Archive for the ‘writing a novel’ Category
writing a novel – segues
So the poet is writing a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: Saving the Landing Church
Setting: a writers’ retreat, includes an abandoned church
Characters: main character a writer; people from the embedded community; people from the commuter community; the aberrant community
Plot: the story of how a woman tries to preserve an abandoned church with unexpected consequences for herself and for the community
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I’ve been working on my novel since the beginning of November, and I’ve made significant progress. I’ve been aiming for about 60,000 words and I now have about 57,000 words. I would say I have a completed first draft.
Now comes the work of editing. I’ll edit for grammar and spelling errors, of course, but also for content. I have several sub-plots to contend with, so I have to make sure each of these tells a coherent story and flows through the novel.
One of the main edits I will do is to try to help the reader follow the story easily by making sure the ideas flow easily from one to another. When I write in draft, I often leap forward in my thinking, the transitions lost somewhere in the synapses of my brain. In the editing stage, I’ll have to supply these transitions.
So, as I edit, I’ll work paragraph by paragraph to provide a transition or segue between paragraphs. I learned a lot about this in university when I was working on essays for my history degree. Professors were always looking for segues to help the arguments flow smoothly. I got used to starting paragraphs with phrases like: ‘In order to accomplish this…’ or ‘After the king died…’ or ‘Before the final decision to build a new school in the community was made…’.
Segues in a formal essay are fairly easy, since there is usually a progression to arguing a thesis. In a novel, the segues are more about making sure ideas don’t come in from the blue. Shifting ideas and themes too quickly will confuse everyone and cause the reader to lose interest. Segues also help the writer to make sure threads are not dropped and the thoughts of the main character are logical.
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At the risk of terrifying myself, I’ll give you an example of the way I transition from one paragraph to the next. This particular scene from the novel describes a drive home, after an evening get-together with a friend named Oliver. I have underlined the segues. To see the effect of including the segue, just read the paragraphs with and without the underlined parts.
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… I gave Oliver a quick hug and ran outside, into the wind and rain.
The storm worsened as I drove home along the Bay. The rain was brutal, as though I drove through a cosmic car wash. I needed faster wiper blades and a second pair of eyes. As though the rain wasn’t hazard enough, the wind blew in frantic gusts and pushed against the side of the Blazer. I hung on to the wheel with both hands, but the SUV swerved in the narrow road. I drove even more slowly. Handfuls of leaves tumbled across the pavement ahead and broken branches reached from the ditches into the roadway.
To cut my driving time in the storm, I took the ferry to Westfield. As I drove down the ramp and on to the ferry, the operator came to the car window to bellow something at me. I rolled the window down a crack to hear and the storm tried to crawl into the vehicle with me.
‘Good thing you got here when you did,’ shouted the operator. ‘I’m shutting down on the other side. The wind is too high. Too much water on the deck.’
In the pale wash of the running lights I could see the river sloshing across the metal platform. Waves crashed against the sides of the ferry, chased by a fine white spray.
In spite of all the water, we made the crossing safely, and I arrived home after midnight, overloaded with adrenaline from trying to see the road, and full of coffee and cake from my dinner with Oliver…
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When you write, do you try to include transitioning in your work?
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these ferries run low in the water and in storms the waves slosh over the sides
Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – the community as a character
One of the first things I did as I was beginning my novel is create character sketches for the people in my book. By knowing as much as possible about the characters, I knew how they would react in any circumstance.
As I wrote, I began to wonder of the community itself could be a character in my book. Communities certainly have characteristics… they may be tolerant or intolerant, modern or traditional, rural or urban and so on. Sometimes a community has a mixture of these characteristics.
Famous examples of books where the community has character include Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960) and Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (Julian Messner, Inc., 1956).
People in the community in my book will respond to the abandonment and disposal of a church both as individuals and as members of the community. In any community, places of worship are important. Churches are important to the community for their religious significance, but also for their historical connections.
Communities in rural New Brunswick, as elsewhere, are not homogeneous. In my own community, there are people whose families have lived here for generations. Other families have just moved here, attracted by the community’s rural character and by its nearness for commuting to work. Sometimes this heterogeneity is a source of divisiveness in a community. More often people from these different parts of community live together in harmony, coming together for school events, community sports or just neighborliness.
The community in my novel will also be heterogeneous, composed of people of different backgrounds and interests. For simplicity’s sake, I am thinking of them in three categories.
1. Many of the characters in the community will be part of the ’embedded community’, people whose families have lived in the community for generations. These will include most of the members of the church congregation.
folks who were born and raised in the community
they all have good eyesight or wear contacts
second from the left is the Minister, Oliver Johnston
2. Other characters will belong to the ‘commuter community’. These will be people who have moved into the community from away. They love its rural qualities. The community is also near enough to the city for them to be able to work there.
the one on the right is my main character
the man to the left of my main character is her husband… looks a little like a movie star from the 50s
I went to university with the lady on the far left
Of course, within these groups will be people who have their own interests and loyalties. For example, there may be members of the commuter community who fit very well with the embedded community. There will be those who are part of the congregation of the Landing Church and those who are not, those who will be interested in the church because of its historic importance and those who are not that interested in preserving its history.
3. There will also be a negative element in the community in my book. This element will behave very badly and I think of this as the ‘aberrant community’.
Ed Blake, the ‘bad guy’ in my novel
my sister will say he looks like Spock from Star Trek
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To help me plan the interactions between these three community components and the main character, I made a graph to guide my main character’s relationships through the book.
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I want the protagonist’s relationship with the aberrant component of the community to begin on a neutral note and deteriorate with time.
Her relationship with the commuter component of community will begin high and remain that way throughout the book.
A main source of tension in the book will be her relationship with the embedded component of community. At first, she is an outsider who thinks she can solve everything by moving and re-purposing the church, and her relationship with the embedded community is very poor. However, during the book, she learns to be more understanding about the community and they learn she is not really so bad after all. This relationship will grow in a positive direction during the book.
As I write, I will check with my time-line to see if the relationships I am writing about are staying true to my graph.
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – selecting a setting #2
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: Saving the Landing Church
Setting: a writers’ retreat including an abandoned church
Characters: main character a writer
Plot: unknown
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From the first thought I had about my novel, I knew I wanted to include a re-purposed church in my setting. I thought it would be an ideal location to tell stories about writers in search of contemplative and quiet spaces to do their work. As I thought about equipping a writers’ retreat, I realized more spaces would be needed, for eating and sleeping for example, and I thought about bringing two other buildings to the location, a house (the church manse) and a sleeping quarters (the church hall). I mentally set them on the site of our (real) property by the lake and … taa-daa! … I had the setting for my book.
Selecting a setting like this meant thinking about how these buildings could have been brought to the site. In our area we have lots of experience with moving buildings, including churches. For example, there is the fascinating story of how churches were moved to a new site along the Saint John River to allow for the flooding by the Mactaquac Dam. For a wonderful novel about the flooding and the displacement of the homes and families, Riel Nason’s book The Town That Drowned (Gooselane, 2011) is an engaging, humorous and award-winning read! http://www.rielnason.com/
To write my novel, my first step was to write a short story about moving the church to its new location at the imaginary writers’ retreat. As I wrote, I realised the move was only a small part of the story. I began to ask myself questions about how the community might react to the move, how the re-purposing of the church might change its character, and how the stress of acquiring and moving the church, and interacting with the community, might change my protagonist.
an imagined writers’ retreat
Designing the setting for the novel has been a lot of fun. I have had to think about how the buildings might be arranged at the new location. I’ve thought about what would have to be done to prepare the new site for receiving the buildings (digging a well, installing a septic system, pouring foundations, and creating access).
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Other aspects of setting I’ve had to consider include:
- the community and landscape where the writers’ retreat would be situated,
- how the property would be embellished to make it ideal for writers seeking variety, solitude and places to write (benches, paths, and so on),
- design changes to the inside of the house, church and hall in order to make them ideal for a writers’ retreat.
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I’ll write more these aspects of setting in a later post.
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So, what do you think of my imagined writers’ retreat? Do you have any suggestions for how to make writers flourish in the setting?
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – stories about abandoned churches
My husband and I were married in an older local church. I remember its lovely flower garden, the church bell, the woodwork, the organ, and the beautiful stained glass windows. Our wedding day began an extremely successful marriage… so far we have been married almost 33 years!
The church was deconsecrated in 1995 and torn down. The congregation moved to a new church not far away. The new church incorporated the furniture, hanging lights and stained glass windows from the old church.
Even today, almost twenty years after the demolition, I drive past the empty space and I always feel badly. Sometimes there is a car parked on the very spot where we said our vows.
Once I took my son to the now-empty site of the old church and showed him where it once stood. He asked, as a joke, ‘Does that mean you and Dad aren’t married any more?’
His question seemed funny at the time, but now I think about how closely our lives are linked with the spaces where we celebrate. If a space disappears or changes, it may seem profoundly sad. But it doesn’t negate the actions taken there. The best things in our lives supersede the physicality of their associations.
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – telling a story
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: Saving the Landing Church
Setting: a writers’ retreat and an abandoned church
Characters: main character a writer (not a very successful writer)
Plot (a focusing statement): the story of how a woman tries to preserve an abandoned church with unexpected consequences for herself and for the community
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Churches are like any building. They require maintenance. In these days of striving for energy efficiency, the maintenance may require expensive upgrades – better insulation, energy-efficient windows, calking to seal the cracks…
Unfortunately, maintenance of old buildings, including old churches, can be very expensive. And the consequences of not maintaining or upgrading a building can be high energy costs, a leaky roof, rotting beams…
Eventually, many church congregations face a difficult decision. Do they continue to try to maintain an older building in the face of difficult finances and declining attendance? Or do they build a new building, or perhaps amalgamate with another congregation?
These decisions are especially difficult because churches are meaningful places to the community. Sometimes generations of families have worshipped there. They are places of weddings and funerals, baptisms and confirmations, Sunday School concerts and church suppers. They are places of profound personal experience. Sometimes, they are also the location of a graveyard where family members and loved ones are buried. It is not easy for a community to let go of its older churches.
And what happens to an abandoned church? Some are demolished, some are sold and perhaps re-purposed, some are retained by the congregation as a place for special celebrations. Some are protected as heritage buildings. Sometimes church buildings are sold and must be moved to a new location.
My novel will be about one such abandoned church.
As I have learned in the courses I have taken and in my reading, every good story is about someone who wants something, how the someone sets about achieving the goal, and the consequences of achieving the goal. I have recently taken a course from Deborah Carr, an excellent writing coach (her website (Nature of Words) is at http://www.natureofwords.com/). She puts it this way: a story follows the pattern of Desire, Struggle, and Resolution.
My novel will be the story of how a woman tries to preserve an abandoned church by bringing it to a new home, with unexpected consequences for herself and for the community.
This will be a complex subject:
- It will deal with the transformation of a space from a sacred to a secular use.
- It will be a story about a community and one person’s relationship with the community.
- And it will be a story about what constitutes the sacred.
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Are there churches in your area that have been abandoned or re-purposed?
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – re-purposing a church
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: Saving the Landing Church
Setting: a writers’ retreat and an abandoned church
Characters: main character – a writer who operates a writers’ retreat
Plot: moving a church? (in part)
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Since the main character in my novel is a writer, it makes some sense that she would like to earn her living as a writer. However, she has not yet published her first book, so there are no book deals or royalty cheques. She turns to an occupation pursued by many talented writers, the education of other writers.
In my book, I want to establish a situation that could eventually lead to other books. So, I have given my protagonist the dream of establishing a writer’s retreat. Her idea is to hold writing workshops at this retreat, perhaps every weekend once she establishes herself. She will be able to teach writing techniques at the retreat, or hire other writers to carry out workshops. She wants to sponsor reading events for the community, to encourage interest in local writers. Now, all she needs is a place to carry out her plan. She does a little research, selects a community where the artistic sentiment has established itself, and purchases a piece of land nearby.
detail of a larger drawing Jane Tims November 29, 2012
And then she sees the Landing Church, about to be abandoned by its congregation. She falls in love with the church. She re-imagines it as a perfect place to hold her writing retreat. A serene, tranquil place for writers to think and write. A place with good acoustics for readings. A place 10 kilometers away.
Now, how is she going to get that lovely little church to her own property???
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – choosing a working title
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: unknown
Setting: an abandoned church (in part)
Characters: main character a writer
Plot: unknown
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This is a first in my experience. I have no working title for my book!
At the top of the first page of my text are the words ‘Chapter One’. The file on my computer is called ‘Chapter One’.
Always, when I started a book in the past, I had the title firmly in my head, right from the start. The title drove the book. My previous books (not published, although I intend to dust them off someday) were called:
No Stone Unturned
Something the Sundial Said
How Her Garden Grew
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Today, it is harder than ever to select a book title. I challenge you to think of a simple title and then type it into Google. Probably it has been used before. The authoritative source for book titles already in use, of course, is Books in Print ® (www.booksinprint.com).
A working title is useful. A good working title frames the book in your mind and keeps the central idea firmly planted. So far, I have written 24,000 words toward my novel and somewhere in there, I am sure a working title can be found. I could tentatively call my book ‘saving the abandoned church’. It won’t do for the final title since it sounds a little like a ‘how to’ book.
There are several approaches for selecting a final title for a book.
Some people choose part of a quote from a literary work. Favorites of mine are: Ring of Bright Water (Gavin Maxwell) from The Marriage of Psyche by Kathleen Raine; Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy) from Elegy in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray; The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (Agatha Christie) from The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) from To a Mouse by Robert Burns.
Thomas Hardy, ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, 1967 Edition, Airmont Publishing Company, Inc.
Some titles are from an important central idea in the book. Blue Castle (L. M. Montgomery) is the name for the main character’s dreamworld, and in the end, she manages to find her fantasy world in real life. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier) is the name of a ‘first wife’, whose memory haunts the protagonist (who is herself un-named). The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) is a reference to the enduring music of the river environment where Rat and Mole have their adventures.
Daphne du Maurier, ‘Rebecca’, 1938, Pocket Books, of Canada, Ltd.
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Rachel Gardner, a literary agent, has some excellent advice on choosing a title for a book (http://www.rachellegardner.com/2010/03/how-to-title-your-book/). She begins by asking a writer to identify the genre of the book and then suggests working with a list of verbs, nouns and other words associated with the book’s theme, setting or characters.
I will follow her advice and see what titles suggest themselves. I will be sure to let you know when I have chosen a final title!!!
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – wearing red shoes
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: unknown
Setting: an abandoned church (in part)
Characters: main character a writer (not a very successful writer) who spends a lot of time at some other creative endeavor, loves to wear red shoes
Plot: unknown
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Almost five years ago, I went shoe-shopping in Halifax. This sounds OK until you realise I have only been shopping for shoes about eight times in my adult life (I’m 58). I buy shoes to last – sensible, good leather, well stitched, usually Clarks but occasionally Naots. I was started on this path by my Aunt who said I should only ever wear the most comfortable shoes available. She often brought me a pair of Clarks after one of her visits to England.
Since those days, I only wear sensible, very comfortable shoes. I also wear one pair of shoes for everything. Since I retired in May, I have been wearing sneakers most often, but my leather shoes go with me to church, work, university classes, writing workshops, botany excursions, walks on the beach, everywhere. Mud or hardwood floors, it’s all the same. Friends have made fun of me for overwearing and outwearing my shoes.
At the shopping trip in Halifax, I bought a pair of sensible Naots and these have been my everyday shoes ever since. But that day, I also fell in love with a pair of red leather Clarks. They were a little tight, but I thought, they’ll stretch. Five years later, they havn’t stretched because I’ve only worn them about three times. They are too small. My husband says I was a fool to buy a pair of shoes too small, even if they were a beautiful red.
So, if I can’t wear my beautiful red shoes, my main character in my book will wear them instead.
Red shoes. A use of symbolism to support an underlying theme. In the The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film, Dorothy wore ‘ruby slippers’ to get back home, where she desperately wanted to be. In the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, 1900, Dorothy actually wore silver shoes!
the passage in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz where Dorothy gets her silver shoes
In Hans Christian Andersen’s rather macabre fairy tale The Red Shoes, an enchanted pair of red shoes causes a girl to dance to her doom. Early in the fairy tale, she gets in trouble for obsessing over her red shoes while wearing them in church. There is also a 1948 film, The Red Shoes, based on the fairy tale, about a ballet dancer who is torn between wanting to be a ballet dancer and wanting to be with her lover.
two books of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen
In my novel, my main character will want something desperately (not to get to Kansas, or to dance, or to be a dancer, but something important to her). Her red shoes are a symbol of her willingness to face all sorts of consequences to achieve her goal.
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – why couldn’t I invent a ‘character generator’?
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: unknown
Setting: an abandoned church (in part)
Characters: main character a writer (not a very successful writer) who spends a lot of time at some other creative endeavor
Plot: unknown
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Characters are the stuff of novels. I am sure someone has written a novel without characters, but for me … no character, no action … no character, no growth …
The characters in my novel were not in my head before I started writing. Once I knew a little about my setting, I began to write and the characters began to suggest themselves.
A lot of writers have said this to me. Begin the story, and the characters and plot will start to unfold. Stephen King says (in Chapter 4 of his book On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft, Scribner, 2000): ‘Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.’ So, with not much more than an idea for the setting, I began to write.
My main character emerged as I started to write about the setting (the old abandoned church). I like to write in the first person, so this character was immediately ‘I’. But, of course, this does not mean my protagonist is ‘me’.
Before I had written three pages, I knew my main character, the ‘I’ in my book, wanted desperately to be a successful writer. But she (still not ‘me’) was also noticing things in the setting that showed she was doing something else with most of her time. Whether she admits this to herself or not in the book, it will be revealed to the reader. Or perhaps a clue is contained within this post…
So, I have my main character. But what about the other characters? Why couldn’t there be a tool for writers called the ‘character generator’, a simple device a writer could use to build the basic characters. Get the characters and the story writes itself, correct???
My ‘character generator’ would look a little like one of those oragami-type fortune-tellers we used to make in school. A number was chosen, fingers flopped back and forth and some ‘secret’ was revealed.
My character generator would be similar, only it would tell the color of the character’s hair, perhaps if he or she was timid or brave, and what sort of work she or he would be good at… a very three-dimensional character… well, it’s a start…
So you think this idea is too ridiculous for words??? Did you know (I discovered this from reading Stephen King’s On Writing ), in the 1920s a writer named Edgar Wallace is credited with creating a Plot Wheel. When a story-teller came to an impasse, all the writer had to do was consult the Plot Wheel to see what should happen next. Once the wheel was spun, the writer could read the result… perhaps one result would be ‘heroine tied to railroad track’ or ‘heroine rescued’… Since then, I suppose many computer-based plot generators are available. I think I will discard my idea of a simple ‘character generator’.
So, now I have a main character who is a writer, but who spends most of her time in some other creative endeavor than writing. Perhaps this is where her real talent lies, or perhaps it is a ‘diversionary activity’. Perhaps she is just using this to avoid facing her fear of never becoming a successful writer.
You see, ‘I’ is not ‘me’.
Copyright Jane Tims 2012
writing a novel – getting started
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So the poet has decided to write a novel…
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Title: unknown
Working Title: unknown
Setting: an abandoned church (in part)
Characters: main character a writer (not a very successful writer)
Plot: unknown
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Before beginning my novel, one of the steps I have taken is to read several books on how to write a novel. This is not because I believe a novel can be written if you just follow some rules. I do want to think about how the novel is constructed and to hear what successful novelists say about their craft.
I have been reading various perspectives on writing the novel and I will talk here about three of these:
1. Stephen King, On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000).
Though I don’t usually seek after the horror genre in books, Stephen King has my admiration for his ability to take you ‘deep into story’. I can’t think of another passage as well done as his description of the running topiary figures in The Shining (Doubleday, 1977), or his chilling account of a father trying to save his son from running into the road in Pet Sematary (Doubleday, 1983). His book On Writing is, itself, highly readable, and contains excellent advice for a writer. I’ll try to pay attention to his cautions about adverbs (she said resolutely) and about using the passive voice (the parishioners abandoned the church, not the church was abandoned by the parishioners). He also says I have to ‘stand in the corner’ if I use the phrase ‘at this point in time’.
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2. Phyllis Whitney, ‘Guide To Fiction Writing’ (The Writer, Inc. Publishers, Boston, 1982).
Phyllis Whitney’s Thunder Heights (Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1960) was among the first adult mystery novels I ever read and in my early twenties, I devoured her books. I read her every chance I got, often while everyone thought I was studying. The interesting thing about her Guide to Fiction Writing is how different writing is today. The Guide suggests extensive planning of the novel, working out outline, plot, and characters in labelled sections of a binder. I had to do this for my first book, since it nearly drove me wild trying to remember when such-and-such occurred and whether my character was wearing a pony-tail or not in the chapter before. However, at this point in time [get in the corner, Jane], everything can now be put in a single computer file! And blessings on Word and the ‘Find’ search feature. The advice I have taken from Phyllis Whitney? – do a detailed word sketch about each of your characters. I have done this with my present cast of characters and I believe knowing how the characters will behave in various circumstances helps the story write itself.
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3. John Braine, ‘Writing a Novel’ (McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1974).
Although I have yet to read a novel by John Braine, I love his no-nonsense approach to giving advice. He says not to write a novel if you are ‘married or permanently entangled’, and suggests a first novel ‘shouldn’t be written much before the age of thirty’. Also, he absolutely advises against making the main character a writer. Bad luck for me, I have decided my main character will be a writer, although not a particularly successful writer. Braine does have advice I plan to take. In particular, he presents the following sentence: ‘he got up, went downstairs, and hailed a taxi’ … he says, ‘test every sentence against it; if any has that same flat, dead quality, rewrite or cut it.’
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a born writer – a young girl, writing about her experience at the Falls, on any surface she could find – I snapped this photo at Athabasca Falls in Alberta in 2003
And so I am writing my novel with the best advice… and now you know my main character is a writer… but what else will I have her be?
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Copyright Jane Tims 2012
nichepoetryandprose 