Novel Workshop #1

Mare Kuntz · 2007-08-26T08:56:40

ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP: This first workshop will assume that students want to begin writing a novel, are willing to do some reading, research, and writing, but aren't sure exactly what they want to write or how to get started. This is not for writers who think that analyzing art or the creative process kills it, we are going to be analyzing the heck out of novels in general, the specific novels we are trying to write, our motives and reactions, etc. All genres of novel are welcome including erotica, although material posted here will be limited to an R rating. People with a partial manuscript which is stalled by some problem should also be able to use this first series of workshops to help themselves get unstuck. If someone has a completed manuscript I would suggest you start a new project if you want to participate, or come back in a few months when (if) we get to manuscript revision. Anyone may participate. I will not have a problem with people doing assignments in some variant way, but if at least 3 people do not complete any given assignment there will be no more of these workshops. Anyone may comment on my lectures, others' questions, and others' assignment responses, just try to be helpful and polite. The copyright to these lectures is held by Mare Kuntz and I intend to publish them, so please do not redistribute them. No I am not a published novelist, I am a scholar of literary theory and I have a good deal of workshopping and editing experience. If you don't like my credentials or lack thereof no one's forcing you to read this or participate. THEORY: WHAT IS A NOVEL? Okay, let's talk about novels! [smile] You are here because you want to write a novel. But what is a novel? A novel is a story. A story is a series of events happening to one or more characters, and the thoughts and actions of these characters. While some would argue with this, my personal opinion is that the thoughts, actions, and events of a story must add up to make some sort of point in order for it to qualify as a coherent story rather than random babble. This point is called the theme, thematic argument, premise, or moral. Besides having thematic unity a story must be unified in other ways. Aristotle suggests that all the events in a story must be causally related, a story must happen in one setting or a group of related settings, a length of time with no huge gaps in it, and with a group of characters which is mostly the same at the beginning as at the end. Of course there have been novels that stretch all these conventions - a novel where events happen to the characters with surreal randomness, a novel which follows thousands of years of evolution, a novel where the characters journey through several apparently unrelated dimensions and never return to where they started from, a novel where the cast of characters is repeatedly killed off and replaced, or a novel where a character changes until they are unrecognizable as the same being. Can you do these tings in your novel? Yes you can. But, if you do all of them at once it will not be a novel. Why? Because what distinguishes a novel from other forms of fiction such as a short story collection is that the novel must in some way or another be the same animal 50,000 or more words down the line that it was at the beginning. The first few thousand words of a novel create a 'contract with the reader': You as a writer are offering to take them on a long journey and promising to get them somewhere meaningful by the end. Which brings us back to the idea that stories have a point. What kind of point, what kind of meaning? Stories show characters' acting and the results of their actions. These results can be regarded as rewards and punishments for the characters' actions. A story persuasively suggests to its audience that the people who are rewarded did the right things in the right way, while those who are punished did the wrong things or did the right things in the wrong way. Stories also work by creating suspense: questions in the reader's mind about what will happen next, when and how the characters will get their rewards or punishments. The reader is only held in suspense if they care, if they become emotionally invested in the characters and what is happening to them. But novels, unlike episodic tv series or comic book series, come to an end. At this end the reader's questions are dramatically answered. The reader feels satisfaction because their suspense has been resolved and along the way their emotions have been cathartized. Thus the point of the story is not just an intellectual statement about how the characters' problem is finally solved, but also an emotional statement about everything that has happened. Readers read novels because they (more instinctively than consciously) want to learn something from your characters' lives, but also because they want their mood adjusted: want to be cheered up, or scared silly, or made to feel longing and love, or made to feel excited and righteously angry. Think about what you are subconsciously hoping for when browsing a bookstore's shelves looking for something new to read, and why your favorite books really resonated with your emotions and stuck in your memory. METHOD: WHAT IS YOUR NOVEL? There are several ways to approach the question of what novel you want to write. We're looking mainly at emotional genre (comedy, tragedy, horror, adventure, romance, etc.) and plot structure here, not so much characters, worldbuilding, or tropes. I will start with the easiest and work towards the most difficult. 1. Identify an existing novel to emulate. If you are thinking that this is cheating or plagiarism, that's BS. I am not talking about copying something word for word or plot detail for plot detail, I am talking about studying what you consider to be an excellent example of a novel so that you can understand what it is doing and why it works so well, then using the same underlying structure to build your original novel on. (I do not recommend using a fanfiction novel for this because they take shortcuts that are not available to original fiction). 2. The same as above, but using an anime series, manga series, tv miniseries, or other work of fiction with a unified plot structure. The additional difficult of using a source like this comes from the problems of retooling from a visual medium to a verbal medium, and it may also be necessary to cut out or condense repetitive material. (I do not recommend using a movie or play because their plots are generally novella-sized, not novel-sized, and rescaling the size of a plot is a very advanced problem which even experienced novelists stumble over. Similarly I do not recommend using an anime series more than 26 episodes long. Anything which is more episodic than linear is totally unsuitable for basing a novel's structure on.) 3. If you can't find a single novel or other work of fiction you think is excellent, you can try to use two or more examples to mock-up a Frankensteinian model to emulate. This is mentally more complicated because of the difficulty that your examples will require editing to make them fit together properly. It will also take more time because you will have to analyze each of your examples completely before deciding which elements of each to keep and how to combine them. 4. For the person who yearns to tell a particular story but can't think of any example which is really similar, try to envision your finished book and analyze that in the same way you would analyze an example. (This will not work unless you already know approximately what you want to happen in your plot.) 5. Finally, (and this can be combined with any of the above methods) you can approach the problem backwards: search your memory for moments in books or other fiction that really resonated with you or grabbed your attention, and for each moment analyze what was so interesting or important about it. Then look for common themes - are several of these moments important for a similar reason? Could some of these moments easily fit together into a particular genre or structure of story? ASSIGNMENT DETAILS: What exactly do I mean when I tell you to analyze an example? I mean you are to get a copy of this work of fiction, preferably a cheap copy you can write in, stick post-its in, or even cut up, and use it to type up a plot outline and post it here. Focus on what seems interesting and important to you, since these are the parts you want to capture in your own novel. Make note of when characters are introduced or removed from the story and any important changes in character's emotional states, goals, or mindsets. Above this outline please state the title, author, genre(s), and try to summarize the story in 1-3 sentences (this is called a logline). Below your outline please spend a paragraph or two explaining why you picked this example and why it is meaningful and important to you. Or if using method 5, post a list where you describe each moment, analyze its importance to you, and then describe one or more plot structures which could contain all or most of these moments and display them well. Please have this done and posted here by Friday August 17th although sooner than that would be great too. Responses may be posted later than this and will still be responded to, but assuming I get at least 3 responses I would like to post a new lecture and assignment once a week. Always, please feel free to ask questions. :) [Edited by - sunandshadow on August 4, 2007 5:44:48 PM]

cyansoft

307

August 11, 2007 05:59 PM

Wow! I can't believe how much I have written already. I just finished outlining the first of three sections in my book, and I'm over 8500 words. Good thing I bought three 24oz coffees this morning instead of the usual two!

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 11, 2007 08:08 PM

LeapYear - When a publisher picks up an author's first novel it is standard to offer them a 3-book contract. If the 3-book contract is fulfilled satisfactorily the publisher may then offer another multi-book contract to the author. Many series that are longer than 3 books either have a standalone first trilogy, or are written by experienced authors who the publishers are sure will sell. I believe the reason for the number 3 is that by the third book the author has enough name recognition for the publisher to truly judge their popularity or the popularity if the series, and decide whether writing any more is a good gamble for the publishing house.

Cyansoft - Good work so far! And you must have a stronger stomach than me, I would be shaking and sick to my stomach after that much coffee lol.

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

LeapYear

122

August 12, 2007 12:06 PM

Thanks for the insight, Sunandshadow.

I appreciate your help.

cyansoft

307

August 15, 2007 05:26 PM

I just finished my first draft of the outline. I would still like to write a summary for each chapter because my outline is too tedious to read. I think I over did it a little; my outline is 1/4 the size of the actual book. I have nearly 26,000 words and 62 typewritten pages. I'll probably have to host it as a PDF on a file sharing site as it is too big to post.

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 15, 2007 08:54 PM

62 pages... o.O yeah a summary would be good lol. I am working on writing up the second lesson and the first thing I want people to do is to strip their outline down to the bare bones, 1-3 pages, and I'm using the Clan of the Cave Bear for my example because it has a nice simple plot focused on a single main character.

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

Omega147

536

August 16, 2007 12:58 AM

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
62 pages... o.O yeah a summary would be good lol. I am working on writing up the second lesson and the first thing I want people to do is to strip their outline down to the bare bones, 1-3 pages, and I'm using the Clan of the Cave Bear for my example because it has a nice simple plot focused on a single main character.

A desired page count range would have been nice to have for this assignment as well. I'm half-way done and have 10 pages (in Word); I imagine 22 by the end. I hope I can find time to finish it by Friday. :P

Cyansoft, where you gettin' the time to write 26,000 words? That's half a novel there (a shorter one, anyway; 100,000 is standard, about?). Makin' the rest of us look bad. ;)

Urban Space Squirrels

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 16, 2007 01:38 AM

Well see, to me it doesn't matter what the page count is for the first assignment because it should include whatever details the person making the outline feels would be helpful to use as a reference for designing their novel. For the second assignment the idea is to bare things down to the essential plot points so that we can make our desired alterations to that underlying structure then build back up from there. Basically we're reverse engineering novels here.

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

Calabi

124

August 16, 2007 05:15 AM

I'm sorry but I'm going to duck out, I'm not ready to write a novel yet.

I'm going to try to do something bad(as in not very good) instead.

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 16, 2007 07:46 PM

Oops forgot to answer this: 70k words is about standard for a novel, although it depends on the genre - science fiction and fantasy tend to be longer.

So cyansoft is done, omega is mostly done, and is anyone else going to finish this exercise? It would be really a shame if we missed the 3-person minimum by only one person. Me, I finished the clan of the cave bear outline but haven't written up the rest of the lesson yet.

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 16, 2007 11:25 PM

Meh. Well, it's Friday and this was done, so I posted it. Absolutely anyone with a story idea can do this second exercise (the part related to your own story idea, not the part about simplifying your example outline) so if the response continues to be underwhelming there will be no justification for it.

BTW please continue to post any responses to the first assignment here, I want to see them.

[Edited by - sunandshadow on August 16, 2007 11:25:41 PM]

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

Novel Workshop #1

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Novel Workshop #1

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