the person telling the story consistent? Are they likable? Trustworthy? Snarky might be trendy, but think about whether you want to read an entire book sustained by a snarky narrator.
Other issues to consider on narration are point of view—first person or omniscient narrator. Would you like to create intimacy with your reader, or keep a cool distance? Italo Calvino, in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, has what is called a “close voice.” You feel he is in the room with you, speaking directly to you. That is a writer with an “intimate” voice. On the other hand, Charlotte Bronte, in Jane Eyre, maintains a cool distance.
Jonathan Franzen on narrative voices and gaining the reader’s trust:
“Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so, a novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust.”
In the classic book Novel Voices, edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabelais, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford talks about writing in first person. The interviewer inquires whether Ford feels more comfortable writing in first person, and Ford responds: “I have a much harder time finding redemptive language for events and characters if I am not writing in first person.” The stories written (in third person or by an omniscient narrator) “are harsher. The moral quotient to those stories tends to be a more negative kind. They tend to be stories that indict their characters more than the first-person stories. Why? I don’t know. But I’d like it to not be so.”
In the same book, Ann Patchett talks about how The Patron Saint of Liars is told by three first-person narrators. Patchett explains: “I spent a year putting that book together before I started writing it.” And, “The last two things I do when I start a book are naming the characters and figuring out the narrative structure. Those are the hardest things for me, and so I put them off as long as possible.”
There are many ways to start. Many ways to tell a story. Map it in advance or simply start writing. You will find your way, the way that opens the doors to page after page. The way that allows you to empathize with and understand your characters. There is no one right way.
Construction
Umberto Eco, author of Name of the Rose, told an interviewer about his practice of building the architecture of his books. He would not begin writing until all the plot elements were in place, the character’s quirks and personalities fully developed.
Like Tom Parker, he also compared writing to building: “First, the foundation, then the framework. You design the rooms and the lighting. Then you decorate.”
Like many other writers, the Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac wrote his iconic On the Road in one long sweep. So did Pearl Buck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth.
Trust
Trust is the first part of growing confident in your work. You may have heard the adage: “Trust the process.” What exactly does that mean?
The writer Joan Didion addressed the topic of trust in the wonderful Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold. When asked to speak about her writing process by her nephew (the producer and director of the documentary), Didion replied: “When I sit down to write, the work unfolds.”
Didion, a prolific writer who published two novels, a seminal memoir, and countless articles and screenplays, maintained a daily eccentric practice. She would wake up, drink a Coke, eat a few almonds, and set to work.
All writers begin with the germ of an idea. A plot. Characters. But it is only when you sit down to actually flesh out that plot or character do the ideas flower into a beautiful, mysterious garden, fit for a long, leisurely visit.
Be ready for your words to flow. Be open to your own new ideas.
Michael Jackson, the musician, lyricist and creative artist, said “I am just the channel.”
The source of your work might be hard research. It might be a mystery. Whichever it is, making the work readable still remains a process and that process is art.
Winning writers are ready for the flowering, to be the channel, and to discover who they are through their work.
As a keynote speaker once pronounced: “Always remember that you writers are in the entertainment business.” Employing surprise, delight, bringing your reader to new worlds, fantasy, imagination, and incorporation of the five senses will bring your writing from first draft to winning writing!
“Writing a book is like crossing a stream. Now I’m on this rock. Now I’m on this rock.”
—Ann Beattie
Onward!
New Yorker columnist, pop psychologist and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers, a book that proves the thesis that it requires “10,000 hours to master a skill.” The phrase went viral. Thinkers, musicians, artists, and writers who read Gladwell’s book agreed. Here is an excerpt from an article that Gladwell wrote when his theory came under fire:
“Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise:
There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…
In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years. (The sole exceptions: Shostakovich and Paganini, who took nine years, and Erik Satie, who took eight.)
This is the scholarly tradition I was referring to in my book Outliers, when I wrote about the ‘ten-thousand-hour rule.’ No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: ‘achievement is talent plus preparation.’ But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that ‘the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.’ In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery. And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. As examples, I focused on the countless hours the Beatles spent playing strip clubs in Hamburg and the privileged, early access Bill Gates and Bill Joy got to computers in the nineteen-seventies. ‘He has talent by the truckload,’ I wrote of Joy. ‘But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.’ ”
I bring this issue up in the interest of becoming a winning writer. An agent friend of mine once said, after I told him that I was revising my
