Anatomy of a Finished Novel
This originally appeared as a post on 10/26/10.
As some of you already know, I was invited by Colleen Cahill to give a speech at the Library of Congress yesterday, in exchange for lunch and a tour of the LoC. Lunch was terrific, the tour was whirlwind and breathtaking, and the speech was lots of fun (for all that only a few people showed up–ah, well, I’m no Neil Gaiman, I guess.) I thought those of you who couldn’t make it might like to see the baseline text of the speech, so here it is! (Keep in mind this speech ran for about 25 minutes, so it’s a little longer than my usual posts. Also, the punctuation was intended to cue me to pauses and emphasis and such during the speech, so if anything is technically incorrect, please forgive me this time.)
Anatomy of a Finished Novel
I chose “The Anatomy of a Finished Novel” as a title because it seemed like an amusing frame that would give me a lot of options. But then I started thinking about it more seriously: what would a novel look like if I diagrammed it like something out of an Anatomy & Physiology textbook?
The skeletal system came to mind first; now, the obvious parallel for the skeleton of a story seems like it should be the plot, but after thinking about it for a bit, I saw another possibility. How about genealogy: the old myths and legends a story is drawn from, the traditions it is built upon. For example, Christopher Vogler says he began his book, “The Writer’s Journey“, as a “seven page memo called ‘A Practical Guide to The Hero With A Thousand Faces‘”. And “Hero”, written by noted mythologist Joseph Campbell, was in turn drawn from an examination of stories whose roots run back to the beginning of oral history.
The Writer’s Journey, and Hero With a Thousand Faces, are two fantastic books that every writer ought to have on their shelves. The information inside is priceless: for instance, Vogler points out that the basic story of the Titanic actually has an echo in a much older tale, that of the Ship of Fools; which was, he says, a “sardonic tale, harshly depicting the flaws in the people and social systems of the time.” The 1997 Titanic movie weaves that same theme throughout its events; I suspect that Cameron, who at the time had been directing major box office hits for over ten years and certainly knew his business, was well aware of that resemblance, and used that angle deliberately.
Any successful tale, whether it be told though poetry, film, a novel, or what have you, is to some degree created from the bones of older stories, the ones our civilizations were built upon. Compared to that level of direct support, I believe plot comes in a pale second: a soft matter best left, perhaps, to the respiratory system. Plot could even be seen as the breath of a novel, the nearly invisible force (if done right) that keeps everything moving along properly. Characters would then become the organs of the novel, conflict the circulation, and so on.
I recognize that the entire notion of examining a novel as an anatomical construct is something of a conceit: but the writing process tends to make me think at a strange slant. For example: My writing tends to veer into dark areas, not because I like writing about ugly things, but because that is where real conflict lives. I can’t get excited over the adventures of a bunch of teenagers trading magical jeans; I find stories that feature impossible choices, nature versus nurture, the evolution of a world’s ethics, and confronting one’s inner demons to be much more interesting. The more involved I get in writing such stories, however, the more likely I am to make silly jokes to my friends and play loud, silly music in the car. I suspect this is a balancing act: I can only work with the difficult questions on the page if I give myself lots of cheerfulness in real life. This is one of the unspoken choices that go into building a book: a deeper choice than what character to use as a point of view, of how to frame a scene: those are fairly superficial items, the epidermis of the story, if I may. The things that really give a story life, the evocation of all the senses and the emotions, comes from being brutally honest with oneself and seeing the world as though through a microscope: examining, dissecting, observing actions and reactions.
A writer chooses, with every story, to take reality and translate it into fiction: to use the experience of a painful divorce to bring the jagged edges of abandonment, betrayal, guilt and grief into a story that has nothing to do with marriage. It is often said that we should write what we know, and I don’t see any way around that old homily; if I don’t know anything about plants or gardening, how can I possibly write a believable scene involving walking through cultivated fields, let alone use the background setting of an agrarian society? A writer’s life serves as tendon and ligament, allowing information and experience to work together smoothly in service of story, and ignorance only limits our range of motion, restricts our reach and damages our ability to grasp.
Given an honest examination of one’s own life as source material, and the world around us as a supporting cast, the old saying “stranger than fiction” comes to mind. The possibilities are endless, and the question of “what to say” becomes that of “where to begin”.
As an example, three characters in my first novel, Secrets of the Sands, came directly from that approach: Begin with a teenaged, angsty feeling of abandonment, a sensation of being a despised, unwanted outsider, of being desperately aware that this life holds numerous dangers and safety is only reached through taking risks: the end result, this time, was Idisio, a cocky young street thief who dares to pick a rich man’s pocket, gets caught, and follows his instincts into a world beyond his imagining. Take the sense of being a strong woman fighting against a man’s world, and I found emerging onto the page a young noblewoman, Alyea Peysimun, who was once badly beaten for her defiance of custom. Take the uneasy suspicion that I am not entirely sane at times, and my awareness that I tend to lock onto projects with disturbing intensity, and here comes Cafad Scratha, striding through the streets with his great obsession of finding the people responsible for the death of his family. Those three characters, thrown together, propelled everything else before and behind them: in the process of figuring out why they are who they are and why they do what they do, I found outlines for several more books forming themselves. Given the nature of these three characters, given the political, cultural, economic, and geographic realities of their world, certain consequences are as inevitable as a thrown ball coming back down to earth. It’s become less a process of developing the plot, of late, and more about being honest with myself about those consequences and depicting their arc as faithfully as possible, in such a way that the reader is drawn along an increasingly tight spiral to the eventual resolution – even if that turns out to be an ugly one.
That, to me, is writing. That is the life-blood and occasionally the guts of a good story: the writer must have the courage to follow through with her own logic, rather than flinching away to a more socially acceptable outcome. Mind you – there’s nothing wrong with a peaceful resolution to a story. Sometimes that’s the right ending, the right consequence. But to me, a completely resolved, upbeat ending reminds me of an old saying: live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.
The human body is a complicated whirligig. None of us truly understand every piece from cells to hairline; we study aspects, specializing in one or another piece of the puzzle, just as a good story focuses in on specific segments of time, place, and character. A good story always leaves unanswered questions in – or, perhaps at – its wake. I would suggest that “a good looking corpse”, in the world of fiction writing, is a story without enduring interest, quickly buried and forgotten.
Writing a novel takes more than living fast and getting it all down on the page; a story requires time to mature, just as humans do. It takes time to find the connections in the story, time to nudge the words into a form that best conveys the intended meaning, time to polish, time to find the right agent, editor, publisher, cover artist, book reviewers; time to spread the word about your new work, and time to see any results from all that effort.
It took me somewhere between five and ten years to write Secrets of the Sands, depending on whether you count the time I actually spent working on it – or start from the first time I wrote about Idisio picking Cafad Scratha’s pocket. The followup book, Guardians of the Desert, took six weeks for the first draft and has been in revisions for four years. The third and fourth books in the series will be drawn directly from ten years’ worth of notes and experimental writing: for instance, years ago I wrote the scene in which Cafad Scratha came home to find his entire family dead. I may use that scene in book four, or three, or not at all; but I have it to draw from, and can use that information in endless ways.
Time also allows for a dilution of popular culture’s influence. I never realized it at the time, but on re-reading Secrets and its sequel, Guardians, I now see certain catch-phrases, actions, and behaviors that I can track directly to some of the movies and books I liked ten years ago. I didn’t put these items in deliberately; but if I had managed to publish Secrets even five years earlier, the parallels would have been glaringly obvious. They are less so now, as the heritage-skeleton of my writing is insulated by the fact that popular culture has moved on.
It’s been said that there are no new stories, and that may be true; but just as the anatomy of the human body is, in a broad sense, fixed, the variety within that outline is magnificently infinite. Similarity to one another, as human beings, does not make us any less individual or mysterious; our lives all have plot variations, unusual characters, and emotional arcs. The anatomy of our lives, from cell to dermis, whether happy or sad, pretty or ugly, is the source of all story, throughout the world, throughout the ages.
But this speech isn’t only about the anatomy of writing; it’s about finished novels. Which begs the question: how does one finish a novel? I found the best answer to this question, oddly enough, in a recent episode of “America’s Next Top Model”. The premise of the show, in case some of you haven’t seen it, is that several hopeful models are put through a series of photo shoots, and every episode, at least one person is cut from the show, leaving one model at the end holding hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of modeling contracts and prizes. In this particular episode, the judge looked at the results of one shoot, looked at the nervous young model waiting to hear the verdict, smiled, and said, “I can tell you want this. You’re going to do just fine.”
You want this.
That’s what it comes down to, in the end. One finishes a novel the same way one finishes any piece of creative work or project: by wanting to do it badly enough. To quote author Heather Sellers, in her book “Chapter by Chapter”, she says: “The number one reason books don’t get finished is this: Writers say yes to other things.” To me, this means that saying yes to dinner with friends, book group meetings, popular new movies, helping a friend move, making an elaborate dinner for my family, going out of town to help a sick relative: this is all perfectly ordinary stuff, but over time, it sabotages my ability to finish a creative project. I have learned that a book just takes so much attention, so much energy, that whenever a tempting diversion arises, I have to stop and ask myself: what do I want more? More often than not, I choose my writing. And that, for me, could be considered the heart of any writing project: the choice to stay with the writing, over and over.
I said earlier that I draw from my own life to create my writing, and that’s true: but it’s not the whole truth, because I’m not alone on this big green and blue mudball of ours, and writing, contrary to common wisdom, is not a solitary activity. I might be physically alone when I sit down to write, but I am surrounded by the presence of every person I have met over my thirty-odd years of writing.
When I pick up a pen or sit down at a keyboard, you are who I am writing about. Just by living your life and affecting others along the way, you create an infinite series of story-ripples in the world around you. You serve as a source of the infinite variety and the magical complexity that fills any serious writer’s stories, and the ripples you create tangle up against those from early mankind sitting around a fire, telling stories of the hunt and teaching their children about the world they lived in.
If the skeleton of a story is its heritage, – plot the breath – characters the organs – if a steady, repetitive series of choices to stay with the work serves as the heartbeat: you, as readers and fellow human beings on this planet, are the most intangible and precious part of all: the soul. I would not be able to write without an audience: my inspiration depends on the intricate, insane web of connections that hooks this planet together. It depends on you. And I will leave you with a question to think about:
If a story is written and nobody reads it, is it really a story?
I thank you all so much for being here today, for taking the time to listen to me, for taking the time to read: not so much my novel, but any piece of prose or poetry you have picked up over the course of your lifetime. Thank you, also, to the librarians, editors, copyeditors, slush pile readers, and anyone else involved in any fashion with the publishing industry; because that is a network of connections and history all its own, without which none of us would be standing in this magnificent building today. And finally, thank you, thank you, to Colleen Cahill, for inviting me here; this is an honor I never expected, and way more fun than I probably deserve to have. Thank you all.
