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CHAPTER 10: The Psychology of Creativity Now that we’ve explored novel structure, its constituents, and its connection to the external world through research, we’ll explore its relationship to the novelsmith’s internal world. The author creates the novel within his psychic landscape, and to study this process, we must delve deeply into psychology. This is the…

CHAPTER 9: Research First of all, research isn’t something you do once for a few days before getting on with the business of writing. It’s an ongoing process, with little letup until the novel is finished. When you write, you write “in the moment,” and you need all your accumulated knowledge at hand to create…

CHAPTER 8: Chapters A novel is a structure of structures.44 At the beginning of this book, we started with the broadest overall structure, the Premise, progressed through the more detailed Novel Diagram with its plot points and reversal, and now we break down the diagram into its component parts: chapters. Before directors start to make a…

CHAPTER 7: The Intellectual World Meaning is so much a part of everyday life that it has become like the air we breathe: ever-present but never really part of our awareness. Yet, meaning is what drives our lives, and without it, life is hardly bearable. The same is true of a novel. It must be…

CHAPTER 6: The Fictional World THE GRAND ILLUSION When a reader picks up a novel, he “signs” a contract with the author. The author has already fulfilled his part of the contract: to present the story as truth. The reader’s part then is to suspend disbelief. So the author and the reader are accomplices in…

CHAPTER 5: Irony Creating the fictional world is difficult. Sometimes, no matter how brilliant your writing, it just doesn’t seem to jell. You provide exquisite description, active, intelligent characters, and yet the novel won’t come to life. Nothing seems to work, and just when you’re about to throw up your hands in despair, it’s all…

CHAPTER 4: Narration Who will spin this splendid illusion of reality, this thing called a novel? The narrator is the one who tells the story. Narration is the most complex element of fiction since it defines the relationship between the reader and the story. The most important decision the novelsmith makes regards the type of…

CHAPTER 3: Character Character motivations, wishes and desires, are the driving forces behind the novel. Character emotion exerts dramatic pressure on the storyline and forces it forward. Therefore, without interesting, highly motivated characters the novel loses its emotional impact. The situation is even more critical, however, than just having interesting characters. The reading experience can…

CHAPTER 2: Plot Just as most of the metals with which a blacksmith works are amalgams and alloys, a novel is generally said to have three constituents: plot, characterization, and setting.8 Plot is the author’s contrivance of storyline, its narrative structure. Characterization is the act of establishing identity, creating the ‘people’ populating the novel. Setting is…

CHAPTER 1: The Big Idea Seems as though everyone has a big idea that they believe will make a great novel. Some of them may be right, but generally ideas that come to a novice constitute only a tiny part of the entire concept that constitutes an idea for a novel. When I lived in…