1. Gateway to Narnia

Let’s start with a bold claim.

Most people who set out to write a novel don’t stand a chance.

Why?

Because they just sit down and write without any clear idea of what they are doing. And guess what! They get stuck.

And then they make a tragic error. They misinterpret this as evidence of something they secretly suspected, namely that they are just not cut out to be a writer.

Imagine you bought a flat-pack wardrobe and tried to build it without the instructions. You would fail. Would you then say, ‘I’m not cut out to be a flatpack wardrobe maker?’

Of course not.

What you need is a method.

This little e-course contains a method. It’s not a rigid step-by-step formula, (because all novels are different). Rather, it will provide a different sort of guide, one that comes from your heart, and ensures you have an intuitive understanding of what you are supposed to be doing. It is based on an epiphanic insight into the craft that I received when struggling to write my first novel.

If you follow this guide, you will finish your wardrobe. But this wardrobe will differ from the ones from Ikea in one vital respect.

It will contain a gateway to Narnia.

Tomorrow we will start by slaying your greatest enemy. The Homunculus of Doubt.

2. The Homunculus of Doubt

I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were—John Steinbeck on The Grapes of Wrath

Meet the enemy. That little Homunculus who perches on your shoulder while you write and whispers into your ear that your writing is rubbish.

You’ll never finish your novel if you listen to his siren voice. But how do you silence it?

With the following two-step method.

Firstly, recognize that your task in the first instance is not to write your novel but finish the first draft.

Secondly, take a tip from Rembrandt. When the Old Masters began a painting they would usually start with a rough underpainting. This would act as the guide for the laying down of successive layers.

With each new layer the painting would gain in detail, accuracy and majesty. The underpainting was nothing special. It was not meant to be. The people who visit the gallery today never see the underpainting, or even suspect its existence.

But without it the artist could not have produced the finished work of art.

That underpainting is your first draft. If you write it on the understanding that no one will see it, that you will drastically improve on it, what is there to be afraid of?

Your words are provisional. You can change them. Again and again and again. Each time you change you improve. You start off writing badly and improve it. This is one of the secrets of writing. Your task is to get the first draft finished. And it doesn’t matter if it is not very good. All writing is rewriting.

In tomorrow’s lesson we will consider the epiphany I mentioned in lesson 1 and from which we will derive our method.

Until then, think about the answer to this question:

What is reading?

3. Through the Looking Glass

There’s another reason new writers give up, isn’t there?

You know how it goes. You sit down and write, and out it comes: scenes, dialogue, description….It just flows. It feels good. But then a doubt clouds your mind. What if it is all nonsense? What if it just looks like writing? The way a duck decoy looks like a duck? What if it doesn’t quack?

I used to feel like that all the time. I don’t any more. You know why? Because one day I had a small epiphany that revealed to me what writing fiction is really all about.

Once I knew that, I always knew what it was I was doing, and more importantly I knew why.

The insight is gained from answering the simple question I posed yesterday.

‘What is reading?’

What is it? Do you know? Have you ever wondered why people read fiction?

I suspect you haven’t. Here’s the answer.

Reading fiction is a form of self-enchantment. I do not mean it metaphorically. We are literally beguiled into an altered state.

Just as Alice passes through the looking glass into Wonderland, so when our eyes come to rest on those strange black squiggles called words we pass through them into a different realm. Where are we? We are in a dream.

Some people call it the Fictive Dream.

Our task then is first to inveigle readers over the threshold, into the trance, using a breadcrumb trail of words.

Tomorrow we will look at ways to hold the reader captive in the dream.

4. The Walled Garden of the Heart

The task is to create a dream that the reader doesn’t want to leave. You are helped in this aim by a curious feature of the fictive dream. In contrast to the dreams we have at night, and the greater dream we call life, even the bad times are good.

Imagine, for example, how you would feel if, in the dream we call life, your neighbour’s 14 year old daughter stabbed herself to death because of a broken love affair. You would be utterly appalled.

And yet when Juliet Capulet does it, we love it and reach for the popcorn.

Or cast your mind back to your childhood when you played hide-and-seek. Remember the terror that gripped you when you thought you were about to be caught? Your heart pounded, adrenaline surged through your veins, you screamed.

Why? In truth, you weren’t in any danger at all, were you? That man pretending to be a ferocious giant chasing you was your dad.

So why did your heart pound in fear?

It’s make-believe. Part of you thought it was true and part of you knew it wasn’t. It’s like a walled garden of the heart. Inside it you can experience all manner of terrible or beautiful things, whilst outside it you know you are safe. You can round Cape Horn without getting wet.

Now you know why you like to cry at movies.

Tomorrow we will look at how we use the simple tools of words to create a dream.

5. Thisness

The key to conjuring up a vivid dream in the reader’s heart is to use specifying detail.

Instead of saying there were paintings above the mantelpiece, you specify. There was an oil painting by Stubbs showing a racehorse under a tree. Specify the tree too. Suddenly I have an image of it in my mind’s eye.

If you say circus performer you require me to guess which one. If you specify clown I have a picture in my mind. If you say Harlequin I have an even more specific image.

James Wood in his section on Detail in How Fiction Works coins the term Thisness to describe a particular quality of prose. This he defines as ‘any detail that draws abstraction to itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability.’

Examples he cites include the cow shit Ajax slips in at the Funerary Games in the Iliad. Or the observation recorded by Orwell in his essay A Hanging, about the condemned man being led to the gallows who stepped aside to avoid a puddle.

You must also take pains to use words for things we can see and touch. Concrete, tangible, simple Anglo Saxon nouns. You avoid abstractions and concepts. The reason is simple. When you say dog, I instantly get a picture in my mind. When you say canine, I get no clear picture, I have to stop and translate.

Doubtless you have heard the advice ‘show don’t tell’ many times. But what does it mean?
It means if you want to evoke the powerful visceral thrill we alluded to yesterday, you do not tell the reader what happened, you show them. You use words to make the scene appear magically before them. So real, that you make them a participant at the scene.

And being present at the scene—in the tomb with Juliet for example—we experience the same emotional response as if we really were there watching.

Tomorrow we will look at some techniques for holding the reader captive in the dream.

6. I was so enthralled, I forgot to behead you

You ask or imply a question at the beginning of the book and you absolutely self-consciously withhold the answer. It does feel cheap and meretricious but it absolutely works—Lee Child

The Sultan Shahryar, on discovering his wife’s infidelity, adopted a radical new marriage policy.

Henceforth he would sleep every night with a virgin and in the morning behead her. Well, you can’t be too careful, can you?

Before the year is out the town has run out of virgins.

So the Vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, volunteers to entertain the Sultan. Each night she tells him a story and so fashions it that they arrive at the best bit as dawn breaks. And so the Sultan spares her in order to hear the rest of the tale the following night.

Scheherazade manages to forestall her doom in this fashion for 1,001 Nights. How did she do it?

Through curiosity. By making him wonder, What happens next?

This simple unvoiced question in the reader’s mind is the basis of all storytelling.

The trick is simple. You raise a question in the reader’s mind and don’t answer it until you have raised further questions and thus ensnared the reader in an interlocking chain of questions.

Behind all this there is an overarching question that is implied in the opening section and answered at the end. Will Ahab get the whale? Will Romeo and Juliet get married? Who shot the butler?

A great first line almost invariably poses a half-formed question in the mind; a sense of intrigue. Consider this one from the novel Berg, by Ann Quinn: ‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town in- tending to kill his father.’

There are about five or six questions contained in that line:

Why did he change his name?
Is it significant that his new name is his old one backward? Why did he intend to kill his father? Did he succeed? Which seaside town?

These questions are not voiced or explicated, but they are felt unconsciously nonetheless.

Now, having raised the questions, the one thing you must on no account do is answer them immediately. The essence of fiction is delayed gratification.

7. Things go pear-shaped

If storytelling beguiles us through the tale with curiosity, plot gently propels us through using the invisible force of causality.

Life is one damned thing after another, but story is one damned thing because of another. E. M. Forster pointed out in Aspects of the Novel, The king died and then the queen died is a story. Whereas the king died and then the queen died of grief is plot, or the rudiments of one.

In the first the two events are coincidental, in the second they are causally linked. This thread of causation is the essence of plot. Each event is entailed by what went before and causes what comes after. Characters should never decide to do things, they should not have any choice in the matter.

We must feel that the story could not have been otherwise, that it was inevitable, almost predetermined. The events fall like a series of dominoes.

When we write about our summer holiday as children, we give an account. We went to Scotland, there was a fire in the hotel and daddy got arrested. That is an account. But told as a story it would be: We went to Scotland and picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be an arsonist. Now we get a glimpse of why daddy got arrested.

The other key element of a plot is conflict. This really means resistance in that every endeavour of the hero meets resistance, whether from an oppositional villain, stormy seas, fate, adversity, the clinging tendrils of the past, inner demons or any number of things. It doesn’t matter as long as nothing comes easily.

Partly this is because it is how the hero grows: his soul burnished in the crucible of adversity.

But also because the thread of causality creates a force that propels the reader through the tale and the resistance thus encountered seems to engender a pleasant feeling of tension in the belly.

8. Meaning

Another powerful way to beguile a reader is to bait our hook with a thing called ‘Meaning’.

A sense that arises unbidden in the reader’s heart that the tale contains within it a meaningful parable about human potential for growth.

How do we do that?

By differentiating between what the hero wants and what the hero needs.

Put simply a story is about a hero who wants something and doesn’t get it, at least not until the end and after a lot of struggle.

This ‘want’ is the outward goal that drives the hero. Usually it is for something tangible like the search for the Maltese Falcon, Grail, Elixir, Secret Formula or whatever.

But underlying this outward goal there is often an inner, psychological ‘need’, a wound on the soul that needs to be resolved if the character is to become whole and find lasting fulfilment.

In the course of the story the hero may achieve the outward goal, or may come to the conclusion that she no longer cares about it. But in the course of struggling for it the hero becomes burnished in the crucible of adversity and the wound on the soul is healed.

This is called growth. We like growth.

9. Habit

Having absorbed all this theory we now finish the course with an avowedly practical exercise. You must take a pot of glue and stick the seat of your trousers to the seat of the chair.

Writing a draft of 80,000 words is hard work.

There is only one effective way to achieve it.

Habit.

You must inculcate a daily writing ritual that becomes as routine a part of your day as brushing your teeth. Set aside a certain time each day and just turn up.

Set a word count.

Almost every writer who ever lived had a daily word count.

It is this, more than any other aspect of the art, that sets published writers apart from the ones who spend eternity in the company of the Great Armadillo of Despair.

No words I say can give you an idea of just what a miracle habit is. You have to discover it for yourself.

Mimic the patience of a dog gnawing on a marrow bone.

Do not look back like Lot’s wife; do not look forward. Look only at the day’s tally. Don’t give a thought for the bigger picture, it will take care of itself without you having to do anything.

Habit is your friend.

And when the going gets tough, as indeed it will, imagine how you will feel one day if you ever see your book in a bookshop.
You know what you will do on that day?
Purr like a cat.
I did. It’s an amazing feeling. Even today, 18 years later I still purr when no one is looking.

10. One last word.

And the word is this:

Bumglue.

Far and away the best single word piece of writing advice I know.

We have now reached the end of my little e-course. I hope you found it helpful.

Normally at this point, I send you the link to my flagship novel-writing course, which goes into far more depth and costs moolah. However, I have put that particular ship in dry dock for the time being while I work on a revised, revamped and much expanded version.

I will email you with the details when it is ready.

In the meantime, good luck with your writing.

Best wishes.
Malcolm