What makes a good novel?

I just thought I would casually tackle that very scary question this week.

Me and my sister discussed this a while ago with a post on the Nano forums, and with April Camp-Nano coming up, we've been discussing it again. Sadly, I can't find the thread where the question was posed to a wider audience (although it was specifically regarding teen fiction), so I assume it was before the last forum wipe. Anyhow, the three points which keep cropping up weren't what I expected when we started asking people this question, so I thought they would be good to share.

Good communication
There's a certain historical romance author, who I shan't name, whose books all follow a formula something like this:

• Character A meets Character B
• They fall in love
• A develops some misconception about B that leads to A thinking they can't be together
• Tension and awkwardness escalates in their interactions until a confrontation, where they break up
• A has a revelation that they were wrong all along
• A and B talk things over, and get back together

 I have a terrible feeling that this could be representative of the romance genre in general. But I digress. The problem with this type of novel is that either the reader is often privy to both sides of the situation, or as an outside observer, has enough knowledge to work out exactly what's wrong. And then to flail at the book and go "Why don't they just TALK to each other?"
Conflict caused solely by miscommunication is incredibly frustrating because it is so easily solved. Either the reader knows exactly how to fix it, or as soon as the solution becomes apparent, the reader starts asking why the characters didn't just talk it over as soon as the conflict began.
In the interesting of not making your readers frustrated with your novel - and also possibly hate your characters in the process - I would avoid this type of conflict at all costs.

Rational decision making
A very surprising consensus in this discussion is, "I don't want to read about teenagers who go out and get trashed and sleep with a guy and then regret it later, or about teenagers who don't tell their parents that their boyfriend is a werewolf, or teenagers who decide to go and fight demons with little to no martial arts experience, or teenagers who let them. I want to read about teenagers who go to a party and have a great time with their friends, who confide in their parents as soon as something bad happens, who don't go into situations without being prepared."
Basically, the reader becomes frustrated when problems arise from decisions that that know are poor as even as they're being made. If you're yelling at the character, "Don't do it!" and the character does it anyway, you lose a little bit of the connection to the character - they become less realistic, and less relatable.
It could also be a sign of poor plotting if your characters have to make these bad decisions to further your plot. The challenge is to make a good plot which still has enough conflict to keep people interested and then keeping your characters in that conflict while at the same time, making rational, sensible decisions.

 Well-executed romance
There's a lot of complaint out there about love triangles. The problem - at least as I understand it - is that they very often centre around a girl who has to choose between two guys: one who is often a long-time friend or even boyfriend, who is sweet, kind, and has a lot in common with the girl; the other, who is dark, brooding and mysterious, with unpredictable mood swings, some sort of 'dangerous' backstory, and a lot of chemistry. And of course, the girl chooses the second option.
While no-one is going to argue that people in love always make rational decisions, this comes back to the previous point. There is very rarely a love triangle where the central character makes a genuine decision - nine times out of ten, the reader is sure that they will choose angsty-and-brooding over sweet-and-friendly. And when you know that angsty-and-brooding is so much worse, and is just going to screw up the character's life for the next however-many books, this is a problem.

Having written these out, I realise that basically, what makes a good novel comes done to this: relatable characters who make decisions which make sense, and strong plot which doesn't require contrived action to propel it.

Researching Historical Fiction

As well as failing to regularly update my blog, on account of holidays and the need to read the entirity of Les Mis in the two weeks before the movie comes out, I have been writing fanfiction of sorts about Cicero and Enjolras solving crime. Unexpectedly – yes, I didn’t see this coming – this has led me into the realm of historical research. I was intending for it to be a small writing project that I didn’t have to think about seriously, but of course, things never stay that way. I spent several hours the other day reading up in great detail on Cicero, to try and gauge how he would respond to being called a patrician. My several hours of reading the works of Cicero, and then any other writings I could get my hands on on the internet about Cicero left me with nothing but a throw-away line that will be read in under a second. But it did raise the question – how much research is too much?

I’m sure this is a problem that plagues anyone who tries to write historical fiction, and much more so those who try to write legitimate fiction that some bizarre sort of fanfiction mash-up, but nonetheless, it’s a problem. Is it really worth three hours of reading to get one line that doesn’t reveal anything at all? On the one hand, I did learn that Cicero was horrible arrogant, but also very witty, and that I’ll have to study Oscar Wilde before I can write proper Cicero fanfiction. It definitely helped me to get my head around his personality, as well as the setting.

On the other hand, it means that rather than write several pages – or at the very least one page – in a sitting, I’ve been moving at about a sentence a day. Even though I’m writing what I plan to be a short story, this could take me a long, long time.

In search of answers, I headed off into the blogosphere. I found advice ranging from “do the most research you possibly can” to “find a happy medium” to “you can write your story and then do the research”. The first raises the obvious problem that if you do the most research you possibly can, you will wind up a very old academic expert, with no historical fiction to your name. On the other hand, if you write before you research, your story might inadvertently hinge on something that couldn’t possibly have actually occurred, and the whole thing with fall to pieces. And as for finding the happy medium – it’s a great piece of advice, but where? and how? Beyond suggesting that you have to get your head around vagaries of speech and dress, nobody seems to have any idea.

I don’t have a solution to this problem yet, so I’m mostly writing this post in the hope that someone will comment with a magical answer. I don’t think there is one, but I like to pretend there might be. Does anyone have an answer? Have do you find the balance between research and writing?

Historical Fiction: Spoiler Alert

Earlier this week, I finished reading Colleen McCullough’s The First Man in Rome, which is a fiction novel about the Roman Republic. If you’re into Ancient Rome at all, I definitely recommend reading it. But sadly, telling you how awesome it is is not the purpose of this post, so onward.

 

The book covers the political and military careers of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, two of my favourite Ancient Romans. So I was reading along, and these two main characters were besties, and things were going along swimmingly. But there was a problem (and yes, spoilers lie ahead) – having studied the history of the Roman Republic, I knew that eventually they fall out and end up at the heads of opposing sides of a civil war. And that Sulla goes really evil and massacres thousands of people. And the closer I got to the end of the book, the less I enjoyed it, because I knew what was coming, and I didn’t want it to happen. And even when I got to the final pages, and discovered that it doesn’t actually happen (presumably until the next book in the series) I still felt discontented, because although McCullough had written what seems like a happy ending, I knew that really it wasn’t. And that after the two main characters walk off arm-in-arm into the sunset (and yes, this is genuinely what happens in the closing scene) one of them turns around a backstabs the other, and it all goes downhill from there.

So essentially, my spoiler alert, which lies several lines up, is not a spoiler for the book at all, but a spoiler for history. And herein lies the problem. Is this just an inevitable thing you have to face, if you want to write historical fiction – that people can be spoiled for your book without having even heard of it? This seems like a very sad state of affairs, but if you’re writing historically about real people, it’s an inescapable fact. And sure, you can do it incredibly well – as McCullough does – but it still niggles at the back of the reader’s mind that they know what’s coming.

Of course, this is a greater problem in some historical stories than others. Marius and Sulla don’t have a nice story: they start out as friends, and then they destabilise the Roman Republic through civil war, and then Marius dies and Sulla becomes dictator and kills everyone (or something to that effect, but far less horribly simplified). And it makes for a terrible story, if you're after anything remotely resembling a happy ending. So perhaps McCullough just chose poorly (or I shouldn’t have chosen to read about those characters, if I wanted things to end well). But I feel like it probably goes the other way, too – if you know that life turns out well for your historical figure of choice, doesn’t it detract something from the tension of the novel? It’s like you’ve already flipped to the last page before you even start.

Every single time.

I’m not sure exactly where these thoughts are going, because I enjoy reading historical fiction, and it has never stuck me as a huge problem before, even when reading novels about, say, Marie-Antoinette, who always gets guillotined at the end. But as it is, I’m apprehensive about reading the sequel to The First Man in Rome, because McCullough created her characters too well, and so the last thing I want to see is their inevitable downfall. So maybe the problem iinherent in historical fiction, but only really well-written historical fiction. But if well-written is the problem, then I don’t know what we do. How do you pull off a good novel, when everyone knows the ending? Have you read any historical novels where you think it’s been done well? Or done really badly? I've now made myself rather confused about the whole historical fiction lark, so thoughts are appreciated.