To Write a Better Novel – Build a Stronger Story

To write a good novel is one of the most demanding storytelling tasks imaginable. But there are ways to make it less daunting.

Back in the last century, I drove my daughter Olivia to pre-school every morning. And every morning, she had a task for me: tell her the story of Cinderella, start to finish, in the approximately 10 minutes it took to get from our house to her pre-school.

Simple, right? But I wasn’t very good at it.

I’ve always had trouble staying on track, and so no two tellings were alike. In one, the King would be an important plot force; in another, hardly a presence at all. I would assign actions to the wrong characters, bungle the order of things, or leave out key plot points. The King would be an important plot factor in one; in another, hardly a presence at all. Sometimes the ugly sisters got a little sympathy, other times they were irredeemably awful. I would bungle the order of things, assign important actions to the wrong characters, even leave out key plot points.

With her 4-year-old’s sharp eye for the literal, Olivia would correct me as we went. “Dad, Dad… Doesn’t the Fairy Godmother say a magic word? She does.”

As I got smoother, my consistency improved. Sequence, my traditional nemesis, fell into line. I stopped leaving out important givens. And unlike the “do-it-again” toddler rituals I normally tired of so quickly, this one got more and more interesting. Running the narrative sprint day after day not only made me adept, it also prompted my unconscious to offer up new material. And that new material was enriching my personal 10-minute version of Cinderella.

Every novel in progress goes through an extended patch somewhere in the middle where the writer either loses touch with the original story or worse, realizes there never was one.This shouldn’t cause panic; it should be expected, just as tornados are anticipated in storm season.

My Cinderella experience suggested a story-clarifying strategy to me: simply “tell” the story, in the form of a freewrite, every morning for a week. Tell it 7 times on 7 straight days. Have you ever actually tried that–to tell the story of your novel in ten minutes, over and over?

Try it now: it won’t feel good. You may even feel compelled to break off. But don’t. For one thing, freewriting doesn’t allow you to stop. Even with a blank mind, you must keep writing, writing, writing…something, anything…with a relentless thrust forward that can make you feel ridiculous, even (briefly, one hopes) mindless.

Trust the chaos if it’s headed in the right direction. Forcing you to tell your story beat-by-beat, from inciting incident, through extended conflict, to completion, over and over until finally the unconscious tires of the repetition and begins to throw out insights, twists, and character observations will lead you to new conflicts, new scenes, rich ideas. Before you know it, you will have taken your meandering original story into unimaginably new territory.

Do this: schedule a week during which each day, before you do anything else, you set a timer for 10 minutes (or 20, if you wish, or 30) and freewriite straight through your story, from beginning to end. Do this every day for seven days. When you feel resistance–and you will–it’s because no one relishes the prospect of throwing himself against a wall over and over.

And don’t expect what you do to look pretty on paper, especially at first, because you will be essentially lost as you freewrite into your own darkness. There will be lines, paragraphs, even pages of freewriting that embarrass you with their triviality, or vulgarity, or lack of authority.

So what?

Humble your pride. Let yourself look bad. It’s freewriting: no one will ever have to see it but you. Letting go your vanity is a small price to pay, but be ready for it and know that you’re paying for an amazing growth and transformation process, a process that will make you and your novel look a LOT better down the line.