WRITING A FIRST NOVEL

Paul Heng wrote for two hours every evening to complete his first book in eleven months. He said, "If you want something bad enough, don't just sit around. You will have to work on it to fulfill your dream."

"I don't know why so many writers, unpublished and published, should find this so hard to grasp: the novel is about other people. A first novel must always be about other people. The function of a novel isn't self-expression: it isn't to sort out your life, it isn't to change society. Above all, it isn't about you. You must use your own experiences, direct and indirect, but only as the purposes of the story dictate. You must realize that you yourself don't matter. Only the work matters. You have to get rid of yourself, or at least try to." -- an excerpt from 'How To Write A Novel' by John Braine.

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature." -- Ernest Hemingway

"The novel, especially the first novel, is a work of love and a challenge of your spirit. Don't treat it as anything less." -- Raymond Obstfeld

E.L. Doctorow said that: "Writing a novel is like driving at night: You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can get all the way across the country like that."

"There is no best-selling formula: There is a common denominator of best-sellers. It is a well-constructed story. Every line must have a hook planted to lead the reader on to the next, every chapter must end with a surprise, a predicament, a big hook. The end must be a true end, all the book must be epitomized in the last paragraph. It must be what the book has been aiming towards, the target it has been planned to hit."

"Every worthwhile accomplishment has a price tag attached to it. The question is always whether you are willing to pay the price to attain it -- in hard work, sacrifice, patience, faith, and endurance." -- John C. Maxwell

"The secret of success is constancy of purpose." -- Benjamin Disraeli

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you will do it." -- Lou Holtz

"As is our confidence, so is our capacity." -- William Hozlitt

In high school, Tom Clancy, the best-selling author of the Jack Ryan books The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and The Bear and the Dragon, knew that one day he'd see his name on a book cover. He says it took him twenty years to finally see that, "but I managed to get that dream accomplished, and then I got very lucky."

    While running his own independent insurance agency, Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October. A member of the U.S. Naval Institute. Clancy learned the Institute was about to enter the fiction business as Naval Institute Press. So he drove the book to Annapolis and drove home. "A few weeks later, the publisher expressed interest and so I've never had a rejection slip."

    The Hunt for Red October was published in October 1984, and on 24 March 1985, Red October came in at number ten on The New York Times best-seller list. His advice to aspiring writers is: "Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. Your must write a book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. ... If it is entertaining people will read it, in case the critics never told you that ... But fundamentally, writing a novel is telling  a story."

(Source: The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, Chapter 44. Copyright © 2002 by Writer's Digest Books)

Scottish physician A.J. Cronin (1896 ~ 1981) was forced by illness to take leave of  absence from his medical practice. He then decided to write a novel. But when half done, he became disheartened and threw his manuscript into a garbage can. Totally discouraged, Cronin was walking the Scottish Highlands and saw a man digging in a bog. As Cronin talked with him, the man said, " My father dug at this bog and never made a pasture. But my father knew and I know that it's only by digging you can make a pasture. So I keep on digging."

    Rebuked and remotivated, Cronin went home, picked his manuscript out of the garbage can, and finished it. That novel, Hatter's Castle, sold three million copies. Cronin left his medical practice and became a world-famous writer.

 

-- an excerpt from 'Let's Keep Digging' by Vernon Grounds which appeared on May 16, 2003 of Our Daily Bread, Copyright 2002 RBC Ministries.

 

 

"Writing a book is an adventure: to begin with it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a master, and than it becomes a tyrant; and the last phase is just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude- you kill the monster and fling him to the public." -- Winston Churchill

 

 

"Writing your first novel is a daunting task. It is a dance, a balancing act, between your inner-editor, and that part of you that, for some inexplicable reason, wants so badly to put your story down on paper." -- Palmer Owyoung

 

 

Fancy a three-hour long Western? In which the Native Americans speak their own language and we have to read subtitles for almost a third of the movie? At the beginning of the 90s, by which time the Western had been declared dead for twenty or thirty years?

 

    Well, Michael Blake set out and completed the novel, Dances With Wolves, following a friend's advice to the effect that it is relatively easier to find success with a novel than with a movie-script. The reviewers hailed the writer as an overnight success and quipped: "Yesterday he was working in a Chinese restaurant, now he's collecting awards." True, but there's nothing overnight about it. His journey was one of single-minded perseverance and dedication, of a discipline and dedication strong enough to to keep him writing after his friends and family, and even he had begun to doubt that success would ever become a reality.

 

    That friend? Kevin Costner. 

 

-- adapted from a scriptwriting book I had read; did not record down its particulars then. Please feedback if you know.

*** THE END IS BEYOND US ***

<< Previous Page