How to Write a Novel: Twelve Essential Components

Stephen Carver

From Blot the Skrip & Jar It, November 24, 2015.

https://stephencarverauthor.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/how-to-write-a-novel-twelve-
essential-components/

One of my most popular posts last month was ‘How to Write a Novel.’ This was basically a
plug for a course of the same name that I teach for the Unthank School of Writing, and
although enrolment is buoyant, I’m guessing that a lot of the hits were actually people
looking for advice on how to write a novel. In that case, as November is National Novel
Writing Month, here are a few free tips to get you started…

The focus of NaNoWriMo, as I understand it, is on motivation and completion, so the

challenge is to write 50,000 words in a month. Now I am all for regular writing routines, and
I don’t believe in muses, natural talent or writer’s block. That said, you can’t just hit it and
hope. You know that line about life being that thing that happens when you’re making other
plans? Novels are not like this. Banging stuff out off the top of your head is not writing a
novel, and despite that initial rush of enthusiasm trying to free associate your way through a
big project is much more likely to lead to the slush pile or the bottom drawer than the New
York Times bestseller list. ‘Discovery Writing’ aside, which E.M. Forster rightly described as
‘introducing mysticism at the wrong stage in the process,’ you need some sort of a plan.

Be spontaneous by all means, but try to mediate this with a rough idea of where
you’re going, otherwise, and trust me on this, you’ll end up just rambling or never finish.
‘Writer’s block’ is more about not knowing which scene you need to write next than some
terrible psychological barrier. Would you set off on a journey with no idea of either route or
conveyance and still expect to reach your destination? Did you ever go into an exam with no
preparation or study and come out with an ‘A’? Thought not. Me neither. It is vitally
important to just keep writing, but this’ll be a deal easier if you have a plan and a basic
understanding of narrative structure. The word ‘narrative’ comes from the Latin verb narrare,
‘to tell,’ which is derived from the adjective gnarus, meaning ‘knowing’ or ‘skilled,’ so a
‘narrative’ is a telling by someone that knows what happened, and has the ability to tell it

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well. In a novel, the narrative can be usefully broken down into the following components.
To write a novel, you will need…

1. A PREMISE

Stephen King calls this the ‘situation,’ the most interesting of which, he says, can usually be
expressed as a ‘What if…?’ question, for example: What if someone cloned dinosaurs and
then opened a theme park? Once you have this, it’s down to you to create believable
characters, place them in some sort of setting and then help them work it all out. You don’t
need to know a lot at this stage, and whatever you’re thinking will almost certainly change
during the creative process, but you do need a rough idea of what this book is going to be
about and, if applicable, the genre. Your goal is now to make this happen.

Don’t get too hung up on ‘originality.’ Read Aristotle, Joseph Campbell or

Christopher Booker. There aren’t that many story archetypes when you get down to the
bones. Many narratologists argue that there are seven: ‘rags to riches,’ ‘overcoming the
monster,’ ‘quest,’ ‘voyage and return,’ ‘rebirth,’ ‘tragedy,’ and ‘comedy.’ It’s what you do
with these archetypes in terms of setting, character, action and, of course, style that make
them unique and potentially infinite in scope. Remember that there are only seven musical
notes as well. Don’t overcomplicate. A strong premise should be pretty straightforward and
‘high concept,’ and you should be able to express it in one or two short sentences. So ask
yourself: ‘What’s this novel about?’ Bear in mind that engaging stories are invariably based
around crisis and conflict.

Oh, and you’ll need a working title at some point as well, but don’t worry too much
about this at this stage unless you find it motivational. It’ll almost certainly change by the
time you finish the project. Try to keep it short (one or two words preferred); don’t be too
cryptic but try to capture the essence of your novel: its main theme, the big question it asks.
You’ll probably find your title hiding somewhere in your text once you’ve written it.

2. A STORY

Remember that there’s a difference between ‘story’ and ‘plot’ in our game. The ‘story’ is the
actual sequence of events as they happen (or would happen) in real time. Once you have your
premise, try working out a few characters and scenarios. Write these out, exploring your

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options and testing ideas until you produce some sort of workable synopsis. Try to build this
in your mind like a journalist or a historian, then write out a timeline, blocking out the story
in a linear, chronological form. Concentrate on key characters and events. Try to get to the
essence of these characters: what drives them, what do they want, what will they do, where
will they end up? Try to figure out at least a notional ending – not a specific scene,
necessarily, just a resolution. You now have a destination and a rough map.

3. A PLOT

Now start to think about how you might structure and tell this story. This is the plot – the way
you are going to arrange these events and characters in your narrative. The original story is
just a bunch of stuff that happens. How you order, select, dramatise, summarise, omit,
describe and pace this raw material is the novel: the story plotted and presented as a prose
narrative, these choices constituting your own written style. It’s very easy to lose the plot,
especially in the long second act, and a good way to stay on track is to know your ‘Through
Line.’ This is the main plotline of your novel, as opposed to an interesting sub-plot, the
central drama that compels your reader to keep turning the page.

Write this down and keep it somewhere that you can see when you work. This should
be a direct and concise statement. In Jaws, for example, the through line would be something
along the lines of: ‘A great white shark stakes a claim to a popular seaside resort and doesn’t
leave. Local politicians and merchants are in denial about the problem, so the Police Chief
takes it upon himself to hunt down and kill the shark.’ If you know Peter Benchley’s original
novel, which is a very bleak piece of post-Watergate American fiction, you’ll recall that there
are several sub-plots (Brody’s struggle with corrupt local government, his wife’s affair with
the oceanographer, Matt Hooper, and the friction between Hooper and the Ahab-like sharker
Quint), but the through line remains Brody versus the shark.

Once you have your chronology and through line, you can start planning how you’re
going to tell this story, thinking now in units of narrative: scenes, links and chapters;
structure, pace and perspective.

4. A PROTAGONIST

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Start by asking yourself: ‘Whose story is this?’ The answer will direct your plot, the
ownership of the story determining your ‘through line.’ Your novel will almost certainly have
more than one significant character, and ideally your reader should care about what happens
to them all. Nonetheless, one character will ultimately demand the most attention, and it will
be his or her eventual fate that defines the trajectory of the plot and its purpose, the point of
the book. This is your novel’s protagonist, your hero.

5. POINT OF VIEW CHARACTER OR CHARACTERS

‘Point of view characters’ are the people around whom the narrative is based, whatever the
perspective. They are not, however, always necessarily the protagonists. In The Great
Gatsby, for example, the protagonist is Jay Gatsby himself but the point of view character is
Nick Carraway.

In a short story, it is conventional to restrict the narrative to a single point of view

character, through whose eyes the action of the story is witnessed. We therefore see only
what this character sees, know what he or she knows, and are present only in scenes in which
he or she is present. In a novel you can have more than one point of view character, and your
choice is therefore central to how you tell your story because it determines which scenes you
can actually include in your narrative and how you organise them. If your novel has a single
point of view, then you can’t suddenly include a scene in which a third party does something
the viewpoint character has no knowledge of, unless you contrive a way for them to find out.
This may sound quite restrictive, and it can be, but it also helps you write the main body of
your story. Discovering what you can’t show and credibly circumventing potential point of
view paradoxes helps you determine what you need to write.

6. A POINT OF VIEW

Moving on from the above, you now have to finalise the point of view of the narrative itself.
(Bear in mind that if it doesn’t work you can always change it later.) Briefly, these are your
options:

The First Person: ‘I’

This is a single viewpoint narration, which limits you to the perception and experience of one
character. You cannot know or witness anything he or she does not, and this character always

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has to be present in the scene. (See also: Framing, Unreliable, Passive, and Self-Conscious
Narrators.)

The Second Person: ‘You’

The second person implicates a single addressee, the protagonist his or herself, another
character, or the reader, telling them what they’re thinking, feeling, and experiencing, notable
examples being Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and If on a winter’s night a
traveller by Italo Calvino.

The Third Person Narrator: ‘She,’ ‘He,’ ‘They’

This can be open or closed:

A Third Person Unlimited Viewpoint knows all and sees all. It is the ‘God’s eye view,’ the
‘omniscient’ narrative, ranging across the detailed feelings and experiences of a full cast of
primary and secondary characters. You don’t have to choose a single point of view character,
you can have as many as you like. Although this popular perspective offers the writer the
most freedom, there is a lot of organisation involved. You must also have balance. If you
favour one character’s perspective then you might want to consider a single viewpoint
narration instead.

The Third Person Objective or ‘Detached’ Viewpoint is similarly everywhere, but only on
the outside. It can’t read minds; the voice of the narrative is thus an ostensibly impartial
observer (no choice is innocent, after all), recording and reporting events through physical
description and dialogue like a conventional movie.

A Third Person Single or ‘Limited’ Viewpoint is a lot like a first person narrative, except
that everything is reported not experienced by a single point of view character, now referred
to as ‘he’ or ‘she.’

Multiple Points of View

There are many precedents in popular and literary fiction for multiple points of view in a
single text, mixing first, third and even, god help us, second person narrative voices. But if
your aim is to write a readable and hopefully commercial novel then as a general rule try to

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choose the perspective that best suits your narrative and then stick to it, accepting and
negotiating whatever limitations it imposes.

There are broadly speaking two reasons for multiple viewpoint narratives: the first is a
stylistic choice based on the need to generate some sort of epistemological uncertainty in the
mind of the reader. You will therefore often encounter multiple viewpoints in gothic novels
and thrillers, and also in self-consciously experimental writing in which the unstable nature of
the literary narrative (Modernist, epistemological) or the Self (Postmodermist, ontological) is
reflected in the instability of the text. Parallel, framing and nested narratives may also be
written in different points of view. The other reason is sloppy writing or a failure to select and
commit to a single protagonist or point of view.

7. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Strong character creation is a synthesis of intuition and detail work – the former provides the
initial inspiration and momentum, the latter helps you develop the character, adding
authenticity and emotional depth. An over-reliance on intuition alone can lead to
stereotypical, two-dimensional characters and obvious self-portraits so be warned. There are
primary and secondary characters, the latter being more like extras in a movie, so you can use
quite broad brush strokes on them, but your primary cast requires thorough biographical
design. Were I to ask you a question about your protagonist, you should have an immediate
answer. Remember always that your protagonist is not you, and try to identify what Syd Field
and Waldo Salt called a character’s ‘dramatic need’: what or who she or he wants to achieve,
win, gain, destroy or escape. This core desire will influence the choices they make, and the
obstacles you place in their way create tension and drama.

Don’t worry if this doesn’t all come together when you start writing. Characters
usually start out quite featureless, coming more and more to life as you build and write. But
when you do have this encyclopaedic character biography compiled, it is equally important
not to dump all of it into your narrative. Like icebergs and family secrets, most of the details
will ultimately be hidden beneath the surface of your text – you shouldn’t be able to see it,
but you need to know it’s there. It’s always important to know which story you want to tell –
you can’t cover all of them in one book.

8. DIALOGUE

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Fictional characters really leap off the page when they speak. Reported speech is crucial to
plot development, and while strong dialogue has its own musicality, bad dialogue can kill
your novel. Every time a character speaks, his or her identity is being expressed and the plot
is being advanced; word choice and syntax should make this happen convincingly. If it
doesn’t, then do it again. Characters’ speech should suit them, sound realistic and natural, and
advance your story without resorting to exposition. You need to steer clear of cliché,
redundancy, and incongruity, while each character you write should have a distinct voice.

Dialogue is a function of character. If you know your character well, you will
eventually start to hear them talking. Once you have this breakthrough, dialogue will soon
begin to flow. When you’re writing something new, however, you’ll find it may take several
pages, or even drafts, before you make contact with your characters, and they start talking
back. Once this connection between you and the voice of your character has occurred they
will, to a certain extent, take over and start telling you what they want to do and say. Weak
dialogue, on the other hand, is usually the result of a poorly planned character. In this case,
you’ll probably find that all your characters sound the same, probably like you, with little
difference in tone from the narrative voice of the text itself. This is known in the trade as
‘sock puppetry.’

There are two types of reported speech, the direct and the indirect:

Direct and tagged speech: ‘You mean he’s chasing us?’ said Brody.

Quint nodded. ‘Yeah. He means to make a fight of it,’ he said.

Direct and untagged: ‘You mean he’s chasing us?’

‘Yeah. He means to make a fight of it.’

Direct and selectively tagged: ‘You mean he’s chasing us?’ said Brody.
‘Yeah. He means to make a fight of it.’

Tagged indirect speech (Passive voice): He asked if the shark was chasing them, and
Quint told him that it was, because it wanted to make a fight of it.

‘Tagged’ simply refers to whether or not the speaker or speakers are identified, while in a
‘passive’ sentence the subject of the verb undergoes the action rather than doing it. If you

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find yourself reporting speech passively, think carefully about whether or not you need to
summarise in this manner, or if you should be writing a dialogue scene.

As far as tagging is concerned, there are about a thousand verbs in English that mean
‘said,’ but this is one situation in which it’s OK to repeat a word. ‘Said’ is so accepted by
readers to indicate that someone is saying something that they don’t even notice it, whereas
varied and unconventional verbs draw attention to themselves and make the dialogue sound
artificial. ‘Asked,’ ‘shouted’ and ‘whispered’ are acceptable, but I’d let it go at that.
Remember to start a new paragraph for each change of speaker, and punctuate correctly.
You’d be amazed how many people get this wrong.

9. A SETTING

It is the task of the novelist to capture the essence of people, places and era as well as
conveying contextual information and physical appearance in a fresh and stylish way. Good
descriptive writing provides the fine detail that brings the story to life, and without this you’re
just writing a script. Approach the world of your novel in a similar way to character
development and do your homework. This is particularly important in historical writing,
fantasy and science fiction: readers love vanished worlds and elaborate, speculative cultures.

Following on from world building, the real secret of original and authentic description
is concise observation. A novelist notices the hidden; defamiliarise: as a writer, your job is to
view and interpret the world around you with insight and originality. Avoid purple prose, and
remember to show and not tell. In descriptive writing you need to do just enough to trigger
recognition in the mind of your reader, and nothing more. There was a time, in the era of
Dickens and Hardy, when the authorial voice of the novel would routinely halt the drama in
order to describe places and their histories at great length. This era is has now passed.

As with dialogue, avoid the expository. Aim always to be subtle, oblique and deep –
don’t just summarise. Readers should be aware of information, but not of how they receive
it. Try to see things through the eyes of your characters. This will make description integral to
the plot, not something stuck on afterwards. If you look closely at traditionally published
novels, you’ll notice that tight, seamless description is most frequently used to link and
change scenes or to break up dialogue, providing a gentle break between events and
conversations, while also setting the next scene and revealing character.

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 10. STRUCTURE: A BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END

From classical tragedy to Hollywood, any fiction narrative can usefully be divided into the
following sections:

Act One/The Introduction: Make the first scene a good one: establish your primary
character, set the scene, state the dramatic premise, and start the story. You ideally need a
tight opening scene that locates your protagonist just before a moment of crisis or change.
The opening line of your book should be crafted to gain your reader’s undivided attention,
and the closing line of the first scene should evoke this change in circumstance and/or be
significant in some way. After that you can coast for a bit, but try to keep your first act
relatively short, concluding with an event – or ‘plot point’ – that drives the main character
from his or her normal life toward an unfamiliar and often crisis situation, sending the
narrative off in a different and unexpected direction and setting up the main story.

Act Two/The Main Body of the Text: The story develops through a series of complications
and obstructions, as forces are marshalled against each other and tension rises and falls
through a sequence of dramatic scenes. These forces must collide at the climax to this story.
This is often referred to by novelists as the storyteller’s ‘promise.’ The second act should end
with a plot point that sets up this collision.

Act Three/The Climax and Denouement:

The Climax is the money shot, the decisive confrontation towards which your narrative has
been inextricably moving. This is the chapter in which the villain plays his final hand, the
lovers are re-united, simmering family tensions finally boil over, and the quest reaches its
goal. If Hollywood options your novel, this is the scene the producers are after: ‘Smile, you
son of a bitch!’

The Denouement follows the climax and briefly wraps up the story. Mark Twain famously
described this as ‘the marryin’ and the buryin’.’ The denouement should show the
consequences of the plot and the fate of any significant characters not dealt with in the
climax. A successful denouement should offer some level of concise dramatic closure. Let
your reader down gently, but by the same token don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

11. KEEP WRITING

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Don’t stop. This is something you learn by doing, while all novels are put together one word
at a time. Write every day, and keep a running tally of words written every week for
motivation. If you add 500 new words to your work in progress every day then in six months
you’ll have written 90,000 words and that’s the first draft of your novel. And don’t expect too
much of your first draft. Never compare and despair. A lot of new writers give up too soon
because they convince themselves that a work in progress doesn’t meet the standard of their
favourite published novels, forgetting how much work these things took. This is a vicious
circle because you can only get better if you keep writing, but you don’t write because you’re
not already better at it. At this point you ‘block’ and then the perfectly realisable dream of
writing a novel is over. ‘If I waited for perfection,’ Margaret Atwood once said, ‘I would
never write a word.’

If this happens then follow the immortal advice of William Stafford: ‘Lower your
standards and keep writing.’ Remember that is the redrafting and the editing that counts, but
you can’t do that until you’ve got something to redraft and edit. Every good novel starts out
as a diamond in the rough, and all this revision is just part of the creative process. ‘The first
draft,’ said Terry Pratchett, ‘is just you telling yourself the story,’ while Ernest Hemingway
(Nobel Laureate, 1954), probably said it best: ‘First drafts are s**t.’

12. EDITORIAL REVISION

Only when this first draft is there, in front of you, can purposeful editing commence, because,
let’s face it, a lot of it is going to be pretty rough, and it’s probably far too long. In writing, as
in all the arts, there is an exuberant and spontaneous phase, but this won’t carry you all the
way to the successful completion of a serious professional project. A ‘draft’ is a preliminary
version of a document, and to ‘redraft’ is to write this document in a different way. ‘Editing’
is slightly different, as in addition to the implicit draft modifications, it also includes
correcting technical errors and preparing a document for publication. So ‘editing’ is about
layout, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, while ‘redrafting’ is more concerned with
structure, content, style, and word choice. If you want to craft a novel of a professional
standard then accept that you’re going to have to take it through several drafts and then copy-
edit and proof the manuscript word by word.

This level of refinement should be as liberating as the initial composition. As the poet
Rebecca Luce-Kaplar wrote of revising her work, ‘Through the work of rewriting the writer

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can discover the beauty of the piece.’ Think of editing as a safety net, a system of constant re-
evaluation that goes hand-in-hand with the imagination that inspired you to write in the first
place and which enables you to not just tell a story but tell it well.

IN CONCLUSION

OK, I know there’s a lot more to it than this, but these are the basics and, just like basketball
and tattooing, it’s important to know your fundamentals. I’m equally aware of a growing
online lobby that basically says you should just get on with it and that people like me should
shut the hell up and let people write without the complication of theory. Looking at the sheer
volume of creative writing hustlers out there exploiting the e-pub boom I take the point, but
speaking as someone in publishing all I can respond honestly is that unpolished novels
banged out in haste read exactly how you’d expect, with half-a-million self-published books a
year effectively making the slush pile public. In the words of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
‘Easy writing’s vile hard reading,’ while by the same rationale amateurs would be
prosecuting murder cases, performing brain surgery and installing central heating. I’m not
sure why knowing what you’re doing in the arts is so contentious, but I am a bit old
fashioned. Skills need to be studied, learned and practiced – you’re not just born with them.
You might have a natural flair for writing, and your first novel might turn out quite well, or
even go viral, but most of the time it won’t, and there are just far too many books in the world
for anyone to waste their time reading a bad one.

Like they say in The X Factor: ‘How hard are you prepared to work?’

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