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whether you're using your home town or creating a complete world from
scratch on the fourth planet out from an alien sun. You have to name the
flowers and the trees and the grass, the streets and the houses and the stars,
the animals and the rivers and the clouds  even if you don't intend to use
these names, or this knowledge. Even if you don't think you'll need it.
The act of learning these details will make them part of your thoughts, and
your mind will know they exist even if you don't put them on the page. And
as a result, the book you write will live within a whole world, and not in a
Hollywood set, where if you walked out in the front door of that beautiful
house, nothing would greet you but the parking lot behind the propped-up
set.
" Know your characters.
Don't spend half an hour going through your baby name book to pick out a
name for your main character and call that character creation. You want to
have a feel for what your character would do in most situations (though if
you've created him well enough, one of these days you'll try to plug him into
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a scene and he'll look at you and say  I'm not doing that. ) And even while
you're angry with him, you'll be thrilled that he's real enough to stand up for
himself.
And don't do a superb job of developing your main character and ignore
everyone else. At barest minimum, you should feel that you have intimate
knowledge of the two or three characters who take center stage in each of
the first three or for scenes you've planned .
" Know your conflict.
This should be fairly obvious, but I overlooked it in most of those thirty-
page false starts. Conflict is the engine that drives any novel, and if you try
to write one without first making sure you have an engine, you're not going
to get far. Write out your conflict. (Or conflicts.) And don't go for the big
generalities.  Gerri versus men, is a conflict, all right, but when you're
stuck on chapter five and you look at your notes for something that will help
you get back on track, something along the lines of  Gerri's hatred of her
father drives her to take up with dependent men that she can then abandon,
and the man she has now abandoned intends to kill her might actually aim
you in the right direction again.
" Embrace a theme.
Know whether the story you are writing is about good versus evil, or about
the transcendence of love, or about anything that can go wrong going
wrong. You'll find additional themes as you're writing that will add depth
and resonance to your main theme, and sometimes the main theme will shift
focus part way through the book, but if you don't know what the theme is to
begin with, you won't have any control of it when it shifts. And theme more
than anything else is what will unify the beginning of your book with the
end.
" Determine a voice.
For salable novels, you need to resign yourself to either first person (Let me
tell you about the time I found a diamond in my soup, and almost got killed
by a hit man.) or third person (The stranger picked up his spoon and stirred
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it through his chili. He chuckled and glanced up at the waitress.  Let me tell
you about the time I found a diamond in by soup, and almost got killed by a
hit man. ) Second person, the voice so popular in those choose-your-own-
story adventure juveniles (You stir your chili with your spoon, then turn to
the waitress and say,  Let me tell you about the time I found... ) turns off
readers so quickly that, unless you're a screaming genius, your editor will
bounce it back to you unread. It's ugly and awkward.
So figure out which one it's going to be. First or third. When you're a bit
more experienced, it can be both in the same book.
First person is great fun to write, because the narrator will develop a
distinctive voice with shocking ease. Its limitations are that you can't know
anything except what your main character knows, and, because the main
character is narrating, you're almost certain she survives the novel. Agatha
Christie did some funky things with this, but I thought the one where the
first-person narrator turned out to be the killer (surprise!) was kind of
gimmicky.
Third person is broader in the scope of what it allows you to do (multiple
points of view, varying emotional distances, shifts to omniscient viewpoint).
It is easier to write a literary novel in third than in first. There are
exceptions. Its drawbacks are the ease with which you can be drawn off into
tangents, the ease with which you can fall into passive voice (boring) and
the way that characters can proliferate, to the point that you start losing track
of them.
I've written books in both, they each have their uses, and you will discover
that one fits what you're writing better than the other. Give it some thought.
" Know your genre.
In a perfect world, every book would be equally marketable to every
publisher, and we'd all sell everything we wrote and make millions doing so.
But we haven't yet reached that perfect world, so in the meantime, you're
going to need to know what you're writing so that you'll have an idea of who
might buy it. It really, really helps to know this BEFORE you type  The
End and print out your final copy. Or, worse, get fifty rejection letters from
publishers who tell you they  don't publish books of this type.
Genre is: romance, mystery, horror, western, men's adventure, science
fiction, fantasy, gay/lesbian, religious, historical, mainstream, etc..
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Mainstream can have elements from any or all of the other genres, but will
have some facet that publishers believe will make it appeal to a wider
audience. Walk through a bookstore, and try to imagine where your book
would likely be shelved. That's your genre.
And be honest with yourself here. If Fabio's presence on the cover of your
book would, A) be appropriate, and B) increase sales, you have not written a
mainstream novel. Ditto rocket-ships, women in chain-mail bikinis, or guys
in cowboy boots and chaps.
" Know your expectations.
If this is the first book you've ever written, give yourself a little slack. Nice
as it is to imagine that you're going to get a million-dollar advance, a movie
deal from Steven Spielberg, and foreign sales in every language known to
humankind, the odds are against this happening. First advances generally
float in the $2,000-$5,000 dollar range, and most first novels sink without so
much as leaving an oil slick on the water to mark their passing.
While having high hopes can keep you going, having high expectations can [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]