3 ways to know your novel’s great before you even write it

It can take years to write a novel. For that kind of time investment you want to be confident it’s going to be worth the effort. Here are three tips to ensure you’re not embarking on a wasted life.

Know the ending

Writers obsess about the beginning of their stories because that’s what will keep an editor/agent/reader reading - it may even make them publish/represent/buy the book - but it’s the ending that will make them remember it. You want some gob-smacking endings? Try Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms or Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. If you’re a reader worthy of the name you will have a handful of favourite novels where the endings still resonate with you, and if you’re a writer worth the name you should strive to achieve that effect in your own work.

But what makes an ending great is not just the ending itself but everything that leads up to it, and what better way to ensure that everything leads up to it by knowing what the ending is before you even start?

Know the start and middle too

Which isn’t the same as knowing the whole book from start to finish. As well as being the classic story telling device of millennia, the three act structure provides a great framework on which to build novel length ideas. For those at the back - Act 1 = start, Act 2 = middle, Act 3 = end. If you have a great ending, a dramatic and compelling opening, and a good idea of how to get from one to the other, you have a great story in the making.

Watch this space for techniques for developing three act structures.

Know what needs to happen, without knowing the why or how

By which I mean, you can know you need particular scenes to punctuate your start, middle and end without knowing the whys and wherefores. In other words, you can know the story points - i.e. the emotional effect that the plot will have on the characters - without knowing the plot.

You want your hero to harbour a big secret that only by addressing in act 3 he’ll gain emotional closure? You have enough - you can worry about what the actual secret is later. You need an epic conflict at the end of act 1 between the protagonist and co-protagonist but don’t know what it is? You will by the time you write there.

And when you have this much you can either break out the index cards and start plotting or just crack on and write - in full knowledge that at the very least it will be a passable story.

Five ways to be a crap literary agent

Writers are a drag, right? It’s bad enough trying to deal with the ones you represent without having to deal with the ones you don’t. Especially the ones who try to get on your books. I mean, shit, what is it they think you do? Here’s some tips to ensure you don’t accidently discover the next big thing.

Don’t bother updating your website

You wouldn’t want a potential million-selling author thinking you’ve got a grip on the changing world of electronic-publishing by having an up-to-date website would you? Take a leaf out of this agent of genius who insists on no email submissions in the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook yet states on their website (which hasn’t been updated for a year) that they won’t consider anything other than email submissions! That’s really going to fox those pesky writers.

Slag off writers via social media

You know in the old days when you could pin up a query letter on the notice board for company-wide mocking? Now you can do that shit on the internet. Make the most of it - you won’t come over like a heartless bastard, you’ll come over as really smart and intelligent. I mean what are they going to do - unfollow you? You’re the self-appointed gatekeeper to the industry for chrissakes! With any luck, they’ll be so humiliated that no-one will ever submit to you again.

Pontificate at length on how to write

Those authors never need to know you’re a frustrated writer who spent ten years not finishing that first draft. I mean, you’re too busy for that stuff, right? But it doesn’t mean you can’t use those writing skills you think you learnt to really tell ‘em how to do it. If they have half-a-braincell, they’ll realise how little they know. Hell, they’ll be wishing you did actually finish that masterpiece.

Incessantly bang on about the ‘business’ of writing

Let’s be honest, if any of us really wanted to make money we’d be in banking - but the great unpublished don’t need to know that. There’s a business, which only we understand - marketing, editing - all that shit. Bang that home, all the time. We don’t want those head-in-the-clouds creatives getting any ideas about using imagination and feeling to produce great works of art instead of easily compartmentalised genre conformity - I mean, shit, they do that and we’re going to have to start making subjective value judgements - then they might get to think we don’t actually know what the fuck we’re doing.

Ignore the writing on the wall

Ok, so we don’t make much money but we do have long lunches and we need to make enough to keep that rolling. Best not to encourage that new-fangled e-publishing thing then. Imagine how horrible it would be if writers could publish what they want and readers choose what they read without us to decide who gets the breaks? Let’s hold that power for as long as possible - afterall we have kudos on our side.

And let’s not ever forget why we got into this business in the first place.

The path to writing enlightenment

Your writing journey probably began something like this: you started writing because you thought you’d be good at it and have something interesting to say; you stay the distance and finish your masterpiece and send it off to your first choice agent/publisher. They reject it without even reading your return address. You send it to your second choice agent/publisher - who rejects it before you’ve even sent it. After the fiftieth rejection a nagging doubt begins to emerge - maybe these agent/publishers aren’t complete buffoons - maybe I actually am just a shit writer.

And that’s when your writing journey really begins...

You’ve moved from critical naivity to critical awareness - the starting point of not just being able to say if you like or dislike a work, but why you dislike or like it. You can even respect something that you don’t like because you understand the craft and technique used to create it. You start to look at other writers’ work more critically, to understand what they do that’s good and what they do that’s bad. You join a critique group and have the same done to you - what you hear shocks and even hurts you - another epiphany awaits - you discover you need to gain critical distance from your work - because without that you can’t tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, or advice that maybe is good but you don’t want to take for artistic reasons that are all your own.

So there’s a lifetime of work in learning how to achieve critical distance and developing critical faculties so that when you look at your baby with the cold hard eyes of a disinterested third party you can not only see what’s wrong with it but why it’s wrong and how you can actually fix it.

Hang-on - how I can actually fix it?

I just wrote that damn thing straight from the heart. I pantsed my way right through it. I know it’s wrong, but now I have to know how to fix it?

And there lies the third epiphany - there is craft, there is technique, there is a science to story-telling and a wealth of material on how to do it. You begin to devour all you can read on the subject, you subscribe to writer’s blogs like this one, you even start one of your own. You become fluent in all the generally accepted aphorisms - ‘show don’t tell’, ‘write what you know’, ‘eat some food occasionally’ etc. etc. ad nauseam.

And you apply everything you’ve learned to your work - you have no telling, no backstory, galloping pace; you begin in media res, no deus ex machina - you do everything the books say, everything your crit group tells you, and you know what? It still sucks.

It’s technical but sterile, it’s all show but it’s impersonal, it’s fast paced but it’s exhausting, it’s well structured but contrived. Basically it’s as shit as it was the first time around but just a different kind of shit that was years in the making.

And you look at yourself, your work, your finely tuned critical faculties, your box of writerly techniques and tricks - and you see them for what they really are - tools, techniques, pointers, suggestions - mere devices that you can take or leave.

You have learned the tools well enough to know that they are not magic - they are just tools. You are jaded and battle-scarred but you are a writer, and you’re on the cusp of being a fucking good one. Because now you’ve got all that stuff out of the way, you can get back to telling the stories you wanted to tell when you started this stupid idea right at the beginning.

Except this time you know what you’re doing.

You must walk before you can run - but you must keep running, for you may just fly.

5 ways to find truth in your writing

So you want to be omniscient? Here are five things that will take you closer to your apotheosis.

Personal truth leads to universal truth

It's a curious fact about writing that to get closer to other people you have to get closer to yourself. To reach out you have to reach in. Soul-searching, digging around in the past, examining old feelings and behaviours and understanding new ones are part and parcel of the writer's lot. Your own responses to things that have happened will always be much closer to other peoples' than those you invent but have never actually felt.

This doesn't mean regurgitating scenes and people from your own life in your writing – it means recreating the feelings you had at those times – love, jealousy, fear, exultation – it's those experiences you need to mine for your work. These feelings can be applied to any situation that any of your characters are in. You may never have been a secret agent but the fear you felt going for your root-canal surgery can be tapped to create the fear the agent feels when he's just about to go on a mission.

Honesty is closer to truth than knowledge

Authority of voice usually comes from knowledge – the more knowledge of your subject you have, the more authority your voice will have – hence the much abused aphorism 'write what you know', but it's also the case that honesty can achieve the same effect. Holden Caulfield is far from an authority on how education can go wrong for a kid, and he's not even a reliable narrator, but it's his honesty that immerses us in his story - that makes us care what he has to say – and it gives us a much more truer indication of what life can be like as a disaffected kid than some educational expert could ever do.

You can say more by saying less

It's always a temptation when you've got a great idea, or an interesting character, or you know a lot about a certain subject to dump everything you know on the page – but there's a huge difference between what you know and what the reader needs to know. Sometimes in our desperation to accurately describe something we over-articulate, over-state – diluting the power of the very feeling we seek to heighten. Who can forget the powerful last line of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. What does he actually say? Very, very little:

"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."

Genius.

Uniqueness is born from imitation

Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club because he wanted to write The Great Gatsby, Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings because he wanted to write Beowulf, James Joyce wrote Ulysses because he wanted to write The Odyssey.

We can't be those great writers we admire, but that doesn't mean we can't aspire to be like them, it also doesn't mean we can't pinch their ideas. In fact, there's nothing really we as writers can do but tell tales that have already been told a thousand times before. The thing that will make them unique will be our truth. And how do we do that? See above.

So if you hear, see, or read a great idea, you're professionally obliged to steal it.

The truth is a question not an answer

If you think you know the meaning of life then you're wrong. Whatever you think the answer is it's not that simple. You want to write something timeless then you have to stop thinking you know more than your readers - that you will know more than your readers twenty or a hundred years from now. You don't and you never will. All you can do is describe the things you see and how they make you feel.

In other words, all you can do is tell the truth.