NORMAN BECK DISCUSSES THE PROCESS OF WRITING HIS NOVEL

After retiring and writing my novel, colleagues asked me how I approached it. So, I’m writing this blog to help, not claiming to be an expert, only I did work through pitfalls and found an approach that worked for me.

In the second blog, I talked about finding ideas and inspiration. The focus was on drama, tragedy, or conflict to engage the reader. A story needs momentum to progress through events and consequences, and a journey can help. Although it doesn’t need to be a physical journey, it could be temporal, for example.

I want to pause and talk about practicalities and resources.

At one level, writing is simple; all you need is pen and paper. Though few would write longhand these days. Most use a word processor for convenience, visualisation of the page, editing, correction with spell checkers, grammatical suggestions, and a thesaurus. Plus, for research, it’s easy to dive into google.

Writing instructors often suggest carrying a journal to write ideas, passages, and thoughts down; it’s worked for me at times. Now I rarely take a diary and feel being alone to think has helped more than a journal. If the ideas are good, they’ll stay in your mind until you get back to the computer.

I used the word processor to lay out the ideas and characters. It was then possible to structure them into chapter outlines. I know others recommend index cards or sticky notes on a board in the first instance. Whatever works is best. A key point here is that it is easier to ‘construct’ a book from outlines. Very few writers start at page one and continue to the end.

I leave spell checking, grammatical corrections, and use of a thesaurus go until the second rewrite. The aim is to get the ideas and thoughts down and not get bogged down. You want to get the tone right and in your voice. Stopping all the time is distracting.

Equally, I tried Dictaphone and speech-to-text tools but what I produced was not particularly good. I much prefer the physical writing process in short bursts, then stopping to look at the page and pull thoughts together for the following sentence or two.

One tool I found helpful after rewrites and corrections was the ‘read aloud’ function. This gives a feeling for consistency in tone and voice as you listen back to what you’ve written. It helps you pick up any sentences or words that seem out of place, repetitious or jarring. But I only use this after I have a clean draft of at least an entire chapter.

The next practical consideration is the size of your novel or memoir. What you write should express what you want to say and be complete to you as the writer. It shouldn’t be padded or repetitious; equally, it shouldn’t feel underdone in terms of the emotional cycle or journey. This gets to the heart of decisions we make when writing. For example, I describe the response of Billy’s parents after the horrific crime. I do this in two paragraphs. I could have left their response out entirely or expanded it to a whole chapter. Because they were minor characters to the novel’s progression, I didn’t want the reader bogged down. Equally, if I didn’t express their response, the emotional cycle in the story would be incomplete. So, I decided to keep it short but express it. I don’t know if I got the balance right, but it met my need as a writer.

The other aspect is actual word size. The Coolabah Tree is around 107,000 words and given a standard font size that’s 267 pages. This is a medium-sized book A small book of 70 to 80,000 words could be 200 pages, and a large book, say 200,000 words, will be over 500 pages. However, don’t feel obliged to write to a word target, although I did think mine would be about 100,000 words once I’d developed the complete outline.

You hear of writers, Stephen King as the classic example, who can turn out thousands of words a day. Most can’t, nor do I think it advisable. You want to think deeply about your writing. With well-developed chapter frameworks, character outlines for the chapters, I may write up to 2500 words in a day. Otherwise, it may be 1000. Later, an equal amount of time is taken with rewrites, corrections, and editing. This process can be slow and requires discipline. I’ll talk further on this in a later blog. But I want to show why it can and will take months to write your novel.

Another point on practicalities involves resources available.

There are sites, articles, YouTube videos on writing a novel in 30 days. My advice is good luck, I certainly couldn’t do it. I need more time to think through the plot, characters, events, underlying themes, and the emotional journey. Plus, I can’t write that fast. I agree, there are some excellent ideas in the steps advocated by these sites. But to me, it smacks of get rich, get fit, lose weight in seven days type advice. Quite often, they try and sell you something. Also, many promote writing, say 50,000 words in a month, without overly worrying about the quality. This leads to the need for disciplined editing, and as new writers, we are loath to cut down on what we have written.

Lastly, there are many creative writing courses available. There are short courses at tertiary institutes or within adult education programs. Also, there are good online ones available, some of which are free.

I did a couple at Future Learn and scanned over a Coursera one. These courses range from basic creative writing, reading a novel, writing a memoir, and writing in specific genres. Most studies discuss the core requirements of plot, character, setting, description, dialog, and the dramatic arc.

Usually, they all have a short video tutorial followed by a reading and discussion on passages from a book. Often, they also have a conversation with an author. I must admit I didn’t do the peer-reviewed assignments as I’d started writing my novel by then.

Like everything on the internet, there is a tremendous amount of material available. You just need to sift through it to find what is of value.  Personally, I would only stick with the respected sites offering relevant courses.

To sum up, think about how you will approach the writing and the benefit you can get from doing a creative writing course. This shouldn’t stop you from building on your ideas or starting the writing, but it may help lay foundations.

Next time I’ll discuss writing a memoir or a novel.

Feedback welcome, and I’ll update next week.

 

Regards Norm Beck

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