A Novel in a Year

A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist

Louise Doughty

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781398513358
• eBook ISBN: 9781847394781

'The art of writing, ' Kingsley Amis said, 'is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair.' So start now. Take up a notebook and pen, and write one sentence… Can you write a novel in a year? If you simply sit back and think about the enormity of writing a book, it will seem like a vast and unconquerable task, impossibly daunting. The way to make it less daunting is to break it down into its constituent parts, to do it bit by bit. Over the chapters herein, different aspects of technique are divided up into bite size chunks, the better to aid digestion. The book will look at different aspects of writing, with set exercises to help the reader along in their confidence and technique. It is designed to be read a chapter aweek, with the aim of the fledgling writer having a body of material at the year's end which should form a solid start to their novel. Deeply practical, with sound advice at every stage, A NOVEL IN A YEAR is essential reading for any would-be novelist.

WEEK 1

Some years ago, I was sitting in a café with a writer friend. He was a comedy-sketch writer whose first full-length work for television was in production. I was a part-time secretary who had published a few book reviews, had a play accepted by BBC radio and was working on my first novel. We were both living in cheap rented rooms, earning a living doing bits of this and that and full of hopes and ambitions for our professional futures.

My friend had just come from giving a talk to a group of sixth-formers. One of them had asked, ‘Why did you become a writer?’

‘You know what?’ he said to me, stirring his cappuccino. ‘I gave them some flannel about the joy of language and the process of creativity, but actually, the real reason I became a writer was so that I could move to London and sit in cafés with other writers and talk about why I became a writer.’

I knew exactly what he meant. For those of us, like me and him, who come from decidedly non-literary backgrounds, there is something wonderful about Being a Writer–all the shallow stuff we are supposed to despise: the café talk, the book launches, the scanning of literary pages feeling guiltily gratified when a friend gets a bad review. Forget for a moment the loneliness and fear, the paranoia and financial insecurity, Being a Writer is great fun.

But there is a catch. You have to write. This is something that would-be writers sometimes seem not to have grasped. Like many novelists, I often give talks at festivals or teach on residential writing courses, and the commonest question is, ‘How did you get your first novel published?’ This is a perfectly valid question but I sometimes feel the motivation behind it is suspect. What was your trick? is what they mean. Tell me your trick, because when I know it, I will be published too. It would sound arrogant to reply, ‘I was published because I wrote a good book’, but it would be more honest and perhaps disabuse aspiring writers of the notion that being published is some kind of holy mystery, or only happens if you have ‘contacts’. For the record, I had absolutely none, even after I had done the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, a course widely and mythically believed to offer a passport to publication. I got an agent because I won a runner-up prize in a short-story competition that was open to all unpublished writers. I got a publisher because I eventually wrote a novel good enough for the agent to sell. If you are a would-be novelist, it may seem baffling to you that so many bad novels get published but it doesn’t change the very unbaffling fact that if you want to publish a novel yourself, you have to write a good one.

Very few people write a good novel on their first attempt. I certainly didn’t. My first published novel was actually the third one I had finished, and that’s not counting the numerous false starts, often thousands of words long, novels that came to nothing after months of work. If you, too, have had those false starts, it is important not to get disheartened by them and to remember that they are a necessary part of the process. I always chortle when I read an earnest biographer writing of Mr or Mrs Great Dead Author, ‘If only he/she had not destroyed those early manuscripts, what treasures must have lain therein!’ Poppycock. Mr or Mrs Great Dead Author burned the early stuff because it was rubbish.

The work you will produce if you follow the remaining chapters of this book may well be one of those false starts–if you don’t have a good idea for a book, then there is nothing I or anyone else can do to plant one in your head. If you do the exercises I set, what you will end up with will not be a novel, it won’t even be the first draft of a novel, it will be a body of work, the raw material, which you may one day be able to shape and work on until it becomes a book.

How long does it take to write a novel? Well, it depends. My first novel, Crazy Paving, was written while I was a part-time secretary and took me eighteen months. That’s quite quick, actually, but I was young and single and had no domestic commitments. By the time it came to writing my second, I was theatre critic for a Sunday newspaper, which meant I had all day to write before leaving the house, owl-like, to go to the theatre in the evenings: as day jobs go, it was a corker. Dance with Me was written in seven months. My third novel was sold on the strength of a one-page proposal when I was pregnant with my first child. I promised my publisher the book would be delivered before the baby but I was lying through my teeth. Baby arrived when I was one chapter in. My partner worked full-time and we had no childcare but I still had to finish the book as we had spent the advance on buying a flat to have the baby in. Honey-Dew was written in eight months while I was half-dead with exhaustion. There’s a reason why it’s my shortest book.

Then came my fourth, Fires in the Dark, which was a huge departure for me. My first three had all been contemporary and peopled by women characters roughly the same age as myself. The events in them weren’t remotely autobiographical–Honey-Dew is about a girl who murders her parents–but it’s fair to say that in terms of their landscape, language and scope, they were within my own experience. Fires in the Dark is set in Central Europe over three decades of the twentieth century. It is about a boy who is from a tribe of nomadic Kalderash Roma. Born in a barn in rural Bohemia, he grows up during the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism, is interned in a camp, and escapes to take part in the Prague Uprising of May 1945. It was three times the length of Honey-Dew and took me four and a half years to write. My fifth, Stone Cradle, was also a long, historical novel but was written in a quarter of the time because I had learned that you don’t need to know absolutely everything about an historical period to write historical fiction.

So, in other words, how long is a piece of string? Your novel will take you as long as it takes you–but I’m going to stick my neck out and say that if you haven’t written a book before and are really serious about it and have the normal encumberments that many of us have, a job or a family or–heaven forbid–both, then you are looking at around three years from start to finish. This book can guide you through Year One, which is when you will get started, gather material, make notes, plan, write some scenes. In Year Two, you will despair, put it aside, come back to it, think you are wasting your time and then realise you want to go on anyway. Year Three is when the real work of rewriting and honing will begin.

Still want to do it? Good, we’ll get started in a minute.

Before we do, let’s establish a few things that this book does not do. It does not, bar a few general pointers at the end, give advice on how to get into print. When I was writing my newspaper column, I was absolutely firm that any letters or emails asking me how to get an agent or publisher would be made into a ceremonial pyre in my back garden and torched. This may have been cruel but I stand by it. Any aspiring author should be spending only 1 per cent of their time thinking about how to get an agent and the other 99 per cent on devising an engaging plot, creating convincing characters and writing clear and beautiful prose. Too many would-be writers have that 1 per cent and 99 per cent the wrong way round. Getting published may seem impossible, and often is, but if you haven’t written a good book yet then quite frankly it’s the least of your problems. Your only concern right now should be to write. Write your book, write it well, then rewrite it even better.

It’s at this point, I suspect, that one or two of you might be getting a little sneery, particularly if you’ve already written a novel that hasn’t been published, or are a veteran of a creative writing evening class. Engaging plot? Convincing characters? Clear prose? Pah! That’s for beginners.

I used to teach on one of those evening classes. My least talented students were invariably the ones who came with a curled lip, convinced that they were far cleverer than anyone else in the group and that the only reason they weren’t a published writer like me was because of some vast conspiracy against them, of which I was naturally a part. On the one hand, they wanted to touch the hem of my garment, as if being published was a virus they would catch if they rubbed up against me long and irritatingly enough. On the other hand, they were convinced they had nothing to learn about actual writing and despised themselves and their fellow students for even being there. Here is this week’s aperçu: we all have something to learn. Even Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrison still have something to learn, and the reason they are great writers is because they know it and work bloody hard on each and every book.

Nobody can teach talent, and if you read this book you will be no more or less talented at the end of it than when you started. Nuts and bolts can be taught, though, and there is more nuts and bolts to novel-writing than many novelists care to admit. Take plotting and structure, for instance, one of my favourite topics. ‘All stories have a beginning, a middle and an end,’ said Jean-Luc Godard, ‘just not necessarily in that order.’ It’s cute, but it isn’t true. Even books that appear to be completely artless and plotless have a structure of sorts by reason of the fact that they are novels and if they didn’t have any structure they would be thoughts. ‘Every time I am about to start a novel,’ says the highly accomplished and experienced Susan Hill, ‘I look at it, and it is like a mountain and I say to myself, oh no, this time you have gone too far.’ If you simply sit back and think about the enormity of writing a book, let’s say of 80,000 words, it will seem a vast and unconquerable task, impossibly daunting. The way to make it less daunting is to break it down into its constituent parts, to do it bit by bit. Over the chapters that follow, different aspects of technique are divided up into bite-sized chunks, the better to aid digestion. Many of these topics overlap, of course, and doing an exercise on dialogue, for instance, may well send you shooting off into writing a passage of description. That’s okay. At this stage, your writing does not have to be perfectly ordered, there would be something a bit peculiar if it was. The main thing is to get as many words on the page as possible. You can always sort out the mess later.

‘The art of writing,’ Kingsley Amis said, ‘is the art of applying the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of one’s chair.’ So start now. Take up a notebook and pen…

EXERCISE 1

…and write one sentence, beginning with the words, ‘The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me…’ Write more than a sentence if you like but just one sentence is fine.

It may be that thinking about how you finish that sentence gives you an idea for another, and another, and another…but it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t. It may be that while you are doing this first-sentence exercise, an idea pops into your head for a first sentence that is entirely your own but, again, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t. Just complete the one I’ve suggested if that is all you feel like for now.

While you are doing this exercise, you may well find a small, mocking voice whispering in your ear. It will be saying things like, ‘Don’t be stupid, you can’t write a novel,’ or, maybe, ‘This is stupid, I’m too clever for this.’ Both thoughts are equally destructive and both must be ignored. Everyone has to start somewhere. Laurence Sterne, Emily Brontë, Nadine Gordimer all started somewhere. Every novel in the history of literature began with one sentence, so begin.

WEEK 2

You are going to start writing a novel. What do you think might be the most useful thing you can do to prepare? Sharpen your pencils, perhaps? Clear the bank statements from your desk or the crumbs from the kitchen table in order to have a flat surface? Prune the privet hedge so it won’t annoy you when you look up and glimpse it through the window?

There are many ways in which one can prepare to write a novel but there is one thing you can do, and continue doing, which will really help. You must read.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been at events with other novelists and heard them say, ‘Well, I don’t actually read other writers when I am working on a book myself.’ To not read when you are writing seems as odd as refusing to listen to any French when you are trying to learn it. Do athletes not watch anyone else running while they are training? Do surgeons say, ‘I think it’s best to ignore any new medical developments while I’m practising myself’?

Writers who don’t read would probably defend themselves by claiming they don’t want to be influenced by others but that strikes me as an equally odd position. Bad writing can be an incredibly positive influence if you learn to analyse why it is bad and resolve not to do the same. Good writing can also be helpful, although in many ways less so. When a sentence is bad, it is often obvious why. A good sentence is often good not just because of the mere assemblage of words on the page but because of the context in which it is set, the way in which the novelist has prepared the ground for this wonderful line or observation.

Most helpful of all, I think, is a novel where the writing is good and bad, which luckily for you includes the vast majority of contemporary fiction. And here we come across a word you should take note of: contemporary. I don’t wish to discourage you from reading the classics–unless it’s Henry James, in which case I would discourage you from even giving him room on the shelves in your toilet. (Oxfam likes unwanted books, I believe.) But if, as is almost certainly the case, your time is precious and you are trying to focus intently on your own work, you will get more practical help from reading Hilary Mantel or Graham Swift than you will from George Eliot or Leo Tolstoy. All writers are a product of their era, however timeless the themes of their writing or the excellence of their prose. If all you read is Dostoevsky, then however much you enjoy his work as a reader, as a writer you will simply get depressed because you will never be Dostoevsky. But if Dostoevsky was writing today, then he wouldn’t be Dostoevsky either. ‘On a very hot evening at the beginning of July a young man left his little room at the top of a house in Carpenter Lane, went out into the street, and, as though unable to make up his mind, walked slowly in the direction of Kokushkin Bridge.’ Read the first line of Crime and Punishment and you know instantly that you are in a nineteenth-century novel. The length of the sentence is a clue but the real giveaway is the phrase, ‘as though unable to make up his mind’. The omniscient narrator who says, uncertainly, ‘as though’, only appears nowadays in the pages of pastiche.

Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does. Read for sheer enjoyment–what sort of books you enjoy reading provides a pretty strong clue as to what sort of book you should be writing. But also learn to read critically. If something that a particular writer is doing rings your bell or gets your goat–why? As a reader, you may favour a certain style or genre; as a critic, you should be an omnivore. Go into a library or a bookshop, and pick up half a dozen contemporary novels at random. Would the first page make you want to read on? If not, why not? Read and keep reading. It isn’t just a matter of learning from other people’s mistakes, it’s a matter of learning how novelists think, so you can think like one too. Steep yourself in the language of fiction in exactly the same way as you would read as much French as possible if you were trying to learn it. When you have learned to analyse and criticise other writers’ strengths and weaknesses, you will be well on your way to learning how to analyse and criticise your own.

WEEK 3

‘The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me to take the fish finger out of the soup, wrap it in a tea towel and take it to Granny.’

Is that possible? Wouldn’t the fish finger dissolve? Depends how long it was in the soup, I suppose. How is Granny going to eat it? Unwrap it first, or suck it through the tea towel?

See, I’m hooked. The author of this reply to the first-sentence exercise certainly had an original voice. One sentence was too little to tell me whether ‘Bridin’ was a writer or not, but I would definitely read on.

It’s a f...

Table of contents

• COVER
• Novels by Louise Doughty
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• WEEK 1
• WEEK 2
• WEEK 3
• WEEK 4
• WEEK 5
• WEEK 6
• WEEK 7
• WEEK 8
• WEEK 9
• WEEK 10
• WEEK 11
• WEEK 12
• WEEK 13
• WEEK 14
• WEEK 15
• WEEK 16
• WEEK 17
• WEEK 18
• WEEK 19
• WEEK 20
• WEEK 21
• WEEK 22
• WEEK 23
• WEEK 24
• WEEK 25
• WEEK 26
• WEEK 27
• WEEK 28
• WEEK 29
• WEEK 30
• WEEK 31
• WEEK 32
• WEEK 33
• WEEK 34
• WEEK 35
• WEEK 36
• WEEK 37
• WEEK 38
• WEEK 39
• WEEK 40
• WEEK 41
• WEEK 42
• WEEK 43
• WEEK 44
• WEEK 45
• WEEK 46
• WEEK 47
• WEEK 48
• WEEK 49
• WEEK 50
• WEEK 51
• WEEK 52