So You Want to Write a Novel: A Direct, Practical, Step-by-Step Guide for the Aspiring Author

Introduction

Of course you want to write a novel. Stories only happen to people who can tell them. Hold that thought. Use it as your mantra. Stick with me. You can write your story.

But you have a job, a business, kids, and/or commitments? Most novelists do. I know a Wall Streeter who claims to have written his novel on the subway. A mother in Baltimore wrote hers in the front seat of her Toyota while her kids took ballet lessons, played baseball, became good Scouts. All the members in my writer’s workshop — a lawyer, an actress, an accountant, an iron worker, a bartender, a classicist, a mother of four, a secretary, a psychologist, a librarian, a grip, a salesman — have novels in progress. Think of it this way: if you write one page a day, in a year you will have a novel. We’ll work on a schedule later.

If you’re serious about writing a novel, or any type of fiction, you should zip out to buy a notebook before you read any further. A writer never leaves home without one. Ideas pop up at the weirdest times and places but often don’t last any longer than soap bubbles. Emily Dickinson composed exquisite poetry on brown paper bags and the backs of receipts, but she created a dreadful mess for the executors of her estate.

The first time I offered a workshop called So You Want to Write a Novel, a student with eyes the size of shooter marbles looked at me suspiciously and said, I think you’ve been reading my mind. The others nodded in agreement. If I’ve been reading yours, buy that notebook.

Sooner or later, no matter what trade or profession you’re in, the urge strikes to cash in your chips and try a different game. Plumbers want to play the tuba, bond traders want to tap-dance, lawyers want to go to sea, accountants want to be sportscasters, mothers want to run IBM, and everyone wants to write a novel. This book is an oxymoron, a practical fantasy. It comes with a brown paper wrapper, to protect your anonymity or your other job while you find out if it’s possible and if you have the right stuff.

Taxi drivers from New York to Tokyo meet intriguing people. Doctors hear bizarre tales. Business people deal with manipulators. Lawyers’ cases take over their lives. Women fall in love with their bosses or each other. Families fight, people get divorced, kids get out of hand. We all have regrets. I challenge a writer to find an airplane seatmate who doesn’t have a story he thinks deserves to be told. Most of us want to write a novel to show our sense of the injustice, absurdity, or beauty in the human condition. Material for that story constantly swirls around you.

Nora Ephron’s mother, the writer Phoebe Ephron, always told her: no matter what happens, it’s copy. Legend has it that on her deathbed she told her daughter to take notes. Nora learned well. When Carl Bernstein had an affair while she was pregnant with their second child, she called gossip columnist Liz Smith and then wrote Heartburn.

Phoebe Ephron was right. The first step for a novice is to begin to think, see, hear, read like a writer. If your life has begun to seem as dull as a day-old doughnut, here’s a way to add a spark. Writers are too busy sleuthing for material to be bored. They notice tics, ties, the shapes of noses, when the copy machine moans, the refrigerator groans. The practice has its dangers. Searching for words to describe how a kiss feels while it’s happening can be distracting. Your boss might resent your taking notes while he is in a rage.

People say the funniest things at the sock counter at Saks, do the weirdest things in elevators, airplanes, grocery lines, staff meetings. Make a note. Don’t be amazed if the man who sat next to you on the bus this morning — the lardy one in the slick suit that looked as if it had been skinned off a fish — works his way into your story wearing that ghastly suit.

Begetting a character to make you proud is serious business. Find one you can live with for a long time. She’ll join you in the shower, read your mail. Writing a novel is like method acting: when you’ve found your protagonist, you never come out of character.

Occupying someone else’s skin costs less than plastic surgery and does give you a lift. You read the news from her perspective. She judges the salsa, the Woody Allen movie. She has an opinion about your ex, your mother, the phone call from your boss. Here’s another chance to put some zing into your life. It’s an exhilarating and spooky experience. You become the person you are creating. Flaubert hadn’t had a sex change when he said, I am Emma Bovary.

What do you need to know about this character? EVERYTHING — his soft spots, mean streak, mood swings, politics, tastes. Would he wear the damnedest gold watch you’ve ever seen or a Timex? Subscribe to The Economist, The Nation, GQ, or Vanity Fair? Clip shaving-cream coupons or fly first class even if he had to pay the difference himself? Would she wear perfume to bed alone, burp the baby wearing her good black suit, do whatever dastardly thing it takes to close the deal? How can you find out? By doing the series of exercises in this book, making up your own, living in her skin, digging into your own experience — with caution.

Fact might sometimes be stranger than fiction, and your life might be jazzier than Queen Elizabeth’s daughters-in-law’s or Milken’s at the predators’ ball, but even the most beguiling personal experiences don’t always make good plots. If you worked your way from office boy to president by being a nice guy or met the perfect mate twenty years ago on a romantic cruise, it’s interesting, but it’s not a novel. It lacks conflict. Conflict is the trouble a character encounters on his way to a happy ending. If Macbeth had won his crown legitimately, Lady Macbeth wouldn’t have been a sleepwalker, and we would never have heard of either of them.

Although cutting your story entirely from the material of your life probably won’t work, you will use your experience as well as your imagination…unless you write with your mother or your wife as the critic in your ear. Let’s say your character has encountered a cynical street kid. Your fingers are poised on the keys, ready to have the mouthy dude say appropriately, Fuck off, lady. Or your character is in the locker room, about to reveal what a shark he is as he tells a colleague about seducing the client’s knowledgeable assistant to get the account. But that voice in your head says, Nice girls don’t use language like that…. What would Aunt Clara think?… Will my wife assume I…?

Blink away Mom, Aunt Clara, your wife. Imagine what The New York Times Book Review critic will think if the street kid says, Please, leave me alone, ma’am, or your locker room shark turns into a goldfish.

After you are in character, you’ll put on his shoes and see where he takes you. Unless you’re the orderly type that alphabetizes her spice rack, don’t waste time on an outline. You probably won’t follow it anyway, and writing it can be star-studded procrastination. Use the psychic energy for your story. When you know the last line, you’re ready to write. Having a destination gives you direction, even if you don’t know all the detours. Write in sequence, or you’re sure to get lost. The pull and the suspense of your character’s quest will drive the book. When your battery dies, jump starts like the following are available all along the way. Pick the ones most appropriate for your story. Writing is a very individualistic art; use this book however it works best for you.

common.jpg WHAT IF nobody gives a damn?

common.jpg WHAT IF there were a leak?

common.jpg WHAT IF she says, I quit?

common.jpg WHAT IF he bought cowboy boots?

common.jpg WHAT IF she feels horny and he says he has to spin the lettuce?

common.jpg WHAT IF he felt like nobody after he lost his corporate identity?

common.jpg WHAT IF someone says, You probably don’t remember me… but oh, boy, does he remember?

common.jpg WHAT IF she called it sexual harassment?

common.jpg WHAT IF she were young enough to be his daughter, he had everything to lose, but he wanted her as nothing ever before?

common.jpg WHAT IF the deal fell through?

common.jpg WHAT IF it rained?

What if is a fiction writer’s magic, but sometimes a single word like droopy can tickle your imagination. Curmudgeon is one of my favorite site words; with cur and mud stuck together that way, weird images take shape. And I like the racket the word makes. It sounds old and grumpy. When you begin to think like a writer, enticing words like duplicitous, whimper, pissant, jump off the page and should land in your notebook.

Some books for writers suggest practice lessons, such as writing about how you felt when you lost your skate key, or why you giggled at the funeral, or what you did when he married your sister. You learn to write by writing, but you finish a novel by writing about how your character felt when he lost his skate key, his friend, or the girl.

I suggest warm-up exercises in which you rehearse challenging writing techniques like tapping memory, where atmosphere is more real than incident and nothing is owed to fact, but you never, ever come out of character.

This book offers practical suggestions for moving a story from your imagination to paper. The urge to move my ideas about writing to the printed page grew out of working with novices who proved my theory: writers learn to write by writing. You’ll come to know some of them, their problems and successes. Their stories add credence to the theory. I’m convinced if we wrote as much as we speak, writing would be as easy as talking.

The novice who urged me to write this book said the Stanek method is unique, it works. I can’t promise you will find an agent or an editor, but if you stick with me and your schedule, I promise you can write a novel. Although I especially address novelists, most of the topics and techniques — character development, using flashbacks, making smooth transitions — apply to all forms of fiction. For good reasons, the most ubiquitous suggestion for all storytellers is still show, don’t tell.

Let’s begin. Stories only happen to people who can tell them, a thought scary enough to drive the worst slacker to a typewriter.

CHAPTER 1

Thinking Like a Writer

All my life I had been training to be a writer, unaware. Probably you have too. Writers script reality, for the characters they make up and for themselves. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

As a child growing up on a remote Illinois farm with one horse and no playmates, I had two personae. By day I was Belle Starr, leader of the Younger Gang, riding Wildfire with two red-handled cap pistols strapped on my hips. But at night in the house, when my father couldn’t think straight if Belle galloped a broomstick horse, I became Brenda Starr, reporting adventures from around the world. I made up the plots, invented exotic settings I longed to see, created the minor characters, and spoke in the voice of the fearless protagonist. I thought I was just playing. Some days as I dash down Madison Avenue, thumbs hooked in my Levi’s belt loops, a notebook in my back pocket, I like to think I still have a Belle Starr stride. I know I have a Brenda Starr eye for a story.

So do you, or you will have when you begin to think like a writer. But beware. Writing is addictive. Humorist Fran Lebowitz says she feels as if she’s wasting time when she’s doing anything other than writing, and that includes tending the sick and going to funerals.

When you begin to think like a writer, you can’t turn it off. You will be looking for the details that make the story real, no matter what the circumstance. In a New York Times Magazine article, The Story of a Street Person, Remembering My Brother, Elizabeth Swados said when she heard her brother had been killed, she kept wondering what kind of truck would run over him in New York City. A Mack truck? A cement mixer? A pickup truck? A van?

Novelists notice how people wear their heels down, show defiance on a crowded bus, get attention, ask people to lunch. They study faces to determine what makes them beautiful, hard, oblivious. Writers read fiction, not only for the story, but also to discover how far away from the central action the story begins, how the author makes transitions, resolves the conflict. When a novelist (you) has a story, she loses her identity to the protagonist.

The first step in becoming a writer is always having your notebook within reach. I’ve carried one since I was thirteen. The editor of the Vandalia Leader gave me the original when he offered me my first job, to write a column, Lou’s Teen Talk, for my hometown weekly in Illinois. Don’t miss anything, was his advice I pass on to you. I took it seriously. The experiences stored in that first notebook became a teen novel called Megan’s Beat.

The adult novel in my computer today is called Clipped Wings. Midwesterners always seem to be trying to get away. Twain took to the river as a steamboat captain. Hemingway went to war as an ambulance driver. I signed on with an airline as a stewardess. Writing the novel, I’ve learned no matter if the odyssey carries you over the ocean, down the river, or up into the sky, ultimately home will be where you started, even if it’s not where you wanted to be or where you will ever live again.

Be prepared. Thinking like a writer could change the way you see and feel about where you came from or where you live.

Toting an accent thicker than suet pudding, Wayne came to New York to become a writer and to shed a small hometown in North Carolina, where people ate moon pies and their speech was sprinkled with idioms like go to preaching. After a year, reading his work to a group begging for more down-home flavor about people called Chigger and Mama who put on her weddin’ dress before hanging herself in the barn, he went back with a tape recorder, a camera, and his notebook. Returning with twenty pages added to his notebook and an album filled with lovely photos of weathered tobacco barns, privies, crick beds, hay bales, a barefoot child in a too-long pink dress, and feeling slightly embarrassed by the pride and affection they revealed, Wayne said, I guess looking at things like a writer does make a difference, doesn’t it? I found some things I had overlooked… I’m going back in the fall when the tobacco has turned….

Even if where you came from hasn’t been your ultimate destination, a backward look through the sharply focused eyes of a writer might spotlight more than nostalgia. Remember the cousin who made you feel ugly and think your mother dressed you funny? Or the first sale you made…those knotty apples you swiped from the tree in your neighbor’s backyard? And that spooky alley where you had your first cigarette…wonder if it’s still as eerie? How would you describe how scary it looked when you were twelve?

You learn to write by writing. It can’t be taught, but with a little luck I can train you to be a spy. Writers are spies. When you begin to think, hear, and see like a writer, you will be one, writing a novel won’t be as hard as you assume, and your life will be so much more fun.

I wish everyone who wants to write could see Miracles, a movie in which two teenagers walk around their Irish seacoast town imagining drama taking place around them, just as it does around you. The boy sees a stranger eating chips. The drabness of his life was so complete as to have fascination. Write it down, he says to the girl. At first they don’t know how to tell a story. They’re only noodling, proud of their facility to manipulate ideas and language. But when they become players in separate rites-of-passage stories, they’re already thinking like writers. Nothing is lost. At the end, they walk purposefully through total chaos, as if they’ve found their way through the world’s muddle of passions and sensations. Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Writers who welcome you to their world have an eye for the details that mirror real lives, from the liver spots on an old hand to the plastic shower curtain slimy with mold. When your description of the glistening, slick filling and the sour savor of a lemon meringue pie makes a reader’s mouth water, you are a writer.

Finding words to describe how things taste takes hard work. But top this: lecturing on a cruise ship, I asked writing passengers to tell me how caviar tasted. Salty was not allowed. Most of them moaned, but a man with a cockeyed grin said it was like being kissed by a mermaid.

In New York, where people don’t drive, everyone schleps property, purchases, pets around in shopping bags. What kind and how they feel about their totes are where the material lies. Novelists, as well as dramatists, use props to reveal character. Remember Captain Queeg’s ball bearings? Writers notice people who flaunt Bergdorf Goodman bags but hide the cheap drugstore-chain variety under their coats when they shop at Gucci or lunch at La Cirque. I swear people iron the status bags from Tiffany. Walk the streets like a spy. Don’t overlook anything.

When luck is a lady, a warm-up exercise becomes a scene, an incident, a chapter, or produces a symbol, a pet, or a minor character who won’t go away. In the workshop, there was a dog named Rebel that became the foil for a gutless protagonist, an old coffee mug with cracks that came to symbolize a disintegrating family line, a flower bed whose changing contents from flowers to rocks reflected the health of a love affair.

You might be able to use the exercise about a message on the answering machine to move your story along or for conveying information to the reader. One of the hidden assets for this invention is how it has helped novelists with exposition and with creating tension. Imagine your character hearing the voice of someone who has died, but her voice remains on the tape, or learning he has quit her from a recording, or…

And don’t forget the fax, another high-tech toy. Imagine the guy who faxes his proposal to the woman of his dreams or gives one the size of a DC-10 control panel to his wife as an anniversary present. Then there are the shy characters who find true love through their modems.

Perhaps you are still looking for the protagonist in your story. Exercises will help you to focus on someone who has a tale to tell, a face you like, quirks that intrigue you, idiosyncratic habits that could be a hoot to develop. Even if a dominant character doesn’t appear, an exercise starts your fingers working and words flowing. Try these. Keep them in your notebook for future reference.

common.jpg WHAT IF your character has a dream? She is dead and is waiting in a long line. When she reaches the front,