How To Write A Novel

Start with an emotion. One that is close to your heart. Then dress it up with a character one that really moves. Then start with a sentence one that grabs you and doesn't let you go. Follow that with another sentence that sets a tone and allows the reader to gain confidence. Follow that with a paragraph that gives you a tempo and a rhythm. Follow that with a page that begins a world.

Now you are rolling. Writing that first chapter is the first shot across the bow of your story that has to be told. And of course one good thing begins another so you start the second chapter then a third then a fourth. No one can stop you now and you have created a ship that sailing along and taking the reader with you. Bail out all the nonessentials because it really is only the light touch that moves one into the chambers of the human heart.

Take the unexpected turn because no surprise for you is no surprise for the reader. Tears are expected and sweat and grime and grimace. Above all else make it live like a dancer on a brightly lit stage. Then run for the end like man whose life depends on it. Then when you are done circle around and begin again like the craftsman who will never be satisfied. Don't stop until you are sure nothing more can be done.

That is how you write a novel.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa

The Improbability of the Novel

If you take  the last few big novels that have come out and put them along side the other novels that summed up our era then you find they are hopelessly myopic. Jonathan Franzens Freedom gave us a big lazy liberal family slowly disintegrating under the zeitgeist of modern times. But it was limited because it was a wealthy liberal family much like the kind I came from. Except we were not wealthy. But I did recognize the characters much like I recognize the characters in a John Updike novel. They are people I am comfortable with but they are  individuals who are already anachronistic by the time the novel hits the shelves.

If we fast forward to the next big novel of the season then we find Harbach's The Art of Fielding. I am not putting the two in the same category but it is publishing's big foot forward that tells us to wake up and read this book. So I did and I had much the same reaction. Very entertaining novel with a story to tell but no real relevancy to today. And maybe that is asking too much of the novel. Maybe the very speed of today with its instantaneous reckoning puts the novel squarely in the category of telling a very good story but that is about it.

Not that is new thought. Gore Vidal and others sung the death song of the novel thirty years ago with the advent of television and film and of course the Internet. But one does yearn for a novel to sum up our time. You may read  Eugnides The Marriage Plot and come away with the same thought. A good story but not about out time. Of course you can extrapolate our time through the novelists treatment of his characters but it is a bit like stretching out a well chewed piece of gum. There is just no flavor left.

So we fall back to thinking that maybe the the improbability of the novel has hit it's new function. To entertain and enlighten a bit but not really grapple with today. The Great Gatsby was not a big seller in its day and maybe that is the problem. Without the big foot of publishing's approval the novelist is helpless to get his word out. And novels that take on society can be a bit depressing and who wants to read that? So you have your dilemma as the  novelist: write a really entertaining book or starve and write something that comes to grip with the times we live in.

There are many out there who do write about our time. They are busy starving and surviving and collecting rejection letters. Occasionally a few do get through, like Mcinerney's Bright Lights Big City did in the eighties. But that is a galaxy from a long time ago and it is curious that Jonathan Franzen seems to be our only oracle now. Pity he can only cover one family at at time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

On Finishing a Novel

Finishing a book is a bit like losing your job. You have been consumed with your singular task for years and have lived your life half in this world and half in the fictional world of your novel. And then one day you realize it is really finished. For good or bad. You no longer have the privilege of working on your book. And so you get up and instead of working on that scene, that paragraph, that chapter, than ending, that beginning...you pay your bills, feed the cat, take out the trash.

There is no ticker tape parade. There is no ribbon cutting ceremony. Just an alteration of your daily routine and of course all those things you have put off for years come crashing in. So you immerse yourself in the practical world of living and realize what a mess everything became while you were off in that other world. You work like hell and get nowhere but the piles of things to do does go down slightly. The exhaustion at the end of the day is different. There is no dreaminess of the job well done, there is the edgy feeling that you cannot get it all done.

A book is a luxury. One task. One goal. Finish the book. If you say it once you say it a thousand times. People ask you for years what you have been doing. Working on the book. They are as tired of hearing it as you are of saying it. So you quit saying it after a while and just answer airily you are working on this and that. And so when you finish there is no real news either. Finished the book means nothing to most people. You finished goofing off, you finished whatever you do up there. Like most writing it is a quiet celebration with an audience of one.

So you have finished your novel and you swear you will not start another for a good while. Let everything cool down. Take a break. It is a crazy existence after all. Still, there is that one idea you have been kicking around. Maybe you'll just google it. Do a little research...you never know.

Rocket Man Kindle Download

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

"The Catcher in the Rye for the fortysomethings. Not quite boomers, five years old during Woodstock, missed the sixties revolution and ended up being mellow in the seventies, partied in the eighties, floated in the nineties, then lost it all in the Great Recession."

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/