What to do
Even for those who launch straight into a novel, ploughing through a first draft in an attempt to ‘get something down’, these are the four main factors you need to consider for your major project: character, plot, place, and voice or style. While I am distinguishing the four essential elements of a novel that you need to consider when planning, it is important that these are developed together in parallel.
What’s more, you’ll need to find the ways to cultivate your own writing habits – the times and places you work best, whether you’re a morning writer or an evening one, or the kind of person who needs absolute quiet or background activity.
1. Character: The first step to consider is who your characters are going to be. For many people setting out to write for the first time, this might feel counterintuitive. After all, the plot or narrative is what many people talk about when they want to indicate that a book is compelling. Yet we care about a story only when it affects characters that touch us deeply in some way. Readers might have only a vague sense of some of the events that happen in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) but, once read, figures such as Pip, Miss Havisham and Magwitch are rarely forgotten. Likewise, when we follow Lyra through Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), or Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), we are drawn into the storytelling because these are people we care about.
The British novelist Ross Raisin describes characters as ‘the lifeblood of fiction’, and observes that because they are the story, they need to be as unique as the work of fiction they inhabit. We want to believe in such people, no matter how fantastical they appear. To make them compelling, you will need to work out what your main character desires – what they want, how are they frustrated (because without this there is no drama) and how they will change to get what they need, which is not always the same as what they want.
2. Plot: If characters are the essential components of a novel, then the events that happen to them form the plot. As we have already seen, knowing all aspects of the plot is not necessary when you begin to write, but in practice most authors will want to have some sense of the overarching structure of their plot. Indeed, so important can plotting be that I’ll cover this in more detail in the ‘Learn more’ section.
Although it is by no means an absolute requirement, a useful technique for beginning to plan your novel is to distinguish between the story (the series of events that occur in a chronological fashion) and the narrative (how that story is told). In a thriller such as Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (1981), the chronological story is the events that lead to the transformation of Francis Dolarhyde into the serial killer ‘The Tooth Fairy’, but the novel’s narrative tells much of this in flashback. A story’s beginning can be quite tedious, so narratives tend to start in the middle of things: launching into a story nearer to the climactic action gives us an impetus to care about the characters.
High modernist and postmodernist fiction often eschews conventional narrative structure, but the majority of writers tend to use a variant of what’s known as the three-act or five-act structure. In the simplest of these, the story breaks down into the setup, the confrontation and resolution. This is extremely popular with blockbuster formats such as Star Wars or Die Hard, where the protagonist is introduced, faces potentially disastrous complications, but comes through at the end. The five-act structure – beloved by William Shakespeare and many writers since – complicates the simpler version by following the initial exposition with rising action or conflict, the climax, a period of falling action and the dénouement which resolves the action at the end. This is now the standard format for many plots. For additional help on narrative structures, see the blog by the British writer John Yorke, who focuses in particular on how inciting incidents lead to a journey, during which the hero experiences a crisis and climax before the story is resolved.
3. Place: The events of your novel need to take place in a particular location. When it comes to worldbuilding, as this part of the process gets called, the assumption is often that writing about what you know will be easier than creating something entirely from scratch. In fact, over many years working with creative writers, I’ve discovered that they can find it more difficult to see familiar locations with fresh eyes in order to make them vivid.
Worldbuilding often comes into its own – indeed, overtakes all other aspects of fiction writing – with science fiction and fantasy. J R R Tolkien invented complete languages and complex histories for the races of Middle Earth, and much of this wasn’t intended for publication but instead to ground his own vision of this alternative reality. Likewise, any form of historical fiction can involve considerable amounts of research to flesh out the place for a reader.
A sense of place can be immensely important to the development of a character, and two simple tricks will help you establish this. First, describe a location where your protagonist spends a great deal of time. List 10 things in the room where they sleep, for example, and one thing that the character wishes to keep hidden (such as a photograph or childhood toy) – this can help to describe their motivation. Second, sketch out the furthest location that they will travel to in the story: this might be a far-flung planet or it could be the next village across a valley, but in both cases it will help to establish the scale of the world in which these fictional characters live.
4. Voice and style: A writer’s style is very often the component that brings a novel to life, and provides it with its unique DNA. The cerebral voice of David Foster Wallace, for example, is a world apart from the tough-talking erudition of Raymond Chandler’s characters or the gleeful spikiness of Angela Carter. Sometimes, a particular voice gives rise to an entire work of fiction: Gail Honeyman began writing her bestselling novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) to capture the voice of an isolated woman who began speaking to her after reading an article.
The factors that go into creating a writer’s style are manifold, but I’ll highlight a few of them here. First, is the voice of the narrator distinctive – a separate character in the novel, such as Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) or the three women who recount the events of The Girl on the Train (2016)? This decision often leads to the second immediate choice for a novelist, concerning whether the narrator is unreliable – such as the split protagonist in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996).
Third, authors must choose the point of view from which the story will be told. First-person point of view limits the text to the thoughts and experiences of the narrator, typically a distinct character in the novel. Third-person is more flexible, and can be omniscient – knowing everything in the story – or close, as though following around one person with a camera to view everything through their perspective. Omniscient third-person was very popular in 19th-century novels, whereby the narrator had access to the thoughts and feelings of all the characters. During the 20th century, however, close third-person has become much more popular, limiting the perspective to one person at a time, allowing information to be hidden and revealed more slowly to the reader.
Although you need to make some decisions early on, such as the point of view and who the narrator will be, be prepared for many elements of your own style to emerge through the actual process of writing. As you progress with your novel, make sure the voice and style are consistent and coherent throughout.
