Can We Write By Challenge? How To get Started For your First Book
You are now ready to start writing a novel. But, before you begin, you would like some guidelines to help you get started or to know what novel you could write.
You have always loved to write. But you may also just be tempted to take on a challenge . One of those who are far from what we are and what is natural to us.
So maybe you want to write to prove yourself and those around you that you can. Why not ? It does work sometimes and it’s pretty happy. But more often than not, the result hardly lives up to expectations.
Let ‘s start, therefore, from the assumption that not only does writing not scare you, that you have an imagination , that you write whenever you have a moment and, in addition, you feel that you are. have a real talent that asks only to flourish.
In a few titles:
1 Are there any recipes for writing?
2 How to build a novel
2.1 1 — Follow a detailed plan
2.2 2 — Take care of the décor
2.3 3 — Choose a narrative point of view
2.4 4 — Find a novel scenario
2.5 5 — Caring for the characters of the novel
2.6 6 — Give rhythm to the novel
2.7 7 — Structuring a novel plot
2.8 8 — Write a novel about what you know
2.9 9 — Writing a novel out of order
2.10 10 — Give yourself flexible deadlines
2.11 11 — Obtain the opinion of a “beta” reader
2.12 12 — Consider all editorial solutions
3. The desire to write
Are there any recipes for writing?
It’s true, and you’re absolutely right: you’ll have a better chance of getting there by following a few simple principles . Whatever your starting point and your experience or lack of experience .
Writers, now well known, did not do otherwise. However, if you expect to find a miracle recipe for writing a great novel in the paragraphs that follow, you might be disappointed. Because it doesn’t exist.
Well, you think, despite everything, maybe you have found one, and worse, you are, even, practically determined to apply it. Hmm, you risk writing a book that looks like a lot of things except a novel loved by its readers. Because having readers is your goal, isn’t it?
How to build a novel
What will be offered to you is therefore not a magic formula, but a method drawn from the experience of a large number of authors who have succeeded in publishing and attracting many readers. This methodology is based on 12 key points or key steps.
1 — Follow a detailed plan
It’s still better to start your novel with a fairly good idea of what you’re going to write. Whatever the nature of your novel , and there are a multitude of possible literary genres , you must have a detailed plan from which to structure your story. “ There is no favorable wind for those who do not know where they are going “ recalls the well-known quote from Seneca .
However, writing a plan that is too detailed can be highly counterproductive. It will take you some time . Your details will eventually overwhelm you. In short, you will start to doubt the value of what you want to write. A plan, a direction, yes, but not a mini novel in short style. And then, as you will quickly see, a novel has a life, a truth , all of its own. Who knows what you’ll write after your first 50 pages?
2 — Take care of the décor
We would like to have finished having started, for fear of never ending. So there is a great temptation to go straight to the point. Without going into details, precisely. And this temptation is all the greater as we often imagine that what we know so well is known in the same way to others. Why, for example, take the time to describe a Parisian street? There are few who do not know what it looks like. And then, what can that add to the story we’re telling?
What about the atmosphere? Your novel is first and foremost a place and a time. Both constitute the stage on which your characters will move.
It is not because the new theater has sometimes accustomed us to very bare sets, often for simple budgetary reasons, which fortunately do not meet in a novel, that we must follow the example.
Moreover, place and time are inspiring factors. Why deprive yourself of it? So, do not hesitate to make place cards for your novel.
Write a novel with attention to detail about the place
Write a novel with attention to detail on the stage.
Frédéric Vitoux thus speaks of the literary technique of Georges Simenon in an article comparing him to Balzac :
He usually started with a setting, a house, then he started to think about the characters in that setting. Often he drew up plans for how they were going to travel. After which he began in an incredibly compassionate way to immerse himself in the skin of his characters.
3 — Choose a narrative point of view
You have several options . It all depends on the distance you want to put between yourself and what is going on in your novel.
And you will mark your preference with your incipit , that is to say, the very first sentence of your novel. If you choose the “I”, you choose the shorter distance. Which doesn’t mean you’re going to write a confession.
Your objective is to write a novel, therefore a fiction. However, if it is close to your experience, we will speak more of an auto-fiction .
You act like you’re talking about yourself, but at the same time, it’s not really you. You are in a way your own inspirer. “ In Search of Lost Time “ by Marcel Proust is one of the most famous examples. He begins his first volume thus:
For a long time, I went to bed early.
Opposite the “I” there is the “he”. There you have the choice between two approaches. Either, you focus on one of your characters and let your readers know whatever comes to mind. Either you go from one character to another, as if you were some kind of all-knowing entity. In “ L’Écume des jours “, a novel published in 1947, Boris Vian begins his story in this way:
Colin was finishing his toilet. He had wrapped himself, coming out of the bath, in a large towel of looped fabric, only his legs and chest protruding.
Incipit that can be compared to the unforgettable one of “ L’Étranger “, a novel by Albert Camus , published in 1942, and a veritable monument of French literature, where he makes his main character say:
Today, my mother is dead. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.
4 — Find a novel scenario
Obviously, in making your plan, you also have to outline it. But, a scenario is little more than a plan, even a detailed one. If your plan unfolds your “common thread”, the scenario allows you to visualize the main scenes of your novel.
The first corresponds to the route you are going to follow, the second to its main stages and your visits. The travel journal that you can make out of it is basically your writing book for a novel .
Remember that it is, mainly, the stages and visits that make a trip enjoyable. Hence the importance of finding a good script for a novel.
It’s not very hard. Let us continue the analogy with the theme of travel.
You don’t decide your steps at random. If your trip is primarily touristy, you will consult guides and choose to stop where others before you have done and have indicated the value of doing so with their comments.
If you are an author, you are also a reader. And there are bound to be books that you love, that you search systematically, and others that you hate, with the same passion, and that you run away from.
Nothing prevents you from taking inspiration from it and imitating its scenarios. Have no fear, you will never do the same. On the other hand, you will write scenes that are familiar to you and in which you feel comfortable.
5 — Treat the characters of the novel
A novel is not just a story or a narration , it is also characters. They have a life. Without even being really involved in the plot of the novel. The reader likes to know where they come from, what they have done, what they dream of, or what they look like.
They want to be able to identify with them or on the contrary push them away. A character in a novel is not just a vignette. It is a being that must be seen by the author as a being of flesh and blood. With a temper and a history.
The characters of novels larger than life
Write a book with larger-than-life novel characters.
Of course, depending on the place occupied by each of the characters, their identity can be more or less detailed. We do not expect to discover in full and length the personality of the taxi driver of the main character, if this driver appears in the novel only very briefly and without having a particular role in the narrative .
However, there are secondary characters that matter. They act as intercessors of Destiny. Without them, in fact, the destiny of the main character would have been quite different. Also note that the concept of main or secondary character is very broad. The list of novels in which a dog, for example, plays a determining role, is very long.
It is therefore recommended to make a sheet for each of the characters in your novel. On this form, it is necessary to indicate, at a minimum, his marital status, his physical appearance, and elements of biography.
6 — Give rhythm to the novel
This is where it is most appropriate to use a writing technique . You can love to write, you can have read a lot, you can have a fascinating story to tell and yet what you write seems heavy and uninteresting.
So take the trouble to look at the novels that work with a critical eye. You will notice at least two things very quickly.
The first is that their sentences are, in general, short and nervous. Such sentences are not contradictory with long descriptions. On the contrary. They make them more digestible. Above all, if they are well distributed.
Buck did not read the newspapers, otherwise he would have understood that hard trials lay in store for him and all the dogs with strong muscles, long warm coats, that lived on the Pacific coast from San Diego to Puget Fjord.
Thus begins “ The Call of the Forest “, the novel, published in 1903, which did much for the fame of Jack London . In the rest of the novel, many other details allow the reader to visualize better and better who Buck is. They will help to understand why it will evolve in a certain way and answer the call of the forest.
The second is that a good story is not linear. As in real life, it is full of unforeseen circumstances. Even the most unlikely.
It is these circumstances that make the reader say: “Oh! “, “ Ah darn ! “, Or” Gosh! “. The great British author Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) made it the hallmark of his novels. Circumstances thus play a primordial role.
Its characters, like Jude the Obscure, Tess of Ubervilles or the Mayor of Casterbridge, can do nothing and are the toys of it.
7 — Structure a novel plot
No good novel without a problem to solve! The plot is the sinews of war for a novel. From time to time, there is no shortage of “new authors” to assert the contrary and write a novel which has no novel in name.
These initiatives are not always without interest. Nevertheless, a novel is the story of characters to whom stories happen.
Seemingly insurmountable and endless. Sometimes, at the height of a myth. And it takes several hundred pages for the heroes to pull through. Or not ; at any rate, not in the way most readers may have hoped.
The end of the novel influences the unfolding of a novel in the manner of a reverse planning and according to the category to which it belongs. It is determined by the conclusion that the author wants to emerge from his story.
This is the “moral of the story”. If we take the example of a romance novel; in the end, the two lovers end up getting married and seeing a bright future emerge in front of them.
However, their story was off to a bad start and they were hit hard more often than they did. And, always renewed magic, mastered writing, we even believed, until the very last pages, that all this was going to end badly.
Write a novel with a good plot
It is with this traditional plan of intrigue , declined at will, that publishing houses like Harlequin editions built their success. But what is true for romance novels also applies to many other, more ambitious novels.
8 — Write a novel about what you know
This is what makes a novel ring true or not. That said, we can quickly get around what we know. And then, what we know may also be quite commonplace. So there are at least two ways to get around the obstacle.
The first is to give oneself the means to live in the environment where the projected novel will take place. If your project is to write a novel whose universe is, for example, that of oil platforms, you have every interest in spending some time on one of them. You will be able to record sensations, witness scenes, acquire a vocabulary, which will nourish your novel and make it true.
But, of course, this is not always possible. Not everyone can be like Bernard Minier whose latest novel, “ M, the edge of the abyss ” is set in Hong Kong.
In it, he describes precisely places and scenes that any visitor to Hong Kong can also see and feel. In his afterword, he explains that to achieve this result, he stayed in Hong Kong for a while, before starting to write. This is what allowed him to soak up the atmosphere of the place and to give an account of it, with all the desired truth, in his novel.
The other way is less expensive, but it involves a lot of documentary research work . If you have a good internet connection, the whole world and its libraries are open to you.
Thanks to the world wide web , this now irreplaceable tool , you can write a novel on just about any subject. Without anyone being able to really realize that you are neither a specialist in the subject you have chosen to deal with, nor a regular in the places you describe.
A novel is not a thesis, and the details you feed into your novel are not going to be scientifically evaluated. They just need to be true or theoretically plausible. This is what Bernard Minier did, who wanted to alert with his latest novel on the consequences of a parasitic development of Artificial Intelligence.
9 — Write a novel out of order
It’s easier than it looks. Logic would say that we start by writing page 1 and that we continue to write, page after page, respecting the natural order of pagination. First page 1, then page 2, and so on.
In general, this is the best way to never finish writing a novel. What will happen if you are unable to go from page 12 to page 13? Nothing. Exactly.
In fact, you can write the end of your novel very well , even when you are only on page 50. The important thing is that you are inspired. Writing a novel is like making a puzzle. You can approach it from a lot of different angles. Little by little, like every piece of a puzzle, your paragraphs and chapters will be put in their rightful place.
There will always be time, when you have finished your writing work, to go back to the “pieces” of your novel, to re-cut them, if necessary, and to rework the “seams”. You are the only master on board, and you alone have the power to decide how best to conduct your editorial project. That is, the one that suits you and allows you to move forward. And then, to help you out, you can always use one of those word processors or novel writing apps like, say, Scrivener.
10 — Give yourself flexible deadlines
Writing a novel is first and foremost a pleasure, but it is also a job . And who says “work”, says “deadlines”. Consciously or not, when we start writing a book, whatever it is, we set ourselves a deadline to finish it.
You have to be realistic and ambitious at the same time. If you lack ambition and tell yourself that your book “will be finished when it is finished”, as much to say that it never will be. But, if you are too ambitious and want everything to be finished before the end of the holidays, you create pressure that can also be discouraging.
Quote Aristotle, The golden mean
“ In medio, stat virtus “, this is the definition given by Aristotle to value “ the happy medium “. Between lack of ambition and excess of ambition, there is a middle ground when it comes to writing a novel.
The first thing to do, to put Aristotle’s maxim into practice, is to write regularly. The effect is immediate. Some days you will write as little as 300 words, but other days you will easily write more than 1000.
Based on this, you can set a goal of writing 2,500 words per week . It is a reasonable goal.
And if you want to do an addition and a multiplication, by adopting this objective, you are on a pace where, in 8 months, you will have written 80,000 words. However, 80,000 words, that corresponds to a novel of about 300 pages, in the usual format. This does not mean that after 8 months your novel is ready to be published.
You should also count the time that you will take to read it and correct it . This is a crucial operation and it will take you at least a good additional month. In other words, don’t really expect to finish your novel for at least 9 months.
The figure is easy to remember. That said, do not put yourself, as we say “the pressure”. Either way, you’re going to have to “wiggle” between the inevitable circumstances.
11 — Obtain the opinion of a “beta” reader
The “beta” drive is a test drive. You don’t need to have a lot. The important thing is to be able to benefit from the advice of informed readers.
In general, one is tempted to have one’s newly completed novel read, or even certain chapters, while it is still being written, to people around him. It’s simple, easy, but often confusing. At worst, the author ends up wondering if he was right to embark on this adventure and if he should not revamp everything he wrote, or even stop everything.
However, the author remains the author and his entourage is not necessarily the most qualified to give an opinion on his production. Moreover, if the opinion of a “beta” reader is a good thing, this opinion must be circumscribed within certain limits. This review should focus primarily on compliance with rules of grammar, the spelling on the greater or lesser fluidity of writing, and the more or less about interest developed by the author to the public that aims.
In other words, if an external view is important, it remains external. It is up to the author and him alone to take this into account or not. And, we understand that this look will be all the more determining whether or not it is that of a person carefully chosen by the author. In any case, a choice made at random can prove to be very perilous.
12 — Consider all editorial solutions
The same applies to the choice of an editorial solution. There are a lot more of them than you might think. Being published is not just about being published by one of the 3 or 4 publishing mastodons. It all depends, again, on the objective pursued. We often see, for example, denying comments all merit to the publishing author account .
It’s not necessarily a bad thing when you don’t have any literary ambition and have simply challenged yourself to write a story. After all, in terms of satisfaction, the fun can be as great or even greater, posting this way, than going around the Mediterranean, for 8 days, on a big cruise ship.
As for the classic publishing houses , they receive so many manuscripts that it becomes very uncertain to pass the course of the first selections. And yet, you may have written the novel of the century. There is no shortage of examples of editorial failures. If there is only one advice to follow in this area, it is that of properly sorting publishing houses according to their editorial line and their dynamism, without worrying about their media weight.
There is always a publisher who dreams of discovering the next Albert Camus or more prosaically of boosting his sales with a good novel and who is ready, for this, to make all the necessary efforts to support the author, even unknown, in which he believes.
Two other options remain. The first, which is gradually settling in the French publishing landscape, consists of using the services of a literary agent . The practice is practically unavoidable, for any author, in Anglo-Saxon countries, while in France, it still seems reserved for heavyweights in writing. But, things are changing.
As for the second, it involves self-publishing . In a few years, self-publishing has become standard practice for many authors.
It does not imply any financial commitment on their part, except at the margin, and it can easily lead to traditional publishing contracts. Indeed, many traditional publishers regularly consult the libraries of self-publishing sites to locate their future authors.
And then, if luckily the novel “works”, copyright is very attractive.
The desire to write
Paying attention to these 12 key points obviously does not guarantee that you will succeed in writing a great novel that readers will tear themselves away from. However, it is certain that they will allow you to avoid entering into paths that can quickly turn out to be dead ends. However, in this area, if there is no miracle recipe, anyway, to make a good novel , nothing can be done without the desire to write .
