Lots of novelists think hard about the total impact of their story, their characters-in-plot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right, obviously. Is this ending impactful enough? Does my middle section hold the attention? Do my characters engage the reader?\u00a0<\/p>\n
All good stuff. And of course, impact can be measured in a lot of ways. Yes, car chases and shootings have a very clear kind of impact. But humour makes an impact. A really strong emotional drama does. An astonishing revelation. A creeping sense of dread. And so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s impact. You want to maximise it. Good.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But personally, my obsession comes to its peak with a slightly different metric. Not total impact, but impact per page. I want a book where each page feels thick with some kind of adhesive force (excitement, humour, romance, revelation, whatever.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
That obsession of mine \u2013 with density not just impact \u2013 gives rise to a few different sub-obsessions. So I\u2019m Mr Stingy when it comes to words. If I reckon I can clip two words out of a sentence, I\u2019ll do that every time. If I can remove one word, I\u2019ll do that. Because my first-person character also tends to the extremely laconic, I find myself dropping main verbs often. Any tiny bagginess in the prose feels like a mainsail flapping loose.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the first, easiest, most obvious way to increase density, but there are plenty of side-tricks too. So I\u2019m very interested in a rich sense of place, because a rich sense of physical being just makes any scene feel more vibrantly present. I\u2019m interested in humour, because it\u2019s a brilliant cheaty way to hop your way through relatively dull passages and scenes. Any interesting and engaging character also gives you a get out. You just wind them up, let them do what they do, and let the reader peep horrified\/delighted\/thrilled at the results.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But I want to talk in this email about one specific side-trick that just always works. It may or may not suit the story you\u2019re writing at the moment, but, you know what?, it probably does.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s this:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Family.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Harry\u2019s Law on Family<\/strong> is this: Take any set of interactions around any set of characters and \u00a0that set of interactions will feel more profound, dramatic and consequential if some portion of that inner group of characters are family. Oh yes, and it\u2019s fine if some of the family are dead\/missing.\u00a0<\/p>\n The easiest way to understand this is to observe just how often family signifiies. To pick a few bestsellers:\u00a0<\/p>\n Harry Potter<\/strong>: Harry\u2019s orphanhood and the role of his real vs fake parents is absolutely crucial to the whole architecture. Yes, JK Rowling\u2019s use of family is interesting in that HP\u2019s parents are dead \u2026 but as we\u2019ll see that trick isn\u2019t so uncommon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Girl with a Dragon Tattoo<\/strong>. Same thing. Lisbeth is (effectively) an orphan. That\u2019s absolutely central to her depiction in the stories.\u00a0<\/p>\n Da Vinci Code<\/strong>: OK, in this rather silly story, Robert Langton\u2019s family is of no consequence. But the goal at the end of the rather silly enterprise is understanding something astonishing about a rather famous family story.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gone Girl<\/strong>. Amy\u2019s relationship with her parents (and their creation of Amazing Amy, a sort of surrogate daughter) is also central.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wolf Hall<\/strong>. Family, admittedly the family of a court, lies at the heart of the whole enterprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s absolutely true of my Fiona books too, where Fiona\u2019s series-length quest is to find out who her biological father is (and why she landed up with the adoptive one she loves.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Strip the whole family story out of any of these things and they feel thinner poorer things.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still don\u2019t believe me? Then ask yourself which of these lines packs more power:\u00a0<\/p>\n Luke, I am your father.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Luke, I\u2019m a roofing guy who did a bit of work for your cousin Mark a little whiles back now.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n (And yes: I know that even the first line there is a misquotation.)<\/p>\n The moral of these thoughts? Well, it\u2019s mostly to keep your story architecture compact and to pull things back to family where you can. I\u2019d say that birth family has most force. Then the protagonist\u2019s own children carry next most force. Actual marriage relationships are weaker, but still important. After that, nothing else really signifies in our tiny little reptilian brains.\u00a0<\/p>\n (With one big exception: I have a theory that books aimed at teenagers don\u2019t really care about birth family. Because teens are so impelled to look outwards from their family, you often don\u2019t get a lot of power from bringing family into YA books. It\u2019s all about the love interest.)\u00a0<\/p>\n You can think about these things from early on. So let\u2019s say that you are writing a standard police procedural. Your character is a cop. The structure of the book is going to be: murder, investigation, solution. But you can still bring family in. Is the criminal somehow involved with a parent? Or is the parent? Or a parent is actually the Chief of Police? Or a famous prosecutor? You only have to toss out those questions to see how instant the sense of enrichment can be. And how multiple the sense of potential new storylines.<\/p>\n Best of all: enrichment = increased density of impact.<\/p>\n And I love density.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thanks all for your reaction to our promotional stuff last weekend. The response pretty much blew our socks off and we\u2019ve been walking barefoot through the cold, cold frosts ever since. But happily of course. Who needs socks?<\/p>\n So, tell me, does your story have family at its hea<\/em><\/strong>rt? And if it doesn’t, could it? What’s your set up? Do you think Harry’s Law is right or wrong? Let’s take our socks off and all have a Heated Debate.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lots of novelists think hard about the total impact of their story, their characters-in-plot.\u00a0 That\u2019s right, obviously. Is this ending impactful enough? Does my middle section hold the attention? Do my characters engage the reader?\u00a0 All good stuff. And of course, impact can be measured in a lot of ways. Yes, car chases and shootings<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":6060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n