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 17, 2007 02:55 PM

My completed outline can be downloaded here. I was able to trim it down to about 40 pages.

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 17, 2007 03:28 PM

Good job, cyansoft. [smile] Hmm, I see why it came out so long, there are a lot of details here that wouldn't have seemed important to me, but perhaps they seem important to you. 1984 is also loaded with symbolism which often makes details more important. In my outline of TCotCB I had to add a lot of explanations about symbolism too, while P&P is largely lacking in symbolism.

So, do you have any questions about your outline or about 1984 that you'd like to bring up for discussion?

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.

Jastiv

146

August 17, 2007 05:52 PM

My outline of Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey is here.

ShadowRancher

142

August 17, 2007 06:05 PM

I am reviewing Magic by William Goldman. Unfortunately, I am about 1/2 done and it is handwritten at the moment. Have had some plumbing problems and a few other delays. I see this novel as a psycho drama. If you could extend your deadline to Sunday evening, I would like to learn more and be an active participant. I will be finishing this project whether you extend the deadline or not as I find the process useful.

William Goldman was also the author of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well as the Marathon Man.

As an aside, I reread, actually listened to 1984 on audible.com about 1 1/2 years ago. Every now and again, I reread such novels.

I trudged my way to watching Pride and Prejudice. Not really my kind of work, I just wanted to expand my horizons of the English Novel. As coincidence would have it I watched the first CD about three weeks ago. I watched a different video, Collateral, through Netflix before deciding to watch the 2nd CD. The 2nd CD was a little more interesting.

Don't fence me in,

The ShadowRancher

cyansoft

307

August 17, 2007 06:23 PM

Quote:
Original post by Omega147
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. ;)

Didn't you know? I have all the time in the world because I have a time machine! Seriously, I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with all that coffee...

Quote:
Original post by sunandshadow
Hmm, I see why it came out so long, there are a lot of details here that wouldn't have seemed important to me, but perhaps they seem important to you. 1984 is also loaded with symbolism which often makes details more important.

I needed to be as thorough as possible; otherwise I would forget the entire novel in a matter of days. Also, there is a great deal of terminology, political ideology, and technology to explain in order to fully grasp the story.

Quote:
Original post by sunandshadow
So, do you have any questions about your outline or about 1984 that you'd like to bring up for discussion?

Do you feel my logline was appropriate? Do you have any suggestions on how to make it better?

I also have a question on the particular structure the author chose to use. I noticed that the novel was explicitly divided into three separate sections. Coincidently, the end of each section ended in a world altering change for our protagonist. At the end of section one, Winston Smith was absolutely positive that the dark haired girl from work (Julia) was indeed spying on him. This posed the question to why he is being spied upon. And the end of section two, Winston and Julia were caught by the Though Police. This was a point of no return for our protagonist. And at the end of the novel, Winston was fully changed into a loyal member of the Party. Even though all novels have a beginning, middle and an end, what are the advantages and disadvantages of explicitly breaking a novel down for the reader like this? Why do most novels avoid doing this?

Also for anyone looking at my outline, the two numbers following my made-up title for each chapter (since the book didn't title each chapter) are the number of words, and the number of paragraphs in the chapter, respectively.

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 17, 2007 07:44 PM

Well, let's see... First, 1984 is not a historical because it was published in 1949, so actually it's technically science fiction. But Dystopian is definitely it's main genre. The logline is good, although it would be nice if it said a bit more about what happens in the middle of the book, Winston replacing his hate for Julia with love, and learning about the past. I think Winston has to make progress in the middle for 3 reasons: to show the reader what is right, to trigger the thought police to arrest him, and to make it more tragic when he gives in at the end because he has more to lose. 1984 is a tragedy and so instead of the good guys being rewarded and the bad guys being punished at the climax, it works that the good guy gets rewarded in the middle and then has his rewards unjustly stripped from him by the bad guys at the end.

The breaking of the novel into sections is an old-fashioned technique which is not generally used in modern novels unless the author wants the book to feel old. It is not used now because the strong divisions in the book tend to break reader immersion. For the same reason chapter titles are rarely used any more, and many books also have no table of contents or even any chapter breaks at all. (For some structural insight though you might look at the snowflake method - it recommends creating a plot from 3 disasters and an ending, 1984 follows this pattern, the first disaster just happens before the book begins; it is either the development of the big brother society or the development of winston's dissatisfaction.)

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.

ShadowRancher

142

August 17, 2007 09:11 PM

Corky and Fats are inseparable until Corky's high school fantasy sweetheart, Peg, reappears when they visit Lake Melody in the Catskills. The penumbra shining from within the caliginous waters of Lake Melody illuminates distorted fragments of Corky's past that remain shrouded under the magicians bright stage lights. Is he in love with a memory or has his memories seared his heart? If one is not careful, misdirection and magic may make a dummy of us all.

ShadowRancher

142

August 17, 2007 09:16 PM

1984

It is my understanding that 1984 was written in 1948 (but published in 1949) and Orwell just reversed the last two digits to come up with a year in the future.

Omega147

536

August 18, 2007 04:30 AM

Forgot to post my assignment earlier. All the extra time I was hoping to put into finishing the assignment went towards looking for an apartment and preparing to move. Would have been nice to get settled sooner, considering my classes start next Monday. Eeek!

Anyway, here's the first half. I'll touch it up and add more personal comments over the week. Things are just too hectic now.

Analysis of Fate-Stay Night (incomplete).pdf

See everyone next assignment! :)

Urban Space Squirrels

sunandshadow

Author

7,435

August 18, 2007 09:57 AM

From my first glance at the partial outline my immediate comment is, you should check out the book _A Night In the Lonesome October_ by Roger Zelazny for comparison, because it has a nearly-identical plot structure.

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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