Thanks for your reply, L. C. Blackwell. I do prefer to tackle new fields systematically and in an organised way. Funny how you mentioned playing Piano by ear is what most do. I have tried playing Piano by ear, but I guess I don't have much of a musical ear.
I think guidelines might work. I know writing novels only takes two things. Good command of the language and imagination. I have both. I just need better knowledge of how to put the two things into a working novel.
I'll check out the books you have suggested. Thanks again.
If you prefer to tackle new things systematically and in an organized way, then you need more than good command of the language and imagination. You said it yourself. You also need "better knowledge of how to put those two things into" a novel.
I've got a scientific mind. I was an engineer in a previous life. Well it was this life, but years ago. Someone like me gets anxiety attacks when confronted with a messy pile of creative ideas. You might be the same way if you have an analytical mind. It's like you have a concrete mixer and a few tons of wet concrete stirring around inside and you have NO IDEA how to turn it into the nice straight columns of a building.
You're probably the type writer who needs to learn how to outline your novel first. There are a bunch of books telling you all sorts of ways to do this. The value of reading these books is not so much to pick one of the ways and follow it to the letter, but rather, to gain the insight for the need to build your structure. For the building with concrete analogy, you need architecture and engineering blueprints and you need to build frames and forms and place rebar. THEN you know where to pour the concrete and it ends up as a strong, organized structure.
In the intro to
The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing, Evan Marshall tells the story of a workshop presented by a NY editor: "Novel Writing 101: A Hands On Approach."
Her presentation was certainly thorough. She covered such topics as dialogue, viewpoint and characterization in admirable detail. But when she finished speaking and opened the floor for questions, everyone in the audience just sat there looking confused.
Finally a man raised his hand. "That's all well and good," he said, "but how do you know when to do each of those things?"
The editor paused, clearly struggling for an answer. At last she replied, "Well, you do them all at the same time."
A woman near me threw down her notebook in exasperation.
That story hit home with me. "How do you know when to do each of those things" was the MISSING part in all the other advice I'd ever received about writing.
In the intro to
Plot & Structure, James Scott Bell talks about the Big Lie:
Writing can't be taught. The Big Lie says that novelists are born with some genetic talent that the rest of us don't have. I bought it for about 30 years, because I could not get my novel written. I had no idea of overall structure, and I had a perfectionist inner editor that stifled my creative flow such that I couldn't even get the concrete mixed up in the truck. Like I was trying to add the ingredients in brick-sized increments, and trying to make a perfect little block of concrete before I could make any more of it.
Learning to outline was like getting the engineering done, and building the forms and placing the rebar.
NaNoWriMo has finally showed me how to mix the concrete. This contest gives you 30 short days to finish your entire novel. You don't have
time to try to create and perfect every small brick, you must just dump all the cement, aggregate and water in there and start it mixing. (Unless you are a very experienced novelist - I can see how you'd get much better and faster at it with practice.)
So, I read a bunch of books about outlining. No one of them is right for me so I created my own outlining style, but all of them together helped me understand the concept. Now NaNo is forcing me to mix up the concrete, so I expect I will finally, maybe, be able to pour the mix into the outline and produce some sort of novel.
About your comment about not wanting to spend a lot of time editing mistakes. Well..... there are novelists who polish as they go and don't spend a lot of time going back to rewrite and edit, but I think the majority of them write first drafts, and expect to do major editing on a second and third pass. I highly recommend you get
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. Read it through, and then keep it handy as you write.
For me, I can see now that it is an iterative process. My concrete analogy breaks down a bit because actually, in mixing the concrete (writing my NaNo novel), I am generally following my outline (you can write an outline before the starting gun). I guess you could say that I use the right type of ingredients and mix the right overall amount, so I do have the whole picture in mind during the creative flow. But things are also pretty jumbled around. When I go back to edit, I'll be able to rearrange everything like in another thread I compared it to a jigsaw puzzle. But for analytical, organized people like us, you need to have the overall picture in mind FIRST. Some say they can just do it in their head, but for you I recommend you figure out a way to outline your novel on paper.
