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FINAL TIPS FOR YOUR GREAT NOVEL
The author of Writing a Blockbuster Novel states (P117-178):
Plotting a blockbuster novel, in addition to the outlining and scene-building techniques already discussed, usually requires other strategies as well. One such strategy is to start a story not at a beginning when its characters first meet or when some other precipitating event takes place, but instead at a point where the action is well underway and already moving toward a climax. These 'beginning events,' which took place before (sometimes long before) what happens on the first few pages or even the first few chapters, are called backstory. Such past happenings, often secret or unknown to at least one character, may become revelations that jolt the present action and sometimes transform a moderately exciting plot into a thrilling one. Even in a story whose action is almost totally in the present, the injection of a plot-twisting complication arising from the past can significantly heighten the drama.
BACKSTORY
You as author, in an outline only for yourself, should create your story from its initiating crucial event, going as far back in time as seems interesting or helpful. Give your main characters life histories that set our how and why they have become who they are. Establish clearly the major actions that have gone on between these characters. Then decided at what later point in their lives the novel will begin, how much of the backstory, if any, will actualIy be dramatized in the novel, and where and how it will be presented - as author narration, a character's memory, dramatic flashback, or some combination of these.
Backstory techniques
This passage of the past can be interwoven, in small units, through several chapters of your story in the present. BUT, solidly establish ongoing action before bringing in any substantial backstory. Don't 'dive into the past' after
introducing a main character and what is at stake in the present.
- Present the backstory straight forwardly in a dedicated chapter or two at a suitable place in the text
- A good technique is to 'bring a character to a moment of decision, slip back into the past, and then use this past even as the influencing or triggering factor for how the character chooses to act'.
PLOTS should move a conflict from winning to losing, to winning - as in a great football match. There should be room for sub-plots, romantic and comic. Sub-plots must weave into the main thrust, somehow. Standing alone they are weak. For comic relief, have an oddball character who serves mainly to lighten the mood eg. The gravedigger in Hamlet, the gatekeeper in MacBeth
STORY POINTS
- Every page should have something 'new'. More than just descriptive, for instance. Something has to happen
- Lay out 10 to 30 story points for every chapter; small and middling actions that should ideally mount in intensity and lead inexorably to your climax.
- In re-writing the second, or even the 10th draft (!!) ensure that the story points have been worked in.
- Take out the excess dialogue, description, digression and other flab
- Build and tighten the linkage within the story
- Even a meticulously planned and ?final? 5th draft should be changed in its writing to allow literature instead of "mellowdrama".
- The larger-than-life action must be drawn out in suspense.
- The relationships of all the characters must be brought to differing climaxes.
PUBLISHING
After your book has been criticised by professionals (please don't ask), find another who has not seen the improving versions you have written, and let him [I prefer 'her'] read yet another "final" version with new eyes; cold turkey.
IF you can do all this, and never falter
You'll be a man/woman, my son\daughter.
but
IF you can blockbust to a bestselling alter
You will have turned wine to non-tasting water.
or
IF you can avoid doing all these things
You will find what happiness brings.
Final advice:
Use your literary talents in any way you will, but don't dog us with doggerel |
