THE FIRST NOVELISTS' HANDBOOK

copyright of Allen Meece

  I learned how to write a novel by writing a novel. During the process, I met with another novelist or two who were also learning the techniques of novel-writing. Our discussions evolved into this book. It will save you months of confusion as you write your first novel. It contains no jargon and no publishing sacred cows. It tells you how to begin, write and finish your precious book.

1. NOTHING BUT ESSENTIALS

This book assumes that you can't figure out why your book isn't a real book.It assumes you don't want to buy a thick book of complex writing details.Once you learn the immutable basics of the story form, you can mute them and be regarded as a genious or an idiot by the reviewers but you can't get there from here unless you get your first book published. You can write a publishable book if you understand these essentials. This booklet shows you how to see if your story's any good.

2. YOU

Do not work and sleep and write or life will pass you by and you will not be healthy. A writer lives and learns and gathers material in the present. If you are relying on the book to make you somebody, forget about it. The book won't change your insides, only your outsides a little. There are more direct ways to self-satisfaction. One is Re-evaluation Counseling. Their website is http://www.rc.org:80/ You are not Cinderella and are not writing a book to turn yourself into a princess or prince. You are writing your book because you want to make a statement that will make people's lives better.

3. OUTLINING

Outlining is a shortcut to a blended and flowed composition. Some people write train-of-thought and luckily obtain blend and flow and point. Try it, you might be one of them. The odds are that you will write pasta and re-write until your mind feels like pasta.Outline your story first. The hard way is the easy way.

3.1. READER

The reader is the most important character of the book experience. They pay the printer. You like your readers and want to give them value for their money. Outline the qualities of the reader you want to please. Having a preferred reader-type will give your book a consistent-sounding voice.

3.2. NARRATOR

Whether obvious or covert, the narrator is the real main character of any book from "Walden" to "Webster's Dictionary." The narrator translates and communicates a body of emotion from one organism to another. It's the true voice of the book, so pick it carefully and outline it well and realize your priority is to maintain a consistent narrator voice or the book's flow will be ragged and disrupted and will put the reader off.

3.3. BOOK

When you know your book's the reader and narrater, then you know how the book's third main character, the book itself, should look. Book appearance is not solely the purview of the publisher. It is the author's responsibility to dictate how the book looks. The creator knows the characters of the book and knows what the medium of emotional delivery should look like.

3.4. PLOT

There is no such thing as plot. Navigators and spies 'plot,' writers don't. Plot is cutesy jargon. Forget about it. It was coined by and for people who only talk about writing. When somebody asks, "What's the plot of your book?" say "What's plot?" You can't answer their question and they can't answer yours because plot is jargon. When somebody asks, "What's it about?" say "Life," because it is and because you can't describe a close friend in two sentences. Ask them if they want to know "the point" of your book, which you can describe in one sentence, as shown next.

3.5. THE POINT

All communication has a point or it is noise. A book is a communication and has a point. Decide that your book will have one point and decide exactly what that ONE point is. Reduce the point of your intended book to one sentence. Does that sentence sound important? If not, change the point-sentence until it sounds important. If you cannot do this step then your story is a scrambled egg type of entertainment. Do just the opposite of everything in this book and it may sell as a novelty.

3.6. EVENTS

You know your reader and narrator and the look of the book they will share. You have reduced the whole point of your book to just one sentence. Now you may outline the events of a story that suits all four components of the book experience. An outline sets the walls of the pipe within which your book will efficiently flow to its point and make that point. Making that point is your purpose in writing this work of art. The outline blends all the events and flows them toward the point which you wanted the narrator to make to the dear reader. The outline is the spine and the ribs of the story. Like the trunk of a tree, it carries all the weight. Like a spine, the outline can't carry weight without muscles to support it. These muscles are the strong events you include around the spine of your outline. The events are attached to, and relevant to, the spine but they must not get into the spine and disrupt it like a cancer. They must stay beside the story flow and never block it by taking center stage. Center stage must always be the main character's reactions to events in the story. If they can't react to events in the story, delete the events. The reader is riding inside the body and mind and heart of your main character and wants to keep moving and feeling, not piddling around with extraneous events.

4. BLENDING

Blend means mix well. Blend means homogenous like homogenized milk. No lumps or bumps or foreign matter, nothing else besides milk. Your story is about one thing and nothing else. I'm sorry, but it is. It's about one thing and that's all. Anything in your book that's not about the main character's experiences does not blend with the book. An un-blended book will not flow. A book is hundreds of linear pages without a sense of purpose until you flow one idea through those pages and make your point. That is the writers' craft. It is our trick, our stock in trade. It's what we do best. It's what the public can't do or get from anyone but writers, us. It is how we make our money, it's what we charge for. Blend and flow.

4.1. WEIGHTING

Weighting is mixing ingredients in proper proportion to make a tasty blend. A recipe that calls for paprika makes damn sure you don't put as much paprika as flour into the mix. Some ingredients in a recipe are its main vehicle and some are spices. Use the same principle for weighting your characters. Giving a sub-character a Name or Title is the same as using paprika by the cupful. Regardless of what the recipe was supposed to be about, it becomes a paprika dish if you don't go light on the spice. Lighten the sub-character's weight by calling her the queen, [not capitalized], or by a nick-name such as Frosty Tits. Never give a supporting actress a pompous title such as Queen Elizabeth II. If you do, your main character will become less important than the supporting actress. Giving sub-characters dominance over your main character automatically lightens, un-weights, your main character and at the same time, you, your book and story. Supporting characters must affect your main character but may never assume omnipotence. Remember, your reader is subliminally the main character and is not paying you for a degrading experience. Giving page-space to sub-characters gives them weight. Writing more than a few sentences to describe them and their exploits gives them too much space in the reader's mind and critically dilutes your main character's importance. Sub-characters are merely air people who float around the edges of your main story and provide the banks of the river of events which affect the main character. One more time: the story is the main character's feelings and reactions to story events.

5. FLOWING

How is a river different from a swamp? Water flows through both. The difference is their degree of cohesiveness. They are both flowing water but neither has the efficient flow of a large straight pipe. Your book should be like a pipe from beginning to end. Your book is a pipe. It has sides, (the single topic, limit of one), and it flows toward a place, its point.

The Mississipi flowing to the sea has but one point. It has many details but only one point: either channelize all the Great Basin's rainwater into the sea or the prairie will flood. How it gets there is its flow. If the flow isn't confined to the topic, the book doesn't move. It will not be strong or forceful or absorbing, or read by many people. Keeping the flow together through all those pages and events is your job. Your sentences have micro-flow and your paragraphs have macro-flow.

5.1. MICRO-FLOW

In the micro-est sense, a miss-spelled word disrupts the flow of the sentence and, by association, the paragraph, and possibley the book. Are you now thinking about the cute word I made up, "micro-est" or about the mis-spelled word "possibley?" Did they distract you from my message? Where were we? Micro-flow means the flow of a sentence. The simplest declarative sentence is the stuff of novels. The sentence is like a block in the great wall of China, which is so monumental that it can be seen from orbit.

That last compound paragraph did not flow with the idea and ruined the paragraph. I mixed writing with outer space and China.It would have been better to have simply said, "The simple declarative sentence is the stuff of novels" and left it at that. That's micro-flow. Train yourself to write a simple declarative sentence and you'll be a writer. Train yourself to blend and flow those sentences into a book that says one thing and you'll be an author, a composer of word symphonies. That's how it's done.

5.2. MACRO-FLOW

Macro-flow is more functionally-descriptive than plot jargon. Picture a tree: it's branches flow into the trunk and the trunk flows into the ground. The trunk is the spine of the tree and the big flow of your book is it's spine. The trunk blends the flow from the leaves and branches and sturdily point them to one thing; the ground. Your book flow blends all the story's inputs from people and events and directs them smoothly, seamlessly, flowingly, toward one thing; the point of your book. The trunk's the biggest and strongest part of the tree. Your main character's story is the biggest and strongest part of your book. You make it big and strong by flowing every event and person of the book into that main character and you get a story. That's all.

6. WRITING

Okay, go write that book. Refer often to the previous instructions as you write. BE PATIENT AND STICK TO THE OUTLINE and you will write a good book.

6.1. WORK HABITS

When digging a trench, work as long and as hard as you possibly can each day and try to beat that progress tomorrow. When creating a piece of art, work when, where and how it feels good. That's the only way to write creatively well. The mind works best when fresh.

6.2. REWRITING

"There are no great writers, only great rewriters." While there's a grain of truth in that, don't you rewrite. Rewriting kills a novel. Rewriting is poison. It's like taking a completed jigsaw puzzle and dumping parts of it back on the table and trying to re-insert them a different way. It's like catching leprosy. Once you get started, you're hooked. "There are no great writers, only great polishers," is the way I would change the quotation. Do an outline that excites you. Commit to that outline one hundred and five percent. When the story's done, polish it with blend and flow, maybe plump it up or thin it down but don't be coerced into rewriting it. If an agent doesn't like it and a publisher doesn't like it, they're the wrong people for you. Say goodbye to them, not to the book. Usually, rewriting doesn't improve the book and withers the author's confidence. Rewrites that do work are ones which take the author in a big circle back to square one with the novel rewritten to its original version. Why bother? Wouldn't you really rather live? New writers founder on Rewrite Rocks. Don't do it unless you're a masochist. If you are a masochist, rewrite is the place for you. You can happily/miserably spend the rest of your life in rewrite. It's fine to polish your manuscript but don't rewrite it, don't dismember it. Your first vision was the clearest.

6.3. POLISHING

How to polish? Here's a checklist:

BLEND

1) Remove all proper names and titles from minor characters so they don't distract from main character. "Un-weight" them.

2) Remove events and scenes that you love but which are not strictly pertinent to the point of the book. You secretly know what they are; egotistical self-indulgences.

3) Make all scene transitions more dramatic or fun.

FLOW

1) Do a breezy read-through and change all bad prepositions and articles that don't read as smoothly as water flows in a brook. If you write like you speak, readers will comprehend your sentences as easily as they comprehend your speech. No trip-ups allowed.

2) All sentences that don't effortlessly enter the mind are wrong. Take out modifiers, use better nouns and verbs and chop them into simple declarative sentences. Completely delete sentences that don't scan and which resist polishing. They were stillborn as soon as you wrote them down. Delete them now.

3) If you read a few pages that make you forget the underlying point of the book, those pages are bad pages and should be deleted or fixed. The main character's problem must overshadow every page. Not scream but at least shadow. Otherwise, you've lost the flow and the reader's concentration and their good opinion of you, too.

Remember, the book is a pipeline from its beginning to its end with no leaks.

7. SUBMITTING

Bad word, isn't it? Submitting.Let's change it to 'offering.'Don't submit to agent's or publisher's bad treatment when you offer your product, your art, your first-born child, to them.Finishing a book is like coming out of a long dream that has to be sold. The vagaries of commerce can make this stage of the book experience rather harder than writing. Just remember, you're offering your product to people who will make more money from it than you will. You owe them no favors, the profit from your book is favor enough. When dealing with the publishing industry, respect yourself and your book. Demand respect in exchange for the profit you offer. You are not a masochist, remember?

7.1. AGENTS

An agent is your representitive, not your boss. They are your assistants in selling. You will pay them well if they sell your manuscript. That means they are your employees. Treat them as such. Demand monthly reports stating how many queries they've made for you and to whom. Add your own terms to the "standard" contract they send to you. Don't accept two-year exclusive contracts unless you want to wait two years for the book to maybe be sold. A good book sells in six months with good representation. Draw a line through silly conditions in the contract. Take charge, you're the one who will be paying their commission money out of pocket.Your book is good and there are lots of agents. Keep looking for one that likes your book enough to respect your wishes for regular reports. Otherwise your book will sit in their office for years, yes, years, until it and you wither on the vine. An agent is not a substitute for your taking charge of your book's destiny. You're a competent adult and can learn enough about the industry to sell it yourself if you have to. Good books don't need agents, agents need good books.

7.2. PUBLISHERS

A publisher can buy a book from anybody it wants to buy a book from, including you. There is neither law nor business taboo against an author offering a GOOD book directly to publishers. The problem is that too many incompetent, wannabe writers send BAD books and produce an avalanche of stinking junk mail in publishers' offices. Obviously, publishers do not like this situation. The TABOO is letting your book get caught in the crap-slide. The slushpile is a lepers' cave without escape. Abandon all hope, ye slushees. You avoid doom by generating an interest in your manuscript before you send it in. Make a friend of the person who's authorized to buy your book. Give them a few phone calls, get to know them. What sells used cars in Akron also sells manuscripts in the Big Apple.

That's enough to get you started selling. Marketing will be a Handbook in itself. I'll write that as soon as I sell "The Abel Mutiny," a 175-page novella that took me so long to write that I decided to get [and give] some goodness from the experience and so wrote this booklet. All I wanted to do was help other beginners to write a good book and I did it. Your book IS good. Never forget that.

The text of "The First Novelists' Handbook" is copyright-protected. All rights reserved. Except for your singular personal education, you are legally prohibited from reproducing this text in any way without first contacting the author, Allen Meece.