WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO write a novel?? Because if you type fast, it's huge money for a few weeks of work. (OK. MONTHS.) PUBLISHERS pay between 10k and 40k for the advance nowadays. You earn more from publisher if it sells well, and an extra million if it sells to the movies. Then, there's Translation and foreign publishing rights, each language entailing a separate publishing all of its own. Some hit books get turned into sixty languages so get 5 chapters and an outline to show and maybe you could be in tall cotton ! Like Charles Dickens!
I made MILLIONS. I only
LOOK unhappy!
There was no TV when DICKENS lived so he sold well. He was the only game in town. You might say "today, PEOPLE don't read.' But that's not true. Stieg Larsson did the MILLENIUM TRILOGY and it's been on the best seller list for years! So, they do read. There are more bored people today wanting to read themselves to sleep, or read at the beach or park.....more than ever before, even with 200 channels on cable. The higher the costs of CABLE TV rise a month, the more likely BOOKS are going to stay a hot item. Just so you don't think that I am giving advice I don't follow. I am writing a novel now, and to keep my braincells in the pink while I do it, am taking brain herbs, vitamins, supplements and reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories. Like Gabriel Marquez, he is able to find the weirdest, most exotic characters that ever breathed. His people are unforgettable. There are many collections of SINGER available for a buck each at ABEBOOKS. Also, even more are avail free at the library!. SINGER will teach you to do something impt. FLESH OUT THE STORY WITH little one sentence descriptions, wild STUFF that people like recognize as an odd history, odd choices, strange lurid, funny or scary QUIRKS, things that he's gotta be punished for, or which make him differ from us ordinary beings, imaginative descriptions. THEN we are fascinated with the story action.
EACH CHARACTER has its history/ look, and it's given in the beginning. Say, she made pickles better than anyone in the town. Or he is a magician. (Magician of Lublin,) does psychic feats, Cheats on his wife and his mistress! NEXT, you want to select a possible story which stays possible and vagueuntil you outline it. I STARTED with one sentence -- well, two or three. KID-VID - PG comedy. Two 'Martian' anthropologists here to investigate Pentagon war toys, espec. star wars, discover that civilization on earth isn't worth saving when they befriend a truant 9 yr old child and his overworked single mother. When the kid is amazingly transformed by their influence, and does a 180, the aliens try to interrupt HomeStar's masterplan to crisp Earth. They create a Network Kiddie show which gives PH'D's to kids thru the tube thusly transforming the entire country, earning them the wrath of Christian-right and the FBI/CIA and the Pentagon!" A crossover audience, like Harry Potter.
If you've ever thought of writing a novel, investigate your own family's history! I have friends with incredible stories about their grandparents in the old world. In your head, now, you have enough chickenscratch for a loose PLOT. Now, fill it in. Do research on the subject. That will inspire you as much as what you remember Granny telling you. THEN you go OK, meditative mind, I want to see what happens in SCENE ONE? And your inner eyeball will show you. It's Granny at the faire meeting Grampa. You then go OK inner higher self, what is second scene? And so on. Make notes A few hours later, you have what we call the master outline.
I find it much easier and faster to write the script version first. It sends me into the same reveries for mise en scene and dialogue, but it snaps together in a sec. Frankly, anyone can write an entire flick in 4 1/2 days if you have an outline.
NEXT is turning it into a novel. I have taken finished scripts (the other one I'm working on now is LONG FALL TO THE SIDEWALK CAFE.Have 4 chaps finished novel on that one.) and am turning them into novellas cuz scripts can't get no respect, bastard art form. BUT if the novel sells to NYC, the script gets mega respect in Hwd!! That sale can be a million. Sale to studios. And always have a script ready on your novel as they will give novelist first swack at the screenplay. I have many files at my website on how to write screenplay.
If you think you're going to be a little flat at this, being a tyro, Study the great ones. I admire the writing of Gabriel Marquez, "l00 yrs of Solitude" --as it's salt peppered, larded like a fruitcake, wild WHACKOS that you couldn't have imagined being in existence and their even wilder quirks and he saturates every inch of his fruitcake with them.He goes on and on every paragraph adding new people with similarly odd quirks, LABRYNTHINE side plots Mostly Cul de Sacs involving them. Most interesting brain ever! HOW does he come up with that? What is he on??? Somebody buy me a crate of whatever he's drinking!
Then for prose styling, SHIRLEY HAZZARD's "TRANSIT OF VENUS" will set the benchmark for prose that's intoxicating, dizzying and a tad surreal. Others say "THE GREAT GATSBY" By Fitzgerald is prose style from heaven. I agree. It rocks. Stunning intelligence there, still. Other lists have Pride and Prejudice mentioned as best novel, remarking that narration needs a very relaxed, cool, extremely smart, analytical 'voice'. And Elizabeth Bennet, really Jane Austen, has that. AGREED!
JOSEPH CONRAD has other abilities. The ability to create a villain whom you hate instantly. SECRET AGENT is an example a novel which I was reading last nite. Became a HITCHCOCK FILM In 36, "SABOTAGE" they called it, with PETER LORRE, OSCAR HOMOLKA. Really scary film! Remember the Birdcage on the tram? The kid carrying a Bomb? CHild takes it on BUS, blows himself up? Then MA knifes PA cuz he did that to the kid? http://www.ductape.net/~steveh/secretagent/ CONRAD was a Polish immigrant who came to London, wrote that book in 07, many others too, barely had learned ENGLISH at age 20 and still everybody puts him on the list of best l00 authors. COPPOLA did APOCALYPSE now out of his book HEART OF DARKNESS. David LEAN ws doing NOSTROMO when he died. NOSTROMO is on some best lists. Stylistically, Conrad does something I have rarely seen done by ANY NOVELIST and does it well. CONRAD MAKES the three main characters, Verloc, the spy who plants bomb on bus via the innocent kid.....Winnie his wife and Stevie her little brother, totally ODIOUS!!!!!!!! And the Mother in law. And he does it in a few paragraphs in first chapter with riff after riff of quirks, things they do, how they look, how they think. Get that book just to read a technique for creating VILLAINS as the center of the novel. ARTHUR MILLER does this at a much slower (but not gentler) pace in FOCUS, his novel about anti semitism, but CONRAD really goes at it. Drumbeat after drumbeat of really foul descriptions of our main three. And at the end WINNIE KNIFES her spy hubby for setting the kid up with the bomb. RENT SABOTAGE if you can. Hitchcock totally took best part out of book and added some magic of his own. He so made the book better! PATRICIA ARQUETTE played Winnie in a revival flick recently, endowed by nature to be a grand tragedienne. The way he makes both VERLOC and the MOTHER IN LAW odious is that THE OLE GAL rhapsodises about how she saw quality and class in VERLOC, as she's previously seen 'gentlemen' in bars (!) who had these same admirable traits!!!!!! IT IS THE MOST VITRIOLIC, ACID intro to characters IN ALL FICTION! Even Scarlett O Hara's utter DIVA VANITY in the opening scenes of GWTW is left in the dust.
Read Alan Rinzler's blog on novel writing. He's not only good, he's the BEST! http://www.alanrinzler.com/blog/
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