Week Thirteen: Why Novels Are Like Apples

The best-laid plots ...

I've been thinking this week about plots, genres, and how they can so easily go awry when you're not watching. Literary novels can go off in any direction they want. But most commercial novels are all about the plot. Characters are important, yes. Vitally important. Characters are what drive the novel forward, after all. But in general they have to do something for the book to take off. The Hundred Year Old Man is fascinating - but it's not until he Climbed out Of A Window and Disappeared that we started buying his story in droves.

So let's cram as many events as possible into our stories, the new writer might say. If action and plot are what is required, let's put something amazing in each chapter, and crown it with a genre twist.

But of course this will not work. Yes, we want action as well as character. But what we do not want is chaos. Fiction is like real life, but it is not real life. It has to be controlled, fenced in, kept in order by its creator. Stories must stick to the plan. Worlds must cohere. Mild-mannered country folk cannot run away and become international jewel thieves - unless that is the crux of your story. (See The Hobbit for details.)

Stick with the genre you came in with. At least for this book.

Genre is all-important in this. Genre tells you your parameters and how far you can push them. It can feel like a limitation at times, but more often it's a liberation. It allows you to focus, really focus, on language, the nuts and bolts of writing, on narrative, on dialogue, on pacing and structure, and forget - to some extent, once you've set it down in outline - about plot. Like a partner at a dance, you need to stick with the genre you came in with or risk losing your reader's trust. (From Dusk Till Dawn is a notable exception in film terms, which I stumbled across one night on the television and watched with my jaw hanging open.) In other words, you can't start out writing a comic novel, then turn it into a romance, then rev it up into a thriller, then shift it into political drama, then develop a cop buddy story, then ...

You get the idea.

It's perfectly possible to write like that, of course. No one is stopping you from writing anything, especially in these brave days of self-publishing. But successes with that kind of genre merry-go-round are going to be rare. You need great skill to negotiate the comic and the dramatic, to keep romance bubbling away while exploring political issues, and so on. Great skill only comes with experience, the kind of writing experience that tells you not to bother in the first place. And if you did bother, you'd need a brave - or foolish - agent to take it on.

The way I see it, novels are like fruit. And they enjoy the same limitations and structural integrity as fruit. So a novel that begins as an apple should end as an apple.

Novels are like apples. An apple never becomes a banana halfway through being eaten.

A novel that starts life as an apple should not turn yellow and become a banana by act two, or morph gently into a mango in the closing chapters.

This does not mean we cannot mix genres. Not in the slightest. A pineapple is a mixed genre fruit. But it's still a pineapple. It doesn't forget which two genres make up its DNA, if you see what I mean. It doesn't add a third one as an experiment just because things are getting boring.

So even if she does not make a plan, the commercial writer needs to know, at least at a subconscious level, what kind of novel she is writing. And though she may not know the exact details of the journey at the outset, she must understand that it cannot suddenly become a different category of novel, or not without risk to its integrity. Romances need to stay romantic. Thrillers scare you till the end. And baddies always get punished, even if it takes a ten book series to catch them.

I write mixed genre novels: this is an historical paranormal romance. But I planned it that way and did not deviate from its exact parameters. It started as mixed genre, and ended the same way.

To steer the story to its conclusion without mishap, you only need to keep chanting, 'Steady as she goes.' And if it feels like your romance or historical is flagging in that so-called soggy middle, don't reach for the hand grenade or the unexpected kidnap. It's not a touch of international thriller you need to excite the reader. It's electric prose. It's a feeling of inevitability. It's narrative drive. It's brilliantly illuminated characters. It's good old-fashioned excellence in writing. Nothing more.

QUESTION: Have you ever written a book that began one way, then unexpectedly turned into something quite different, and what did you do about it? Was it successful?

Week Ten: Planning Your Novel

For me, not planning my novels before writing them would be like marrying someone I had never met.

A novel starts with a single idea. Sometimes a line or two of dialogue. Most often for me it's a visual scene in my head. Two lovers parting at dawn. A man creeping through the darkness, a knife in his hand. A body twisting slowly in the wind ...

From that idea or line or concept or image springs the plan. The blueprint of a novel.

Some writers - probably shaking their heads over my foolishness at this very moment - eschew the plan. They are 'pantsers', i.e. they write by the seats of their pants. They have no desire to know how their novel ends; that would spoil the surprise! So they sit down and write out that line of dialogue or that image in their head, and whizz, they're away, thumping the keys, page after page until they discover who dunnit.

I can't speak for those people, as I have never done that. Or at least not with any success. For me, things go badly awry when I attempt to write without making a plan. For years I wrote literary-style novels that meandered this way and that, and were either unfinished or became curiously flat and lost in the end stages compared to the great energy and promise of their opening chapters.

Then I fell on hard times, and like many writers, turned to pulp fiction to scratch a living.

The discipline of writing pulp fiction to a deadline has always been a fantastic training ground for writers ...

Writing pulp fiction was my great salvation as a novelist. The money was not wonderful, and neither were the novels themselves, but it was work I could easily do at home while breastfeeding baby twins.

The parameters were fairly narrow: not formulaic, per se, but certainly there were strict expectations about length and content. And deadlines were tough. Having only 8-10 weeks in which to write an 85,000 word novel was not unusual. So I learned in a hurry how to plan and structure one of these novels so it would not fall apart in the middle. And my editors wanted - demanded, in fact! - a synopsis before they would commission a new book from me. So I would plan the novel from start to finish over a few days, then write a shiny one or two page synopsis to hook them into offering for it. Then the finished book had to match the expectations set up by this synopsis, of course, so it would morph into a working outline for me to follow as well as a selling document.

After years of drifting along fruitlessly in a literary dream, writing a novel became all about structure: beginning, middle, end; goal, obstacle, resolution; trigger, disaster, success.

In basic terms, your main character enters the first scene in one situation, then turns in a different direction because of some triggering action or event. A new goal has been set for them: win the lover's heart, rescue the hostage, save the world, or perhaps just survive a series of dangerous obstacles. These obstacles need to behave like a crescendo: each is more dangerous than the last, until the ultimate test is faced. In some genres, they call this 'the dark moment', the point at which things seem to be going the heroine's way at last, and then abruptly, a mistake is made, a baddy comes back to life, and all hope is lost.

Our intrepid hero and heroine, braving the whirlpool .... James Gillray: Britannia between Scylla & Charybdis.

As writers we have to steer our characters through the whirlpool of this 'dark moment' and out the other side into catharsis, to sail on into the future, all questions answered, all loose threads drawn up and satisfactorily resolved.

At some level at least, your plan needs to represent the successive stages of this archetypal story. You may be quite mechanical about it, estimating chapter length and events within each chapter, or chart graphs on a whiteboard or a series of sticky Post-It notes. Or you may dash off a loose plan on the back of an envelope, then pin it above your desk - or chuck it in the bin. Whatever works for you is best. But if it's not working, you may want to try another method. I highly recommend the whiteboard and stickies route. I have a thought, scribble it on a stickie, then push it onto the wall next to my desk while I work. It saves having to reach for a notebook, then recall which notebook and where I put it.

The trick is remembering to check your stickies occasionally. Not find them after you've finished the novel, and think, ah ...

Every story has a shape, a 'story arc' that exists in the head long before it exists on paper. For truly massive, multiple-character novels, this shape can be horrendously complex to plot out, taking in many different events in any number of characters' lives, so their high points and low points all coincide to create a really strong climax.

The important point of planning is to establish that arc in your subconscious, so while you're typing away furiously late at night, lost in a character's struggle, some deep-buried part of your brain is remembering that story arc and instinctively laying it down and sticking to it as each scene unfolds.

But if you really can't face the idea of knowing in advance how your novel will end, there's always the no-planning, 'just type Chapter 1 and start writing' approach. Good luck with that!

QUESTION: are you a planner or a pantser?