This is the second part of a blog on approaching a book like a writer. The first part can be found here.
The best way to learn how to write a novel is to pull some apart and analyze how they were put together. Here is the second part of things to look at during your dissection:
What I am advocating is to approach the book like a writer. Investigate what made the book work and fail. Pull it apart into its component parts — plot, character, scene, POV — and see how it was put together. There is no better master class in writing than looking deeply at the books you love and love to hate. But you have to be critical in your analysis.
Structure is 85% of your story. Never heard that before? Yeah, that’s because I made it up. I don’t think anyone has an exact statistic showing the importance of structure, but maybe they should. Structure is essential, even if the math of the thing is not. All you really need to know is that structure is essential to a good story, whether that story is fiction or nonfiction.
This is the final installation in my series on writing “rules.” If you missed the first two installments, you can read them here and here, respectively. These are the remaining “rules” of writing that all writers should know, with a couple of scriptwriting tips at the end for good measure.
There aren’t any hard rules for writing, outside of grammar, but there are guidelines that help. In this series, I outline the most common axioms of writing. If you missed the first part of this article, you can read it here.
Here is the second set of guidelines for good writing:
Blogs, books and articles often tout the “best” ways to write, but I am sorry to tell you there are no rules for writing—no easy short cuts. There is grammar, which is essential. There are the various elements of craft. And there are some axioms that hold true, which, while I won’t go so far as to call them rules, are great guidelines.
These are what I want to share today—the Axioms of Writing:
Somehow sitting down to plot a story always feel like an intellectual exercise. It’s a logical timeline of things that happen and the resultant consequences. But the trick to telling a good story does not come from the head—it comes from the heart.
There are basic details I need before I start any project. They determine how I begin and how I set up the piece. It also sets up my process, which I will discuss next week.
These are the top seven things I need before the first word is written:
Strong writing requires strong verbs. That’s nothing new. It’s far better to say enraged than angry and exhausted rather than very tired. There are tons of articles about that on the net. What isn’t talked about as often is the ways we soften language.
Ideas are everywhere. If you doubt that, just tell someone you’re a writer and they’re sure to respond with their “great” idea for a novel. (That tendency may be why I rarely tell people what I do for a living, but that’s another blog for another day.)
Editing can be fun, but it also can be tough. It’s an emotional phase of the writing process that can batter a writer’s spirit. Not all of the time. There will be projects that are easy to write and edit, but I’m not talking about those projects today. Today I’m talking about those larger beasts that tear at a writer’s soul. The projects that make us question whether we can write and why we want to do this in the first place. Those projects are the ones that test our resolve to write.
You could argue that three is the most powerful number in the world. It is found throughout literature, music, and movies. It is the reason Mozart’s music, filled with major and minor thirds, soars. It is what governs photographic composition. And it forms the basis for most story structures.