I can save you a whole lot of time and effort here if I just repeat the famous advice of Lawrence Block from his book, Writing the Novel: “If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”
Ah, but you don’t need no stinking aspirins, do you? You need to be a novelist, and you need it bad.
Trust me, I can relate. Before that first contract, I spent several years in feverish, monomaniacal pursuit of publication. Yes, I was a desperate aspiring author, hungry for that first sale, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Hunger focuses your attention. Focused attention yields results. If you don’t have that fire in your belly, you might want to pause right now and seriously consider whether you’re up for the significant time and effort it takes to complete a novel of publishable quality and shop it around. Because it’s a project that will consume you, physically and mentally, day and night, for quite a long time.
If your answer is, “Hell yeah, would you please just shut up and get on with it,” then read on.
When people ask me what they should concentrate on in order to become a novelist, I tell them to read. The love of reading is a lot more important to a writer’s success than the love of writing. Not that it’s not a wonderful thing to enjoy the process of creating stories—it is—but it isn’t necessary. There are plenty of authors who, like Dorothy Parker, hate writing, but love having written.
Ah, but reading…
If you want to write fiction, you’ve got to read. Hopefully, you love novels and that’s why you want to write them. You want to transport your reader to a different time and place, take him or her on an emotional journey, perhaps even make a statement about the human condition.
If you love to read, great, keep reading, because it’s your enthusiasm about the written word that’s going to make you a great storyteller.
If you really don’t love to read, you might consider taking those two aspirins and lying down in a dark room until the urge to be a novelist fades away. It’s been my experience, based on my years of teaching writing, that people who aren’t readers tend to produce fiction that’s dull and amateurish no matter how smart they are and how hard they try. There’s something missing—the heart and rhythm of storytelling.
Not only is it a good idea to read a lot of books, it’s important not to get into a genre rut, reading almost all science fiction, or whodunits, or literary fiction, or romances, and rarely venturing further afield. If you’re serious about authoring good fiction, you should really read a wide variety of novels. Even if you aspire to write whodunits, if you only read whodunits, you’re going to have literary tunnel vision. You’ll end up constrained by the conventions of that genre, and you’ll hesitate to push the envelope in the ways you need to push it in order to create something really new and fresh and exciting.
So experiment a little. You can learn so much from other types of literature, as well as from non-fiction. Literary novels will help you to explore issues of theme and style. The occasional romance novel can illustrate ways of developing sexual tension that might be just what you need for the love story subplot in your technothriller. History books are great for reminding us that truth is stranger than fiction. Biographies will help you to develop complex characters with interesting backgrounds.
And don’t just read books. Read the newspaper every day. Subscribe to lots of magazines and read them. Read the cereal box while you’re eating breakfast, read advertisements and analyze why some ad copy is amazingly persuasive and some forgettable.
One benefit of all this reading is that it will help you to focus in on just what it is you want to write. There’s an old adage that you should write what you know. In reality, it’s a lot more important to write what you like to read. If the books that really spin your wheels—the ones you can’t put down, the ones that really transport you—are cozy mysteries, or literary coming of age novels, or historical romances, then maybe that’s what you were meant to write.
Not that your personal experiences don’t matter. Every story we write is a synthesis of something new out of our own memories and experiences. But that doesn’t mean that if you’re a teacher, say, you can only write books about teachers, or if you’re a lawyer, you can only write legal thrillers. The personal experiences that are most important when it comes to writing fiction are the deep emotions we’ve experienced that we can then tap into for our stories. You can research the rest.
Many people, when they first begin writing, want to write just like their favorite author. More often than not, it’s Hemingway. My feeling about this is that you can love Hemingway—I love Hemingway—but when it comes to writing another Moveable Feast, all I’ve got to say is, don’t try this at home. It won’t be Hemingway. It will be pseudo-Hemingway. You’ll be a Hemingway wannabe, and there’s nothing in the literary world that gets quite as many eyeballs rolling.
Another pitfall to avoid is the temptation to write in a trendy subgenre—say, chick lit, or a vampire romance—not because you love it, but because it seems to be the hot thing right now. You can’t fake true passion for a particular type of story. If you’re trying to write to a perceived formula, it will show. And bear in mind that the books being published right now were probably bought around a year and a half ago. The editors and agents reading your all-the-rage novel have been slogging through similar manuscripts for a couple of years or more. Yours will have to be stellar to stand out, and even then, you may be out of luck. Publishing insiders have their thumb on the pulse of what’s selling right this very minute and what’s not. They’ll know well before you will whether that particular type of story has run its course. If it has, your submission gets tossed on the reject pile.
Besides, greatness never comes from following a fad just to get into print. It comes from tackling a subject for which you feel real excitement, and doing it in a fresh and unique way—your way.
Does that mean you should just follow your muse and to hell with market considerations? Not quite. Yes, you should avoid jumping on bandwagons that aren’t a good fit for you, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to the bigger picture. If your goal is to be a working novelist who makes a living from it, you would do well to write in a genre that’s healthy and has a broad readership, and steer well clear of those that are flatlining. For example, as of this writing, pure horror has been a hard sell for some time. Ditto gothic romances and family sagas. I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t write that epic multigenerational tome if you’ve just got to get it out of your system. I am saying it will be a tough sell. Not impossible, especially if it’s brilliant, but tough.
Needless to say, your chosen genre should also be one that you genuinely love, and with which you’re very familiar because you’ve read so much of it. Or, if you have a story inside you that doesn’t fit into an existing genre, or that’s a fusion of two or more genres, you might want to just do your own thing. The advantage: if you’re really excited about your break-the-mold story, that excitement will come through in the writing, and the agents and editors who read it will feel it, too. A truly great, compelling novel will probably find a home. The disadvantage: it might be a harder sell simply because the marketing folks at publishing houses, who have a great deal of input as to what gets bought, tend to green-light the books that fit neatly into one genre or the other.
The bottom line: Write the book you want to read, the one you wish was sitting on your nightstand at home, waiting for you to get back to it, and it will probably be a book that other people want to read, too.
So, now that you know what kind of novel you want to write, you’ve got to come up with something to write about—the essential concept at the root of your story. Tune in next month [Septembere] for “First Things First: The Story Idea.”
Louisa Burton
May/June 2008
“FictionCraft” © 2008 Louisa Burton. All rights reserved.