So. You’ve decided to write a novel in thirty days. First of all, you’re an idiot. But a good idiot. The kind that doesn’t know their own limitations and so sets out to find them. The kind that inspires people. You’ve probably gotten that look:
“So what are you up to these days?”
“Oh, you know. Work. Chores. Boyfriend. Oh, and I’m doing NaNoWriMo.”
“Oh…”
…and then there’s that look. Equal parts incredulity, envy, pity, and maybe a bit more envy. But part of that look is blank. Your interlocutor isn’t looking at you anymore. They’ve dived down into the depths of themselves to ask questions that have no right or wrong answers: Could I do NaNoWriMo? Could I do it this year? No, there isn’t enough time left. Is there? There isn’t, right? But is there? Well, how about next year? After all, if I don’t write erotic fan-fiction about the Nixon administration, who will?
You did that. By doing something you didn’t know whether you could do or not, you gave the other people in your life a moment’s pause while they asked themselves: what can I do that I didn’t think I could? You’re a goddamn inspiration. Yes, really.
In Praise of Shortcuts
Anyway, if you’re writing a novel for the first time, there’s a decent chance you’re looking for shortcuts. Which is exactly what you should be looking for.
A short story is different. You can write a short story by transcribing one of your dreams and then editing it a bit. I know because I did. And the same with a poem. Just write down your dream and add line-breaks and you’ve got yourself a poem. Again, I speak from experience. Will it be your best work? That’s not the question at hand right now. This is NaNoWriMo. The month when we talk about done, not best. Still, a novel is a different beastie. How not, when novels often contain entire short stories (think of the “Pension Grillparzer” interlude in The World According to Garp) or entire poems (yes, Tolkien is the obvious reference here, but far from alone).
One useful shortcut is to steal the structure, or even the very plot of your novel, from a different work. No, you’re right. You don’t want to stoop to the depths inhabited by *checks notes* Jane Frigging Austen.
The Shortcuts of Jane Austen and Jane Smiley
Yeah, my favorite example of this is Pride and Prejudice, which steals its plot whole from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. In the book (it doesn’t matter which one) a man and a woman are circling each other, snapping at each other, but, from context-clues, clearly destined for marriage. No one else in the story is their equal for brains or spirit. Meanwhile, each of the two main characters has an emotional dependent. The two dependents get engaged, but then a scandal breaks out when the engagement suddenly breaks off. Our two leading characters set about patching up their dependents’ mismanaged love affair and, in the process, accidentally get married themselves.
Other novelists have committed the same sort of thievery. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which tells the story of three daughters trying to deal with the legacy of their father, borrows its plot rather neatly from King Lear. Too neatly, in my opinion. I always thought that it was a better essay about King Lear than it was a novel in its own right. And yes, that’s the trouble. How to write a novel using a borrowed structure without being derivative?
People say they don’t want to write a novel that’s derivative. They don’t want to write what’s been written before. And yet we’ll happily read a Stephen King novel or a Sherlock Holmes short story or–. Because at the end of the day, there’s something to be said for a simple dish, well made. And there’s something to be said for practicing.
The Expectations are Too Damn High
Which is where we come to the point, isn’t it? Which is that our expectations are too high. We learn to read and write at three. But not really. Or at least not quite. We learn to write doing the basics–sounding out words, shaping letters, practicing short sentences… But almost from the very beginning, we are thrust into a world curated by some of the greatest poets and prophets who ever set their thoughts to paper. Sadly, a variety of circumstances work together to deprive us of some of the Black and Brown and Queer and economically disadvantaged voices we might benefit from hearing. But even the stuff we do end up reading is sufficiently accomplished that it’s tough to see how we might emulate it if we were to try our own hand at writing.
In short: we are ready to read a novel of the very first rate long, long before we are ready to write one. But that’s what imprints on our minds: this is what a novel should be. If I write a novel, this is how good it has to be. This is how we torture ourselves.
Don’t Compare your First Novel to Tolstoy’s Last
Every time you read a truly great novel, your expectations for your own work tick up a little bit. When reading Anna Karenina, for instance, and marveling at the richness and beauty of the language and character, it’s hard to remember that its author had written several novels before it. And was a literal nobleman whose status bought him the leisure to spend the better part of a decade writing and rewriting until the writing came out just so. Parenthetically, I’m happy to say the same rule does not apply to political speech. People share that stuff just to crow over how terrible it is. In fact I’ve had that happen to me several times in university-level classrooms alone. (One of the favorites of this kind is Thomas Babington Macaulay.)
But you get used to reading novels of overwhelmingly good quality. Maybe it would help to see Stephen King’s first novel. I’m not talking about Carrie. I’m talking about the stuff he experimented with before that. The short stories he wrote when he was fifteen or so. The stuff he probably didn’t even finish. Maybe that would cure us of the need to write something publishable the first time out of the gate. If we could cure ourselves of that need for our writing to rise to the level of our reading, we might focus on how much fun it is to write.
It’s the Process
The way forward, if there is one, is of course to take joy in the process. Novel-writing, like any other skill, takes practice. And practice is drudgery if all you care about is the finished project. It can be hard to refocus in this way. To see your novel as a series of challenges rather than a series of obstacles and disappointments. I’ll give you an example. For the climactic scene of the novel I drafted, I wanted a lot of moving parts. The two main characters were going to face off, but each of them was going to bring a posse of sorts. I had introduced one of these two groups. But I realized as I was writing that I had not even crafted characters for the other side. What to do? Where was I going to find ten or twenty new models to base these characters on?
A walk in the park sorted me out really nicely. I was explaining the whole problem to a friend of mine when I realized: duh. I’ll just use archetypes. So I based them on the Olympian gods. And then I changed a bit here and a bit there until they were their own people. Or at least until I thought they were. Then I back-dated them into the story by inserting them into early scenes. From there, I still had to write the climactic scene. Which means I still had to come up with something for each of these people to do to contribute to the face-off between the main characters.
It was a lot of work. But I’m glad I did it. There’s something inherently satisfying any time you set a problem for yourself and complete it. Frightening, yes. At times depressing. But, if you push through, ultimately satisfying. Even if you do it badly.
Don’t Call it a “Shortcut”… Call it “Making it Easier to Do Things that are Good for You”
Anyway. Novel-writing is hard. I strongly recommend making it easier for yourself in any way you can. And that includes embracing the well-trod paths. At least your first time out. Probably your second as well. You’ll drive yourself nuts otherwise. One short-cut, as I said, is to borrow the plot from an existing book. Another is to pick an episode from your own life and just change the names of all of the “characters.” Neither is easy. They’re just easier than reinventing the wheel.
Embrace the idea of writing a novel as exercise, rather than as a goal that you’re driving to. And while you’re at it, embrace the idea of trying to write a novel. Which means not necessarily writing a good novel. Not necessarily even finishing the novel. Giving up midway and writing a memoir instead. And so on. There’s a benefit to trying things out just as there’s a benefit to doing things badly.
Also, if you think that inhabiting a world others have conceptualized before you and writing fan-fic in that ready-made universe isn’t a legitimate way to write, then how do you explain Madeline Miller’s retelling of Greek Myths? Or John Gardner’s retelling of Anglo-Saxon Myths? Or, for that matter, Vergil’s retelling of Greek Myths? It happened such a long time ago that nobody thinks in these terms anymore, but Vergil was looking over his shoulder at his literary ancestors no less than we are today. And robbing them blind. We don’t know as much about his literary thefts, though, because one of the poems Vergil based his work on, the Annales, written some 2500 years ago by the archaic Roman poet Ennius, has been lost. So remember: it’s only fan fiction unless and until the missteps of history cause every single copy of your source material to perish by fire.
