Before You Write a Word
• Thematic Reading List
• References
• Index
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