Home · Book Reports · 2018 · How to Write a Damn Good Novel

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

I enjoyed this book. It was a quick read and moved predictably through what is required of a novel.

First, and this should go without saying, is the character. Your focus will be on the protagonists for essentially the entire book, so they should be interesting, more real than real. More noble, more ruthless, more ugly, more real. Your characters should act optimally, they should always be on their A game. It is also suggested to write biographies for your characters. Even if most of this will never make it into the novel, it gives the writer a more concrete vision of the character. How would they react given their background, their beliefs, etc? The author calls this: doing your homework. I think it could be extended to other aspects as well: setting, technology, history, and anything else that is real.

Since the story should follow the protagonist, it stands to reason that the story should follow some kind of progression. From introduction and the initial problem to a climax. The recipe for this is:

Main Character + Goal + Opposition = Conflict

The opposition should be ever increasing, always forcing our characters to evolve, stepwise, scene by scene. Each scene should be a battle; attack, counter-attack, repeat until surrender or resolution.

Additionally, every dialog should have some kind of conflict.

Where should you begin your story? Just before the beginning. Basically you want to lay down a little status quo before quickly jumping off. Another tactic could be to start right in the thick of things and fill in the gaps in subsequent chapters, after you’ve caught the reader’s attention.

What view point should you use? There are three main ones: first person, omniscient, and limited omniscient. First person might be difficult to pull off, especially for novice writers. It has the baggage of: how does this person know everything they know? How would they know what they were not privy to? This can lead to clumsy tricks to clue in your first person perspective.

Omniscient and limited omniscient are easier, but they have their own caveats. Since you, the author, know everything, you might be tempted to peek inside everyone’s head. This viewpoint hopping can be disorienting and should be limited to getting inside only a few characters; Each chapter should be limited in such a way, but you can write other chapters, or scenes with great care, from alternate viewpoints.

Another piece of advice I’ve seen in several of these ‘how to write a book’ books is that flashbacks should be limited, if not outright avoided. Do not use them to flesh out a character’s past. If the “antecedent action must be relevant to the present story”, they may be acceptable, but get back to the here-and-now as soon as possible. In short: use with extreme caution.

A lot of books are chock full of symbolism, classical allusions, and the like. Don’t worry about this, and maybe don’t even try. Making everything red will not allude to anger in your story, it will probably come off as ersatz. Some symbols can work great, like the whale in Moby Dick or the lump of coal in a Christmas Carol, but too many would-be authors bog the story down with artifice.

How will you ever finish? Regularity. You must write ever day, no exceptions. Set yourself a butt-in-chair time quote and stick to it. Alternatively you might set goals in words or pages per day. This advice is constantly echoed in every book I’ve read: everyday regularity, however small, will best the most sporadic Herculean efforts. I follow this advice; it works.

OK, you’ve written regularly and in a few months or a year, you’ve finished your first draft. Now what? Set it down to cool off, start the next project. Leave it sit for as long as you can stand. Some authors suggest leaving it for a year before coming back to it. This way you’ll have a chance to get it out of your system. When you finally do come back to it, it won’t be fresh in your mind. You’ll see only what you’ve written. The gaps you fill in with what is in your mind when you have been thinking about the story for months on end won’t get filled in after you let it sit. You’ll be able to see the holes, what needs work, what needs tossed completely.

Other advice I liked, that wasn’t in this book, was: write big and cut big. If you have 200,000 pages, you’ve got a lot there and will not feel so bad cutting. On the other hand if you’ve barely eked out 90,000 pages, you might be tempted to leave sub par material in simply to fill the pages. Not good.

Lastly, once you are happy with your manuscript, find destructive critics that will tear it apart. Friends and family will tell you absolutely nothing. It is up to you what to do at this point; take the critics advice, rewrite, polish, start over from scratch, but whatever you do, write regularly!

Further Reading

Exceptional Excepts

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 01: What it's All About is "Who"
• 02: The Three Greatest Rules of Dramatic Writing: Conflict! Conflict! Conflict!
• 03: The Tyranny of the Premise, or, Writing a Story Without a Premise is like Rowing a Boat Without Oars
• 04:The ABC's of Storytelling
• 05: Rising to the Climax, or, The Proof of the Pudding is in the Premise
• 06: Viewpoint, Point of View, Flashbacking, and Some Nifty Gadgets in the Novelist's Bag of Tricks
• 07: The Fine Art of Great Dialogue and Sensuous, Dramatic Prose
• 08: Rewriting: the Final Agonies
• 09: The Zen of Novel Writing

• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· Introduction

page 11:

• A dramatic novel embodies the following characteristics: it focuses on a central character, the protagonist, who is faced with a dilemma; the dilemma develops into a crisis; the crisis builds through a series of complications to a climax; in the climax the crisis is resolved.

· 01: What it’s All About is “Who”

page 12:

• Characters should be like real people, but more. And minus all the boring stuff. More handsome or more ugly, more noble or more ruthless. Even if they are dull, they should be more dull.

page 13:

• Characters should not be fickle, they should be fathomable.

page 18:

• “Doing your homework” means creating a background for the major characters: in effect, writing their biographies.

· 02: The Three Greatest Rules of Dramatic Writing: Conflict! Conflict! Conflict!

page 43:

• In How to Write a Play (1983), Raymond Hull explains opposition in terms of a formula: “M + G + O = C. Main Character + his Goal + Opposition = Conflict."

page 53:

• Your characters should be facing ever-increasing obstacles; their problems should be multiplying; pressures on them should always be growing.

• As in attack, counterattack, repeat until surrender.

page 54:

• There should be a step-by-step change in the character from, say, cool to fearful, spiteful to forgiving, cruel to compassionate, or the like, in every scene.

· 03: The Tyranny of the Premise, or, Writing a Story Without a Premise is like Rowing a Boat Without Oars

page 71:

• every good premise should contain an element of character which through conflict leads to a conclusion.

· 04:The ABC’s of Storytelling

page 84:

• The story should start just before the start of the story; give a little status quo before you get into the conflict.

· 05: Rising to the Climax, or, The Proof of the Pudding is in the Premise

· 06: Viewpoint, Point of View, Flashbacking, and Some Nifty Gadgets in the Novelist’s Bag of Tricks

page 112:

• First person view, omniscient view, limited omniscient view. You should limit your viewpoint hopping; focus on a few characters, but stay out of the rest of the casts head.

• First person might be hard to pull off; how do you relate the things that person would not have been privy to?

page 124:

• Only use a flashback if the “antecedent action must be relevant to the present story”. Don’t simply use them to flesh out a character. Use with extreme caution.

page 131:

• Don’t worry about adding symbolism, classical allusions, but symbols like the whale in Moby Dick or the lump of coal in a Christmas Carol are more reasonable. Imagists tend to bog the story down with artifice.

· 07: The Fine Art of Great Dialogue and Sensuous, Dramatic Prose

page 148:

• Have some conflict in all the dialog. Characters should always be at their maximum wit, whatever the particular character’s maximum might be.

page 156:

• Whenever you have a vague adjective describing something, try to find a comparison to make the description more vivid, and try to make it resonate. If a character is tall, how tall? Tall as what? Smart, how smart? Smart as what? A puppy is cute. How cute? Cute as what?

· 08: Rewriting: the Final Agonies

page 164:

• Find destructive critics that will tear your work apart. Friends and family will tell you absolutely nothing.

page 168:

• It is easier to be objective if you put your manuscript aside for some time before you begin to analyze it. Three or four months would not be too long. Some writers wait a year.

· 09: The Zen of Novel Writing

page 178:

• The secret of finishing a novel is regularity. Do it at the same time each day. You must say nyet to everything and anything that interferes with that time. No phone calls, no neighbors stopping by, no nothing. You can’t work in the middle of a floating cocktail party. If somebody calls, let your answering ma- chine get it. If a good movie is on television, sorry, you’ll have to see it some other time. If your goldfish dies, you won’t have time to attend the funeral. Even a hangover is not an excuse. The assembly line must keep rolling.