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.

Beige Protagonist Syndrome

I mentioned last week that I had decide to cut my main character, Ink, from my Nanowrimo plans. In fact, my sister and I had a Delete-Your-Main-Character party, where we both got rid of our main characters, and upgraded a secondary character. This isn’t the first story I’ve found has benefited from this. Once you’ve got caught up in your exciting plot, your fascinating secondary characters and your shiny new setting, it’s easy to forget that your main character protagonist has to be exciting too. Instead, they end up beige, bland and overall dull. So, to save myself – and anyone else who finds themselves burdened by boring protagonists – I have compiled a list of question to indicate whether the main character suffers from beige protagonist syndrome.

Can your protagonist be described using the words ‘ordinary teenage girl’?

Of course, this doesn’t apply only to teenage girls. It also works for ‘ordinary middle-aged mother’ or ‘just your average office-worker’. If someone asks you what your main character is like, and this is your answer, warning lights should probably be flashing. If the most interesting thing you can think to say about your main character is their age, their gender, and their averageness, there’s probably something wrong.

I once figured this was okay, because of course my protagonist would be ordinary at the start of the novel, which is why it would be so much more exciting when she discovered the magical world. But I don’t think it works quite like that. A protagonist has to be interesting as a person before they become interesting as a vessel for the plot. Ordinary is basically shorthand for ‘I couldn’t be bothered thinking of a character’.

Would the plot change if you removed your protagonist?

If Harry Potter didn’t exist, Voldemort wouldn’t attack Hogwarts at the end of the school year. If Frodo didn’t exist, nobody would have volunteered to take the ring to Mordor, and then where would we be?

When reading the wonderful Snowflake Method (somehow this seems to come up in every post), Ingermason suggests “It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist's attempts to "fix things". That’s a bit of a simplistic, overly structured take on the whole affair, but the point stands that at least some of the plot should be caused by your protagonist. They shouldn’t just be along for the ride.

Do you find yourself struggling to explain why your protagonist is present during key moments in the story?

This relates do the previous question. If you do, they probably aren’t connected strongly enough to the plot. Similarly, if your protagonist is only there because they begged to come along (Mortal Instruments, I’m looking at you) and the more you think about it, the more it makes sense for everyone to just left them at home, you have a problem. Your protagonist shouldn’t need a reason to be in key scenes. Key scenes should come to them.

Do you love your secondary characters more than your protagonist?

This one isn’t linked to plot, but it’s still important to making sure your main character isn’t boring. If you think your secondary characters are more exciting, chances are your readers do too. You want to write more about your secondary characters, and your readers probably want to read more about them. So why is everyone being subjected to your beige protagonist?

Of course, this goes by degrees. It’s probably okay if your main character isn’t your favourite character. But it’s probably not okay if you cringe every time you have to write a long scene about them, and invent extravagant subplots just to give your secondary characters more screen time.

Is your character having too much fun?

While other characters are feeling angst ridden and stressed, is your character really just having an adventure? Chances are they’re not invested enough in the plot. Your main character should be up there in the list of people with the most to lose if the antagonist wins. They should be on the front line of the battle against your story’s evil, and if anyone has the right to be an angst monkey, it should be them. Make sure your character is heavily affected by the plot, not just a passive observer. Motivation is important.

When you come across a beige protagonist, there are several things you can do. Character development obviously helps.. I’ve posted some stuff on the topic here and here. When it comes to plot, the easiest way to fix things is to raise the stakes for them. Your protagonist has no reason to fight the antagonist? Have the antagonist threaten something that personally matters to them.

If your protagonist is too far gone for any of that to work, scrap them. Promote your favourite secondary character. You might be surprised at how well it works.

The Pros of Planning

With Nanowrimo coming up in a mere 7 weeks, and having just entered the ‘100 for 100’ challenge over at Go Teen Writers , I have been thinking a lot about planning novels. I’m not usually a planner. I much prefer to come up with a premise, maybe a few scenes that I want to take place, and then start writing. Talking with my sister, I tried to justify my lack of planning with the following argument: 

If you plan a novel, you know that something exciting is coming up soon, and so you’re not too worried about every individual scene, so much as ‘slogging through the boring bits’ to get to the exciting plot point you know is around the corner. Whereas if you don’t plan, you never know what’s going to happen, so you have nothing to look forward to, and you’re forced to make every scene equally exciting.

Unsurprisingly, she shot my argument down like a fish in a barrel, pointing to several examples of novels which were clearly not planned, which had very dull middle sections. And she was right – when reading a novel, you can usually tell whether the author planned it before they wrote it, or whether they just say down and wrote, and tried to tighten it up afterwards. I struggle to get through the latter kind. Justine Larbestier’s How to Ditch Your Fairy was like this for me, as was Libba Bray’s Rebel Angels. Books like these have good premises, good characters, and even good plot points, but they wander. I often feel like the same events happen over and over again. As my sister pointed out: if you’re forced to make every scene equally exciting, that’s just the problem. No scene is more exciting than the rest. There’s no rising tension, there’s just a sense of plodding along through the same plot points, until you get to the end.

Against all the odds, I am beginning to see the merits of planning. I returned this week to the novel I began planning back in July using the Snowflake Method (thoughts on that over here), and I discovered something very useful – my main character, Ink, was boring.  Whereas the other characters had backgrounds that connected them to the conflict of the plot, and motivations rooted in complex backstories, Ink was described (and I cringe to write these words) as “a vaguely dissatisfied teenager” who wants to “change the world” although she “has the potential for a secure job”. It doesn’t sound like compelling reading.

So I cut her. Ink is banished to the dustbin of novel-writing forever, to be replaced with (hopefully) much more compelling characters. And you know how long it took me to cut her? Under a minute, since I realised this in the very early stages of planning. And how much time had I wasted on a boring character? Maybe an hour, at most. By comparison, several years ago I wrote some thirty thousand words about a girl named Katie who could be described with nothing more than the tags “ordinary teenager” and perhaps “flaming red hair with a temper to match”. When I realised she had no emotional connection to the other characters, and was perhaps most kindly described as “sociopathic”, I scrapped the story, because there wasn’t much I could do when all thirty thousand words were first-person, from her point of view. Had I realised my main character lacked pretty much everything except a name and a hair colour during the planning stage, I could have remedied it then.

The moral of this story is: planning isn’t all bad. The only thing I have ever written which has made it to second draft was written with no plan, but I think I have to accept that that might have been a once off. It looks like planning could save me a lot of time and a lot of effort, as well as producing better results. This revelation makes me sad, and won’t stop me from sitting down in front of a blank screen and writing down the first words that pop into my head, but it might make me stop to think before I write thirty thousand more of them.

Has anyone else had a revelation like this? Do you find planned-out novels are better than others?

(Also, the latest report on the Snowflake Method is that it can be quite a bit of fun, if you skip steps 5, 6, 7 and 9.)

To Plan or Not to Plan, and the Rule of Cool

This post is dedicated to Lisbeth, the first person to comment on my blog without being coerced into it.

After last week’s adventures with the terror that is the Snowflake method, I continued trying to plan the poor story which I subjected to it. As it turns out, without the goal of writing a blog post about it, I have zero motivation to do such detailed, formulaic planning. On the other hand, I feel like I’m doing it wrong if I plan half the novel using the Snowflake method, and the other half in whatever strange way I see fit. Which has left this story at great risk of being abandoned altogether. This leads me to the question: Was it worth sacrificing the idea for research into the Snowflake method?

A lot of people say that if they try to plan a novel, they exhaust the idea, and never start actually writing it. Which is pretty much the current problem with my poor, Snowflaked story. Similarly, a few other stories I’ve planned recently, where I’ve gotten so caught up in the plan, that by the time I’ve finished it, I have no inclination to write the actual novel. I think part of the problem here might be that planning stifles characters – if you plot a character’s every move, they have no space to do anything interesting. It’s especially true if you start planning before you’ve actually got a good idea of your novel or characters – they become a vehicle for plot, which is by far the worst way to destroy a character, in my opinion.

On the other hand, the story I’m having most fun writing at the moment – something ridiculous about insanely talented Mary Sue teenagers at a performing arts boarding school – was not only planned before I wrote it, but the characters were created using a table with insightful headings such as hair colour, height and skill level. I developed the plot basically by listing all the things that might happen in the setting, and then ordering them in the most likely fashion. And it worked. Amazingly well – every time I sit down to write, I consult this handy-dandy list of plot points, and I know exactly what I’m doing. And strangely enough, the characters from that terrible table have personalities, and realistic interactions (and totally unrealistic levels of talent and angst), and my sister is a ridiculously enthusiastic fan. (On the other hand, she has always been a sucker for angsting teenage super-talented pianists.) So the question is: Why did this work, when planning so often has failed me?

My theory is that it’s because when I plan things, usually, I start taking the story too seriously. I start trying to close plot holes, and have a cohesive plot that makes sense, and all those other (very useful) things which detract from making things gratuitously awesome. Rule of Cool always wins. In order to write about the performing arts teenagers, I basically decided they would be ridiculously talented, and then threw every plot point I could at them. And it was fun. I don’t expect it to be brilliant, because it’s gratuitous as, but nonetheless, I can’t deny the effectiveness (so long as you’re not looking to write anything deep and literary) of plotting your story by thinking of awesome things, and writing about them.

Adventures with the Snowflake Method

I began this venture expecting to hate the Snowflake Method. For several years now I have detested it with every fibre of my being, all but screamed when it came up in conversation, and only opened the website while wearing my hazmat suit. Why? Well, first, to explain the method itself. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, visit it here. Or if you can’t be bothered, it basically works like this picture:

except where you see triangles, image the plot of your novel. You start with a single sentence about your plot. And then you expand it into a paragraph. And then you expand it into a page. And then you expand each paragraph in that page into a page. And then you make a scene list. And then you write a ‘multi-paragraph’ description of each scene. There are similar steps for character creation. Theoretically, at the end of ten such steps, you have a novel. Or you have stuck red-hot pins in your eyes from the sheer tedium of the exercise. Either one.

By the time I’ve written my novel out in some six ever-growing formats, I surely will be well and truly sick of it. At a guess, I will get bored and abandon the novel long before the end. But right now I’m only on step three, so who knows.

STEP ONE: Summarise your novel in a single sentence. This is surprisingly effective at turning what is a vague kind of blob in your mind into something that sounds exciting on paper. All you need is a setting, a few words to describe you main character, and an explanation of the conflict. Here’s one I prepared earlier from the work of my amazing sister:

In a university town, a student of magical theory questions the line between good and evil when she comes up against a sorcerer determined to bring back funding for his major by any means.

So far, so good. And now, you are hopefully feeling excited about your potential novel. Look how shiny it sounds!

 

STEP TWO: Write your novel in a paragraph. I seriously struggled with this step. Ingermason, master of the Snowflake, suggests a five-sentence paragraph, which I found was both too long to just write down a really cool-sounding sentence, and too short to explain my plot in a useful any kind of helpful detail. While this step appears to have the potential to tie vague plot ideas together neatly into a cohesive whole, I really don’t think a paragraph is enough to achieve that goal. I would suggest a bulleted list. Everyone loves a bulleted list, and you won’t tie yourself in knots trying to explain everything in one convoluted sentence. This paragraph, rather than explaining my plot to me neatly, more ended up with a series of events between which I don’t really see a connection, because I wasn’t able to fit it into my five sentences.

STEP THREE: Write a page on each major character. Confusingly, this is also step five. I’m really not sure why. Anyhow, Ingermason gives a nice list of this to address in your page, the main ones of which are goal, motivation, and story-line from your character’s point of view. It obviously doesn’t hurt to think about any of this – on the contrary, there is nothing worse than getting to the end of a draft, looking at that plot-defining action, and going – but why? Nonetheless, this step gets very tedious, very quickly, although I suppose this would depend on the novel you are planning. In my case, most of my main characters spend their time together and endeavour to achieve the same goal. Which means I was writing out the same paragraph for story line and goal five times. By the end, I was seriously struggling to find new ways to word it and pretend it was a different paragraph. I see how this could be useful, but whether step three is necessary is really very story-specific. And I still don't understand what I am supposed to do when I get to step five.

A final thought: Ingermason very much writes to be published. From the very start he is talking about book proposals and editors and other such things. While I do enjoy spending my spare time imagine the future where I shall receive fanmail, and there will be fanfiction of my works, and I will write witty messages in the starts of my novels thanking my friends and family, when I sit down to write a novel, I’m not thinking about selling it. I’m thinking about how amazing my next brilliant idea is, and imagining my unrealistically attractive and talented characters. I don’t think that thinking about selling at that stage is good for the creative process. Write the story you want to read, not the story an imaginary agent does.

So in conclusion – do step one. It is exciting, and shiny, and motivating. After that, I personally think it would be just as effective to write a bulleted list of my plot points, organise them, and then start writing as it is to follow Ingermason’s steps. But it worked for him, so who knows.