Some novelists merit the word great linked to their names. Among these are John Steinbeck, Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Others, such as Cormac McCarthy and Charles Frazier may not be in that league but nevertheless, are very successful in their own right. They have produced novels far above the ordinary that have sold millions. Who belongs on the list of great and near great authors is arguable but, for purposes of this article, I’ll stick with those few I have mentioned and focus on what they have taught me in the two novels I have written and what they can teach you also. I will touch on some of their literary qualities that hold us spellbound when reading their works. By doing so, a writer can come to own some of the tools essential for improved writing. First, however, an idea of what a book’s content is about has to form in any author’s mind or else a novel won’t happen. So let’s begin there, with plot.

About Plot

There are many books available on novel writing; some good, some bad. The bad ones can discourage anyone who attempts to plod through the author’s methods. I’ve seen a few. One I came across describes complex layers of advanced plot techniques, hierarchical structuring and building of inter-relationships, plots and sub plot relationships that defy the imagination. There seemed to be no room for spontaneity. I quickly determined there was nothing to be gained from these exercises in futility because attempting to write a novel using some of the methods described would take a generation to accomplish. For me, there had to be a simpler solution.

So, here’s the question: are you good at story telling? Yes? You have the main ingredient. Add some creativity, patience to edit, plus what you can learn from really good authors and you may have a winning combination. Once you have the story told, however, real writing comes about through editing. Most anyone will tell you that. There you achieve the polished sentences, the paragraphs that hang together well, the absence of repetition.

Your story, and the way you tell it, is going to revolve around a central plot that you can explain in as few words as possible. You need an idea, not a rigid outline, to begin writing a novel. That will expand as new characters and new situations come into play. The characters you create may or may not have an impact on the final outcome but they will provide depth, have histories, add color, and characteristics as you weave them in.

A novelist may not know how his story will finally end. But he does have some idea, some general outline of how it will go. He may even have a few sub plots in mind at the outset to make the story more interesting. He will do research, maybe extensive research, but generally, the novel is his imagination at work, his input, his characters, his tie-ins, his flashback sequences, his suspense building. It comes together the way an artist paints a picture; mottled sunlight, more contrast here, background imagery there, a touch of red etc. until the whole thing takes shape over time, over re-painted portions, over corrected mistakes. All of which are transparent to the viewer who looks at the picture, sees it as a whole, and sees art.

Same with a novel. It develops twists and turns, adds characters that weren’t initially intended, terminates others that weren’t expected to be terminated when the project began. Eventually, it may develop into a free flowing, masterfully told story that engrosses the reader who, of course, is unaware of the hundreds of hours of editing and re-writing required to produce it.

Once begun, what follows never comes entirely from pure imagination. It comes from many sources stored in one’s memory, triggered by one’s experiences, one’s fantasies, and certainly what one has read in the past. Robert Ruark, the author of ‘Something of Value’ and ‘Uhuru’ described it best. This is what appears on the flyleaf of ‘Something of Value’:

“It is rankest nonsense to claim that any novel is purely the product of an imagination; it is only contact with people and places, with situations and conversations that fertilizes the germ of an idea … that finally grows into a book.” - Robert Ruark

In addition to a plot and a few main characters, your story will have a theme, the moral message you wish to convey, such as; the perils of power obsession, destruction of the environment, belief over unbelief, social injustice, racial discrimination and so on. The author has a message he wants his readers to know, and the theme will come through in the plot. In most instances, it will boil down to good vs. evil. Out of that, conflict is born and conflict is essential to any good novel; more than essential. Without it, a novel becomes less than satisfying to those who may attempt to read it. It is the novelist’s job to stir trouble wherever he can. Even if the setting is a serene monastery in the middle ages, there can always be conflict. Maybe it’s jealousy between two monks over who makes the best wine, an unjust abbot who discriminates against new comers, a gossip spreader in the cloister. The possibilities are endless even in the quiet setting of a monastery.

There are only a handful of basic story lines common to all novels that have been devised. Some say seven, others eight, a few as high as twenty. According to Christopher Booker (The Seven Basic Plots), they boil down to: rags to riches, odysseys, quests, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth. Others would add love triangle, hero’s downfall and so forth. More than likely, whatever plot you choose will be a variation of one of those. As in painting a picture, writing a novel is also akin to composing a song. Millions have been written, but they are all composed with only eight basic notes and eight basic half notes. It’s how you vary them that make the difference; same with a book, except the variation of basic story lines comes in the form of conflict, tension, intrigue, suspense and character development.

Plot is the heart and soul of your book. It sets the boundaries. Often vague at the outset, plot eventually becomes more focused. You should be able to summarize it in no more than a few hundred words.  For instance, this is plot for my novel, Stained River.

A wealthy hedge fund owner is troubled over a series of events affecting his company. They threaten its destruction. Summoned to a meeting in Brasilia on a pretense, he is the unknowing victim of a scheme.  The scheme, however, is interrupted when his plane crashes in an extremely remote part of the Amazon. He survives, but his troubles are just beginning. About to be discovered by a particularly fearsome tribe unknown to the outside world, he must escape or face certain death. He finds help from an unlikely individual. Together they flee for their lives into an unknown region.

Barely surviving a two month sojourn in unchartered territory, the man is assimilated into a primitive tribe that practices bizarre and oftentimes violent rituals. He must adapt or lose his life. But the tribe is threatened, their rivers poisoned by the very same leader who tried to engineer the takeover of the man’s company. The hero begins a quest to find a way out of the jungle on his own, and return to Brasilia. He seeks payback not only for himself, but for the wanton destruction of an essential bio system.

There is my plot summarized in less than 200 words. Was it the one I began with? Hardly- That ran more along these lines:

Man gets on plane bound for Brasilia. The plane crashes in the Amazon. He is the lone survivor lost in an unknown world inhabited by fierce tribes. His ticket out lies in befriending one of those tribe members. Forced to join a culture far different from his own, he manages to survive and learns the real reason he was lured to Brasilia.

That’s the core idea I had in mind when I began the novel. I had read news stories about uncontacted tribes. I could envision one of them coming across the giant tail section of a modern aircraft. What would they think? How would they react? It gave me the beginning of a story, but I needed a reason for the man to be on the flight in the first place; a tie-in, a sub plot so to speak.

The answer lay in developing some type of corporate intrigue. I settled on a corporate takeover fueled by the ‘Brazilian Mafia’ led by a corrupt thug of immense influence whose operations destroy parts of the environment. How? Illegal river mining using mercury oxide poisoning as an amalgam. That provided a reason for the payback that comes in the end. In between, all kinds of opportunities arose to develop characters and situations that led to the final showdown.

You too may choose a simple plot that becomes more complex as you go along. But don’t let it become too complex or you will lose the reader. I suggest that, for starters, you come up with one that has less than 100 words.

Opening Words- Lesson from Steinbeck

You’re ready for page one. That, along with the back cover text, could make or break a customer’s decision to either buy your book or place it back on the shelf. So you want page one to be more than good. You want it to be excellent, engaging to the reader, capable of taking them to the place you want to take them. They must want to know more.

This means you will have to labor over page one; more so than any other page in the book (not that they won’t all be good.) But page one is different. Here you set the mood, the tone for what is to come. Here there is no room for a misplaced comma, or repetitive words or too many adjectives. Here is where you avoid opening lines like the now infamous - ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’

Don’t worry, you will be changing it many times before you publish, but in the end, you have to get it right. So, take an afternoon, go to the library. Seek the great authors, the great books that have sold millions. Read the first page of at least ten of those books. Which ones struck you the most? Here’s one that struck me; the opening words to John Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath:

“TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover.”

Three sentences, sixty-nine words, polished as only Steinbeck could. You know immediately where he takes you, can almost smell the rain, see the plows; sense how the land turns from red to gray as you move west out of Oklahoma as the Okies did during the great dust bowl.

It’s unlikely you and I will ever become another Steinbeck. But we can learn from him  on what to stress and what to avoid, to set a tone, to use adjectives sparingly, to pick the right ones (scarred earth), to limit the use of passive voice, to use simple but effective language and so much more. There are no words in Steinbeck’s opening sentences that anyone would have difficulty in understanding. Stay with that formula.

Read and re-read your first page. If you opened to a book with the words you chose, would you buy it? Would you be enticed to read more?

Word Power-More Lessons from Steinbeck- How to say it

There’s always a better way to say something; a twist of a sentence, placing the subject at the beginning instead of the end, eliminating use of the passive voice and flowery adjectives, adding active verbs etc. Let’s take some examples:

Suppose you want to describe sunshine on an autumn day. You could write:

“The Sun was shining through the crimson colored leaves of the large oak tree.”

Or

”The beautiful autumn leaves glistened in the bright rays of late afternoon sun.”

Or still

“The large oak, festooned in crimson, parted the afternoon sunlight.”

Acceptable, but if you thought about it long enough, you might (I say might) have come up with the words of Steinbeck when he wrote ‘East of Eden’.

“The afternoon sunlight came yellow through the aging leaves.”

Same words as the three examples, yet expressed so differently. Now to think that the great author composed this line without considerable edit and re-edit, is a stretch. I’ll bet he considered it, pondered it, changed it several times, then finally settled on it. All of which required an investment of time. Just a single sentence but it bursts in the reader’s mind and scatters autumn images everywhere without so much as mentioning the word ‘autumn’. He placed the subject, ‘sunlight’ at the beginning of the sentence. So much more effective than, for instance, “Through the aging leaves came the yellow afternoon sunlight”.

Afternoon sunlight is different from morning sunlight. It sets a certain mood, a tone to the atmosphere Steinbeck wanted to create in the poignant scene he portrays. Then the action verb; not just ‘came’ but ‘came yellow’. He used an ordinary verb, ‘came’, and transformed it into something special by appending ‘yellow’. Instantly, color brightens the imagery. Then he finished the whole thing off by describing the leaves as ‘aging’. Shadows get longer that time of year. Summer’s gone, autumn almost gone, but not before its dazzling display lights the landscape a final time. The sentence itself struck me. It was like watching a black and white picture suddenly turn to high definition color; and with the use of but nine words.

This is an example of what separates outstanding writing from mediocre writing. It’s what great authors can teach us. It doesn’t just come about by itself. It takes work; writing and re-writing, turning words around, choosing the best words, the best delivery.

Back to the three examples above. Not bad, not good, certainly not memorable; writing of a lesser quality. Take the first example; ‘was shining’- passive voice, weak delivery. Seldom does Steinbeck descend into the passive by over using forms of the verb ‘to be’. Most commonly, passive writing shows up by using the verb ‘was’ followed by a present participle ending in ‘ing’. To be avoided whenever possible. Words ending in “ing” can be used as verbs, adjectives or adverbs and are referred to as “present participle”. But since this isn’t intended to be a grammar lesson, I’ll leave the “ing” complexities alone. Suffice it to say, stay away from “was running” or “was falling”. Take the “was” out and go with the action verb itself, “ran”, “fell”.

“Large oak tree” is somewhat redundant. Most oak trees are large. It needs a different descriptive adjective such as ‘majestic’ maybe, or ‘stately’. Any number of good, descriptive words are available by using an online thesaurus as an aid. Lastly, eliminate “the” wherever possible, as in “The sun”. Just “sun” or “afternoon sun” sounds so much better and doesn’t tire the reader with too many definite articles.

So, example number one could possibly be changed to.

“Afternoon sunlight filtered through crimson leaves, painting a dappled mosaic beneath the stately oak”.

The second example suffers from immaturity. “Beautiful” sounds too routine, every day. Also, ‘glistening’ is not the best choice of verbs. Autumn leaves don’t glisten in the sunlight as much as they “flash” different hues. Introduce color; “flashed yellow and crimson” is an improvement.

Example two could then possibly be changed to:

“Autumn leaves flashed yellow and crimson in late afternoon sunlight”.

Example number three is an improvement. “Festooned” is a good descriptive adjective for a stately oak at its autumn peak. The verb “parted”, however, might have more impact as “scattered”.

Example three could possibly be changed to:

“Festooned in crimson, the stately oak scattered late afternoon sunlight”.

There are descriptive words and there are descriptive words. Some obviously get the point across better than others. Maybe it’s when the sound of the word itself describes the action referred to. I’ve noticed that Steinbeck favors the word “hissing” or “hissed” to describe anything from the engine of an old Model A Ford to a steam kettle. He used it perhaps fifteen or more times in “Grapes of Wrath” and several times in “East of Eden”. Always, he allowed enough “space” in between uses. A thing to watch out for is that the same word isn’t used more than once in the same paragraph.

Sometimes, certain words get way over used inadvertently and it’s something to look for during editing. Too many of these words slow a reader down; “the”, “that”, or the conjunction “and”. Of course, you need them, but as you embark upon the editing process first time, don’t be surprised if you can eliminate 40% of them and add to the readability of a manuscript. You may not notice the inclusion of extra words as you are writing. That will become apparent as you read at the same pace as an ordinary reader would. I was surprised to find I had something like two thousand “thats” in an eighty thousand word manuscript. Needless to say, I began scrubbing and eliminated a large percentage. Word 2010 can help with counting words you think may have been used too often. Use the Find and Replace feature in a backup copy of your manuscript file. There is another benefit to doing this. It forces the rearranging of sentences and the result is almost always for the better.

Sentence Length and Cormac McCarthy

Is writing more effective using short sentences or long ones? It’s a common question. I favor short over long; the more periods and fewer commas, the better.  But I think the true answer is: it depends. An author who effectively uses both is Cormac McCarthy (The Road, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men). He traverses from short, choppy dialogue to sentences with seventy or more words. You won’t find an abundance of commas in Cormac’s novels, and that can be a good thing. You may not even find quotation marks in his dialogue. But that’s his style and it works for him, and the reader. Here’s an example of his sentence style, short and to the point. (from “All the Pretty Horses”).

-He lay awake all night until dawn. Listening to the silence in the bay. The shifting of the bedded horses. Their breathing. In the morning he walked up to the bunkhouse to take his breakfast. Rawlins stood in the door of the kitchen and studied him.-

McCarthy’s style has been described as ‘elegiac rhythm.’ He shifts easily from abrupt like sentences to drawn out ones that are overly long but don’t seem that way. This is one of them- again from ‘All the Pretty Horses.’

-He dismounted and rolled his plunder and opened the box of shells and put half of them in his pocket and checked the pistol that it was loaded all six cylinders and closed the cylinder gate and put the pistol into his belt and rolled his gear back up and retied the roll behind the saddle and mounted the horse again and rode into the town.-

Sixty-six words without a single comma to pause the reader. On top of that he used nine conjunctions in a single sentence! McCarthy breaks the rules and establishes his own. My take is: if it’s a choice between short sentences and long ones, short is the safer route. More periods, less commas. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Any prose is unlikely to come alive unless the author makes it that way by doing what most great authors do; write and re-write, search for better words, avoid repetition etc., until you have something you never need to make excuses for. That is their secret.

Pace, Character Development and Harper Lee

As you would suspect, there’s more to it than just turning a sentence. You have to tell a good story. Hardly anyone I know can resist listening with interest as someone relates a well fashioned tale. On the other hand, if the build- up to climax is too long, too verbose, too tedious, the story could get over cooked. The listener will say mentally what he wants to say openly; “C’mon! Get on with it!” Same with a novel, except the reader will, more than likely, put the book down after eighty pages or so and may never pick it up again. Or, if he has a Kindle, he’ll archive it and eventually delete the file.

The pace of a novel then, is very important to its success. Probably more so in today’s world than say, when Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in the latter part of the nineteenth century. We have become more impatient, more demanding of suspense, intrigue, action etc. People are less inclined to sit down with an eight hundred page novel than they were a century ago, or even a half century ago.

That’s where the genius of an author like Harper Lee comes into play. She wrote the classic novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ fifty years ago. Her book has sold more than 30 million copies in that time. It’s poignant, memorable and well written. It’s her only published work. Her forte is fast moving, simple dialogue that builds suspense. The reader just has to know what’s going to become of Boo Radley and- who is he anyway? Why does he live behind shuttered windows in a scary old house? Is he evil? Harper Lee keeps you turning pages while at the same time delivering a powerful message about racial discrimination and pre judging people. Even more remarkable is the fact that she grew up in the Deep South during a time of intense segregation. She wasn’t so much concerned with writing elegant narrative as Steinbeck was. But what she writes is effective and she defines her characters well. Take this sequence, for instance:

“He’s lookin’ for a place to die,” said Jem.

Mr. Tate turned around. “He’s far from dead, Jem, he hasn’t got started yet.”

Tim Johnson reached the side street that ran in front of the Radley place, and what remained of his poor mind made him pause and seem to consider which road he would take….

Atticus said, “He’s within range, Heck. You better get him now before he goes down the side street- Lord knows who’s around the corner. Go inside, Cal.”

Tim Johnson is an old dog, sick with rabies. Atticus Finch, a kind hearted man, has to take him down while his children wait to see how he will act under the circumstances. The dialogue is crisp; it’s simple, no sentences ending with an exclamation mark. Makes you want to read more.

More on Dialogue-Truman Capote and Harper Lee combine talents

Is it any wonder then, that Truman Capote, who began a whole new literary genre, dedicated ‘In Cold Blood’ to Harper Lee. His book created a new style of writing nonfiction so you’d swear it was fiction if you didn’t know better. Capote and Lee grew up together in the same town and were childhood friends. It is reported that her character, Dill in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ actually depicted Truman Capote as a child. When it came time for Capote to write about the 1959 Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas he asked Harper Lee’s help because, according to Gerald Clarke (Capote: A Biography) she knew how the locals talked and how they reacted to events while he had a great memory for facts and remarks.

With Lee’s help, the townspeople became like characters in a novel, a great part of the appeal of “In Cold Blood’. Fact that reads like fiction. The book’s dialogue and remarks seem straight out of a novel. In one instance, Capote takes a relatively minor thing, like the local post office in Holcomb (which most townspeople were ashamed of) and brings it to life with dialogue like this:

Quote from ‘In Cold Blood’ -The ceiling leaks, the floor boards wobble, the mail boxes won’t shut, the light bulbs are broken, the clock has stopped. “Yes, it’s a disgrace,” agrees the caustic, somewhat original, and entirely imposing lady who presides over this litter. “But the stamps work, don’t they? Anyhow, what do I care? Back here in my part is real cozy. I’ve got my rocker, and a nice wood stove, and a coffee pot, and plenty to read.”

With dialogue like that you get to know the people of Holcomb, the feel of the place and how it was shattered by the murders of a prominent family. It’s genuine, not phony. It’s the dialogue from one of the world’s most successful novels, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, present in one of the world’s most successful ‘nonfiction novels’, ‘In Cold Blood’. Lee and Capote combined to give us a great lesson on how to keep a story moving with outstanding dialogue.

Dialogue vs. Narrative

In the editing of a novel, an author is likely to discover places where there is either too much narrative or too much dialogue. There is no set rule for how much of one or how little of the other is ideal. But, an abundance of narrative can slow the pace while an abundance of dialogue may leave the reader looking back for answers. Every author sets his or her own rhythm to the story in the amount of narrative or dialogue used to develop characters and plot.

Too many facts gathered from research, for instance, might cause a manuscript to read, in part, like a textbook when it’s supposed to read like a novel. Likewise, an action sequence or confrontation scene using dialogue might go on for too long and lose its intended effect.

‘Cold Mountain’ was written in 1997 by Charles Frazier. An immediate hit, it subsequently became a major Hollywood production. I found the novel spellbinding and so did many others judging by its popularity. It’s a first novel, the story of a wounded Confederate soldier, Inman, who has seen so much bloodshed and inhumanity that his spirit is deadened. There is no sense in continuing the madness. After serving with distinction in numerous bloody battles, he decides to leave the absurdity behind and walk hundreds of miles home to Cold Mountain and his wife.

It’s an absorbing tale, told in a unique way. For the first hundred pages, or so, Frazier introduces little dialogue and tells the story by narrative alone. Yet, you get to know Inman well and what drives him home. At the same time, you get to know Ada, the woman who awaits him. While it is mostly narrative, Frazier uses it well to build his characters. Beyond the first hundred pages, the author picks up the rhythm and the dialogue expands but never to the point of being too much. If it gets close, Frazier slips back into narrative and, in the end, delivers an excellent and moving story the reader is absorbed into.

Frazier has a unique way of presenting dialogue. He doesn’t use quotation marks, he uses dashes (sometimes) to let the reader know when a character speaks, as in this sequence:

Esco said, And you say this took place some time ago?

Monroe said, Two thousand years, if you consider that some time ago.

-Oh, I’d call that a stretch all right, Esco said. He looked at his hands where they hung from the wrists. He flexed the fingers and looked at them critically as if trying the fittings of a new implement. He thought on the story a while and then said, And what this fellow come down for was to save us?

-Yes, Monroe said.

-From our own natures and the like?

-Yes

-And they still done him like they did? Spiked him up and knifed him and all?

-Yes indeed, Monroe said.

To sum up, dissect the really good authors and the styles they use to produce great novels, then keep these few things in mind as you construct yours.

·       Turn a sentence around, take the subject, move it to the front of the sentence. Makes it Read very different. You’d be surprised.

·       Adjust the pace- you don’t want to put anyone to sleep because your story moves too slowly.

·       Get rid of the passive voice… it weakens the narrative in most cases.

·       Use more action verbs and fewer adjectives

·       Correct poor transitioning. If you don’t connect your thoughts properly between paragraphs, you’ll leave people guessing and the story flow will suffer.

Best cure for writer’s block

What’s worse than being part way through a novel, groping for ideas with nothing coming to mind. You’ve run into a dry well. You need some inspiration. There’s one sure cure I can think of. Research. No matter what you write about, there is some aspect of it that you don’t know fully, some part of the world that your characters are in that you need to know more about, some process that you need to weave in, some exotic culture that your characters may come into contact with. The possibilities are never ending. One thing will lead to another and your story will develop around them.

Research can be the fun part of writing a novel. And it adds authenticity to your work, informs the reader of some information he or she might not have known. All within the context of the story you tell. Part of Stained River, takes place in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, carved out of jungle over fifty years ago. I’ve never been there, but it was fascinating to learn that the country wanted its new capital to be ultra- modern. The developers and architects were commissioned to lay out its avenues and streets in a unique design. From the air they form a large swept wing aircraft. Here was interesting information that could be incorporated in the book as an aside, so long as I didn’t make it sound like a travelogue promo to visit Brasilia.

Good Luck with your book!

David Faxon

Find me on:

www.rainforestnovel.com