The three page novel

A friend of mine is a painter. He was in a grump the other day because he’d been working all morning on a new canvas, then decided the picture wasn’t going anywhere. His plan was to scrape the canvas down – scrap it, in effect – and start on something else the following day. He moaned about a morning’s wasted effort.

Well, he didn’t get much sympathy from me.

(I’ll tell you why in half a second, but the last of my triumvirate of writing books is out at the end of this month. It’s called HOW TO WRITE and – in its previous, Bloomsbury, incarnation – it got lots of nice comments from readers. We’re looking for people who would like an Advance Review Copy. The e-book will be yours totally free. Your only commitment is that you’ll leave an honest review on Amazon when we publish. More info in the PS. And here endeth the public service announcement.)

Right. Back to painting and all that.

Now, for one thing, a painter’s decision whether to commit to a project is just a much smaller deal. My buddy thought he had a good subject for a painting. He tried it out. He didn’t like it. He decided to do something different.

For a painter, that’s a day. For a novelist, that’s a year. And – especially if you rely on your writing income for a living – that’s a year you literally can’t afford.

That’s one reason why I make a big deal about elevator pitches. You just can’t afford to go bombing off on a project where the basic idea is flawed.

But also – editing.

My painter buddy can just step back from his canvas and see, at a glance, if he’s happy with it. He literally has to take one backwards step. That’s all.

A screenwriter has more of a challenge, but even so, she has only 20,000 words to deal with – an easy hour’s read.

You lot – you brutes – have work that often runs to 100,000 words or more. My first novel weighed in at 180,000 words. The final book was like a blue and gold brick. And don’t get me wrong. I love long work; I’m almost incapable of writing briefly.

But the editorial challenge is huge, even at the basic level of evaluating your own project. Instead of the painter’s simple backwards step and visual assessment, we might have to spend six hours reading the damn manuscript. And having done that, we’ve got a ton of intersecting thoughts and issues. We’ve half-forgotten our opening thoughts by the time we get to our closing ones. And the implementation phase is even more arduous than the evaluation one.

So: what to do?

The obvious answer is: you just plunge in.

Gotta problem with Character A? Dive into your 100,000 word swimming pool, find references to Character A, tweak what you need to tweak, then get out dripping and wet.

Got a plot problem with that bit after the escape from the castle? Then dive in again, tweak again, do what you have to do.

And so on. Given that you may have a whole string of editing issues to fix, that’s a lot of dives into your swimming pool – or, worse, you decide you’re going to deal with everything at once, which means you soon start drowning in word-porridge. You fix one thing but accidentally break two others, and because you can never just step back and see your manuscript at a glance, you don’t even see the breakages.

Now, any pro author ends up evolving their own methods for handling these issues. (Common elements include: washing less, drinking a lot of coffee, sleeping at weird times, forgetting about your family and developing a tic.)

But watching the magnificent Rachael Herron at the Summer Festival brought a new clarity for me.

Assuming you’ve written your first draft, here’s what she suggests you should do:

You go through your entire manuscript. You note down every scene and summarise it in a sentence. Like this:

• Jed and Tania argue
• Tania drives to her mother’s
• Arrives with mother – encounters sobbing Elinor
• Jed smashes up holiday cottage

And so on.

That exercise, for the whole book.

To make this work, it’s critical that your scene summaries are as brief as possible. A maximum of one line of text. That way, you can print off your summary of the book on two or three sheets of paper – and you can just see it. The whole damn book. The entire skeleton laid out before you.

That brevity is illuminating. Take those little bullet points above. Do you need the “Tania drives to her mother’s” scene, yes or no?

Well, OK, that depends on the story. If Tania, while driving, has thoughts / reflections / memories that shift her world a bit, so the Tania who gets out of the car is different from the one who got it, then the scene probably stays.

But not all scenes are like that. Maybe, you just wrote the scene because you thought “gotta get Tania to her mother’s” and forgot you could just write, So Tania drove over to her mother’s house, where she …

In that case, you certainly don’t need the scene – but that extraneous material only becomes obvious once you don’t have the texture of a fully-written scene to seduce you.

Rachael Herron encourages us to take things a step further. She likes you to define your theme in a phrase: ‘Family is chosen’, ‘Love wins’, ‘Heroes can be unsung.’

Now, I’m not sure my books would be happy to get reduced in that way. For me, theme is best understood more loosely. For me, it’s more like a collection of words and ideas, rich in opposites. (So underclass is a theme of my Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, for example. But that also means power is a theme, because you understand the powerless via the powerful and vice versa.)

So you can define your themes narrowly or loosely, but Rachael says you should take your skeleton outline and ask of every scene whether it somehow embodies or reflects on that theme.

If it does, then great. The scene probably belongs in the book and your editorial task is simply to make that theme as strong as it can be. So that Tania-in-a-car scene might have her grappling with her “heroes can be unsung” thoughts and memories, in which case it certainly belongs. But if the scene has no thematic resonance, you ditch it.

Or you change it.

You might, for example, need a particular character to die to advance your plot. But then how to do they die? Is their manner of death one that harmonises with the moods and melodies of the book, or not? And if not, then what might work better?

Personally, I don’t get quite as systematic as Rachael does, but I’m generally quite a messy worker, anyway. I also like my books to have some rough edges. Some elements that don’t quite fit into a system.

What I do love, though, is the absolute clarity of her approach. Your book in three pages.

I’m knee deep in my detective story at the moment. I’m at about 60,000 words and (because I never write short) I’m still a good 50,000 words from the end.

But I already know that some of my earlier text needs redoing. There’s a character, Anders, who needs to enter the story way earlier than he does.

In my pre-Rachael Herron life, I’d have just gone back and created the scene. My forward motion through my text would have been put on hold while I dealt that little episode. In Herron-world, I don’t need to do that. I just keep a skeleton log of my book as I go and enter a note or a post-it which says, “Introduce Anders here”. By the time I get to the end of my book, I’ll have a whole flapping horde of those notes, which I can just deal with one by one.

And yes, those notes will breed more notes, but that three-page skeleton will remain the iron spine running through all the editorial work I do – the organising principle.

I think that, thanks to these disciplines, I’ve just figured a midpoint sequence in my book that may yet make the whole damn thing hang together. (Think highly trained & physically capable psychos spilling out en masse across the Welsh countryside. Yum.)

That’s it from me. The children think they’ve found a coronavirus in the garden and want me to come and look at it. It’s green, apparently, and the size of a walnut.

_______

As mentioned above, we have some free e-copies of HOW TO WRITE to give away. It’s a really big writer’s guide to writing a novel, from first conception to final editing, with everything else included along the way. If you would like an advance review copy, then:

1. Please email publishing@jerichowriters.com with “HOW TO WRITE” in the subject line please
2. Please let us know if you usually shop from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or some other Amazon store. If you never shop at Amazon, then they won’t let you leave a review, I’m afraid.
3. We will send you a free e-book, which will be yours to keep.
4. Your commitment is that you will leave a review on Amazon promptly on the book’s publication at the end of this month (or, maybe, the start of Sept; we haven’t yet finalised details.) We’ll be in touch at the time to nudge you and we’ll tell you exactly how to leave a review.

We’re are especially keen to get plenty of US reviewers for this book, so if you’re based in the States, do please get in touch.