The Novel Structure: A Problem

I met with the local novelist group on Wednesday afternoon as planned. At the end of the two hour session, I came away with a lot of notes on the first seven chapters of my first novel, a psychological thriller.

Most of the group thought the writing style was good. Many enjoyed the tension, but virtually everyone felt that I’m putting in too much information too soon and shifting time frames too often. They found it difficult to understand the plot.

So, I’ve opened up a new file on the computer, cut and pasted a couple of chapters and begun to simplify the text, away from the main story file. I’ve also decided to experiment with writing in the present tense to get a new feel for the text.

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I hope to arrange to get the editing report email sent over to my account later this morning.

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A Really Scary Movie

Although I love to read a good psychological thriller, I don’t usually get scared.   Psychological thrillers on TV frighten me even less because the plot often has a made-for-television feel and doesn’t always ring true.   But there’s one movie I did see a couple of years ago that chilled me from the start –   Identity (2003)   I watched it alone at night and kept on glancing over my shoulders constantly throughout the film.   A scary but fascinating story.

I would definitely watch it again.

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Personal Clichés

Creative writing tutors and members of writing groups often warn against using clichés, partly because relying on clichés is seen as laziness on the part of the writer.   One of the most common clichés is “cool as a cucumber”, a description of someone’s calm reaction to an unexpected event or news of one.

At my last meeting with the local novelist group, one of the members advised me to watch out for my own personal clichés.  She was referring not to actual clichés (like “cool as a cucumber”) but to phrases and ideas I tend to overuse.   For instance, the central character of the novel sensing someone watching, lights in a house mysteriously going off or coming on.   Old ideas that appear in all my writing.

The challenge now is to create new ideas and tighten up the plot.

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Creative Criticism

The editor’s report on my first novel will be available at the beginning of next week.  Apparently, it is common practice now in the UK for a writer to pay for an editor’s report before most agents will even consider taking on a new writer.   On a positive note, however, agents generally don’t tell writers to seek editorial help unless they think the story in question shows promise.

Meanwhile, I met with the local novelist group for my first feedback session on my current novel, a psychological thriller dealing with repressed memories and flashbacks.   The members of the group think my writing has improved substantially, especially in connection to scene setting, but feel there are fundamental problems with the plot, character interactions and overall structure.  Too many names of places and people too early on.  One member, in particular, thought I was concentrating too much on creating suspense.  

So it’s back to the basics of plot and structure.

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Moving On After Writer’s Block

 

I’m now at 17,000 words in my current novel, a psychological thriller set in coastal Dorset, rural Sussex and West London.   Having struggled with a recent bout of writer’s block, I feel I’ve finally solved some of the structural problems regarding plot. 

Some tips regarding plot and writer’s block:

• Jot down ideas that come to mind as you read your manuscript
• Keep lists of story questions and refer to these if you don’t know what to write next
• Establish the motives governing the behaviour of each leading character early on in the writing process
• Take a one or two day break from writing if necessary
• Read a novel in the same genre

Short Excerpt from Chapter Nine, Neil’s viewpoint 

All nights are bad, but some worse than others.  Tonight’s one of the more difficult nights. Pippa sleeps beside me, but apart a couple of hours of disturbed sleep I caught when I went to bed earlier, I’ve been awake since two o’clock in the morning, too churned up to relax after finding the train ticket among Katie’s precious photographs. The heat is overbearing, coming from inside the bedroom as well as from outside the house.  I’m surprised that Pippa can sleep in it.

Tonight, a part of me is back in the old village in Sussex where the eight of us lived as neighbours once.  Me, Aileen and the girls.  Bill, Lizzie and the two boys.  Only Bill, Dawn and I keep in contact now, although Bill occasionally meets up with his older son, who has issues of his own to contend with.  No word on the younger boy.  After it all happened, we sold up.  I returned to London with Dawn, and Bill and Lizzie moved a short car ride away from the village where our two families had formed close ties, to another village almost identical to the first.  I can’t understand how he can possibly bear to stay in the region.

Pippa murmurs in her sleep, but doesn’t awaken. 

I swallow hard.  More than twenty years have passed since the death of my first wife, but it is all still too raw for me.  And once again, I’m running…running from the silence that hangs heavily, like a fog, in the cottage next to Bill and Lizzie’s…running down the garden path to the woods at the back of the cottages, shouting for Dawn and her mother, branches crunching under my boots. Aileen I yell. Dawn   Where are you?   They don’t answer me.  The afternoon light is fast fading.  Bill, Lizzie and the boys are out: I’ve already checked at theirs.  Rusty leaves litter the ground, damp from the frost, and an icy chill sweeps through the air, clinging to my donkey jacket.  When I reach the top of the grass mound by the fields, I notice a trail of footsteps next to the fence and a crumpled up packet of cigarettes. 

And then, I see her face down in the water.  And I know at once that it is too late to save her.  But there is no sign of Dawn.  She has vanished, like Katie.

I hurry back to the cottage to contact the police. 

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Polishing and Tightening Plot

I’m still at it…revising the first six chapters of a draft, a psychological thriller I started earlier in the year.   Several times in the past, I’ve read that writers never find the novel writing process easy; if anything, the process gets harder over time because the writer’s standards increase.  I think that’s certainly true.  

Viewpoint, dialogue, scene setting….these seem manageable to a point.  The problem in this particular novel revolve around creating a feasible and believable plot.

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Pounds, Pence & Words

There’s an old saying that goes something like “take care of the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves.”  

I think the same could be applied to creative writing, particularly novel writing.   In my last post, I described why I’ve chosen to revise my novel writing on a weeky basis  rather than concentrate on getting the draft completed.  Obviously, my writing method won’t necessarily work for everyone, but here’s one reason why I think it has merit.   It allows you to correct more noticeable problems as you go.    (I struggle with dialogue and plot, in particular.)    

Approaching  a piece of writing from a critical and analytical angle enables a writer to tackle the problems relatively early on.   Also, it helps with the overall word count.   By paying close attention to problematic or abrupt passages, you can actually increase the word count considerably – a bit like those pennies taking care of the pounds.  Obviously, if a writer is able to hurry events and dialogue along, my approach won’t help at all, but do consider it if you’re having problems.

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The Plot

Hidden Truths, a psychological thriller set in Dorset and London. 

I’m having quite a struggle.

The story so far… Dawn is a clinical psychologist who has lost her license and spent a few years in prison for manslaughter.   She has no recollections of the event and believes she killed her former boyfriend after he subjected her to a series of subtle but menacing mind games.  Dawn’s father, however, suspects his daughter might be innocent and launches his own investigation into what really happened. 

Dawn is now rebuilding her life in a secluded Dorset coastal town.  Soon after her arrival, though, she begins to think that someone is watching her.   The events that follow trigger off flashbacks of a past event in her early childhood, leading her to danger.

Read a sample:

Father’s viewpoint.

Dawn’s viewpoint.

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Trimming The Plot

I’m at the 50,000 word stage of my second novel again, a psychological thriller set in the English countryside.  This time, I’m focusing on clarity rather than a restructuring of the narrative events, a sort of trimming away at the plot.   A bit like a brief haircut to keep things neat.   As I stated in another post, when you start cutting material, you risk losing something of the true nature of the story.  Too much cutting might – to use a cliché – “kill the spirit.”

When deciding whether to remove sections or characters, ask yourself a few questions first….”do I really need the section?”…”could the story survive without it?”….”does the idea or character add intrigue to the plot or does it complicate matters?”   I once read that a character must have a clear function in a story.  

Still, I think writers shouldn’t be too hasty in deleting material.  At the very least, they should place all the cut sections in a separate file and keep backups.

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Self-Editing and Haircuts

I’m in that really awkward stage of editing my  novel…that’s where I start cutting sections out of the story or placing them somewhere else while I decide what to do next.  It’s a confusing process.  As I said elsewhere, I feel the first twelve chapters have structural problems concerning too much back story introduced either too soon or in the wrong places.  I noted also that some of the warmth and the charm from earlier rewrites had now gone, lost in a flurry of grim memories of rising vigilantism on a tough housing estate in 1980s Britain.  

I often think that self- editing is a bit like trying to cut your own hair in front of a mirror.  Styling the front of the hair is probably the easiest part, but things get complicated when you reach the sides and back.  The following, I believe, should guide a writer’s attempts at a rewrite:

• Keep the material you really care about, but remember to make any small changes for clarification purposes.  
• Try to keep the plot as simple as possible at first.  Then, you can develop it and add unexpected twists and turns.  Problems usually occur when the various strands of the plot are introduced too early on.   This confuses readers and leaves little to work on later in the story.
• Trust your own intuition.  If something in the writing just doesn’t seem right, it probably isn’t.   The opposite is true, of course.  Others might not like what you’ve written, but you know it’s excellent.  Stick to your story.

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