What goes into a novel: idle speculation by an idle novelist

Telling Stories

The difference between telling a story and relating a sequence of events is primarily a question of whether the teller feels compelled to abandon effect for the sake of objective truth, or feels compelled to abandon objective truth for the sake of effect. I know that I won't hesitate to edit the facts to make a better story, and I have to stifle screams of frustration when someone else starts into a sequence like:

"So it was Tuesday afternoon--or was it Wednesday? No, it must have been Tuesday because I had lasagne for lunch--and coming back from the cafe Rick said to me--or was it Jeff? Yeah, it was Jeff, because Rick was still in Bermuda--or was it the Bahamas? Anyway, Jeff said to me 'My mother-in-law must be the sloppiest person on the face of the earth.' No, no, it was 'messiest eater on the face of the earth,' oh, rats, now I've spoiled the funny part, because then I said. . . ."

A few moments' thought before launching into this ruined narrative should have had its narrator saying "The other day Jeff said to me 'My mother-in-law must be the messiest eater on the face of the earth.' I had noticed the whole left side of his shirt was speckled with tiny dots of grape jelly, but I didn't want to say anything at the time."

Even it if was Rick who said it. Whether it was a week ago or six months ago. Whether it was "sloppiest person" or "messiest eater." Whether his shirt really had spots or he just told you she sprayed a lot when she ate. Whatever "really" happened, if you're going to tell a story, figure out what the point is and who the characters are, and invent details and put words into their mouths if necessary to make it interesting. That's story-telling. It can get you into trouble, especially if you're a kid, or you do it outside its accepted social milieu, but a story-teller's got to do what a story-teller's got to do, no matter what.

Writing Stories

Very quickly you discover that subjective, internal truth is a hard thing to find. If you invent Jeff, he better be recognizable as Jeff all the time, and not turn into Rick (at least, not without a good, internally truthful, reason) halfway through the story. There'd better be a reason for those spots of jelly. In fact, there'd better be a reason for the mother-in-law, and for her messiness, and for the very fact that you're taking up your readers' time trying to tell them the story in the first place.

When you're writing the story, nobody's going to jump in and say "Wait a minute." But when you're done, if somebody reading it runs into a statement that doesn't ring true they'll just put it down and look for something better to do. So what's a story-writer to do?

The main thing, the first thing, the thing that makes your story a story instead of a writing exercise, is the point. Why are you writing this? What are you trying to tell your readers? If you know the point, you can test every sentence and every paragraph to see if it is internally truthful to the point. If the point of the mother-in-law story is to show how someone can be so much in love with his spouse that he'd allow his in-laws to do things to him that he'd formerly advocated the death penalty for, then you might start out with Jeff telling you something unpleasant his mother-in-law did, with comic details like the shirt, then your reaction, then his explanation (with the details, of course) that she's done worse, and so on. Each comic incident of the mother-in-law's offensiveness would be worse than the last, but in each you'd involve the wife, and show how much Jeff loved her, and how he tempered his reaction out of consideration for her, until you arrived at some climax where the mother-in-law did something truly unforgiveable and you are left hanging for a moment--will he let her get away with that?--and then the denouement.

I should leave the denouement as an exercise for the reader, but I'm in a spoiler of a mood, so I won't. Either Jeff, in a stroke of genius, figures out how to get rid of Mom while making it look like an act of loving kindness (buys her a retirement condo in Arizona) or the wife leaves Jeff because she can't live with a man who lets people walk all over him (and he ends up dependent on Mom because he can't cook, wash, sew, etcetera for himself, typical male pig that he is), or Mom finally transgresses against the wife in some tiny way (serves her decaf instead of ethyl) and the wife decks her out (saying "Oh, I always figured you didn't mind Mom's little ways, or I'd have belted her into line months ago"), or this-particular-denouement-left-as-an-exercise-for-the-reader-after-all.

Writing Novels

But there is a distinction between stories and novels. A story should have a point, or it's no story at all. But a story considers its point from a single perspective, in a single setting. You shouldn't attempt, in a story, to show how Jeff puts up with impossibly offensive behavior from his mother-in-law for the sake of his wife, and how his wife is simply blind to the fact that Mom's behavior is offensive to him, and how his mother-in-law manages to engage in this behavior deliberately while telling herself that she has good reasons for it, all with a subtext of the interactions between the characters' moods, the weather, and their financial ups and downs. If you want to do that, you should write a novel.

On the other hand, if you did all this multiple story-telling in a book where each chapter took up the tale from a different character's perspective, or combined different moods and bank balances with similar, repeating events, and yet failed to have the overall whole maintain a focus on a point, then you'd be writing a collection of stories, not a novel. A novel should have an overall point, a message that's complex enough that it can't be addressed without establishing a bunch of related points, weaving them all together into an organic whole. The decision of whether the elements that are woven together should be discrete stories or should overlap and intermingle is independent of whether the book is a novel, but should be more than just a stylistic issue. The choice you make in this and every aspect of the book should reflect the point you want to make.

And no, I'm not now going to outline the novel of Jeff, his wife, his mother-in-law, and the shirt with the tiny dots of jelly. If I went to the trouble to do that I might as well write the damned thing, and I'm already writing a novel that isn't about that. I will, in a future article or articles, tell something about how I'm constructing the novel I am writing.

In Conclusion