The time investment is massive and, even after that, it's difficult to ask others to invest their time in what you have written. Writing these behemoths can be dispiriting and pretty darn anti-social, but it is so worth it.
Over the next few weeks, nay months, I will be sharing bits of the novels I've been working on and, hopefully, starting a serialised novel to be published fortnightly.
But how to get started with a novel?
1) Wherever the idea comes from (check out out an earlier post on forming characters), the piece starts with an idea. But it's worth thinking about what sets the idea apart - do that at an earlier stage and you might adjust the trajectory of the story the few degrees it needs to be special and different.
2) I've found it helpful with my first novels to break it into a series of arcs, so I can feel in control of it. Looking at it as interrelated narratives, helps it to keep fresh for you and the reader.
3) Try not to make the characters too idealised. Maybe it's just me, but it's the flaws that make a character human. They don't have to be incompetent, but they should be human.
4) Efficiency! This is a bit more specific and I'm paraphrasing advice I've found from a series of books etc:
a) Use adverbs like they cost money and you're writing on a budget. When we're kids we're told be creatively and write "Todd said maddeningly" or "Sarah snapped aggressively". Well "snapped" does enough work there - we do not need "aggressively", especially if the dialogue is chosen wisely.
b) Try and tell us about the charcter in the way they talk as well as what they say. Show don't tell! You'll often find that you are then free to chop out a lot of the information you would otherwise directly tell the reader (why tell us he was unhappy when you can show it to us?). Besides, how often do we say "I watched the film, but the book was much better"? It's not just detail, it's the fact you have to work more with a book and it's more rewarding because of that - It's a puzzle the reader has solved. Give your readers a puzzle and they'll keep reading.
c) Read through your sentences - aloud. I do teach English (don't shoot me!) and the single most common bit of advice I give students is to read their work aloud. They don't even have to read it to anyone else - when you hear what you've written (and you have to read word for word, pausing only for punctuation) you see silly slips you've made and, more importantly, you get a feel for the fluency for the piece. The flow of it.
5) Treat each chapter as a short story with a beginning , middle and end. And when I say end, leave some kind of a cliffhanger to make the reader desperate to learn more. It's one of the reasons Dan Brown is as successful as he is.
6) From drafting and drafting (so much redrafting!) it gets shorter and shorter but, as better authors than me have said, no story is ever ruined by being shorter. It may be painful, but my first tip is to strip it back to the bone. You may fight tooth and nail to keep a sentence, a paragraph, even a chapter... but does it really need to be there? We always have a nagging feeling, this sense that you need someone to say 'cut it', but ignore it until we are forced to do it.
It's painful, but I found my instinct was right. It knew best. Cut the thing. Often what I thought of as flourishes was really a load of old waffle.
Really a lot of tips carry over for whatever you write, but keep them in mind and it'll help you to add a little more polish to your work.
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