Composing a Novel: Create a Soundtrack to Help You Re-live the Story You Have Yet to Write
Whether or not you outline your entire novel before you begin or leave plenty of room for surprises along the way, many writers will reach a point where they struggle with a story. Maybe you wrote yourself into a corner. Maybe you’re having trouble bridging main plot points with smaller scenes of character development. Maybe the characters feel flat. Maybe you want to add an unforeseen subplot but nothing fits just right. Whatever it may be, story speed-bumps are out there waiting for you, but I’ve found a little “game” I like to play that can help flesh out a story idea and possibly turn a handful of outlined scenes into an expansive epic full of action, drama, and tension.
The Club Dumas: A Review
** Warning: May Contain Some Plot Spoilers **
Like many readers, I saw the Polanski/Depp film The Ninth Gate before I read Arturo Pérez-Reverte’sThe Club Dumas, and despite what I felt was a let-down ending in the film (we’re taken all the way to the final gate, and then...), I enjoyed it enough to pick up the book years later, hoping for a fleshed out story and an improved finale.
But for those wanting to dance with the devil after an eerie, mysterious, occult-infused plot, the movie may have come closer to a satisfactory ending than I first realized.
My Alma Mater is Making Me Jealous: Southern Vermont College & The Shire Press Series
I recently discovered that my alma mater, Southern Vermont College in Bennington, VT, has cooked up a new angle to their creative writing program, one that I’m really excited about even though I haven’t stepped foot in a classroom at SVC in over ten years. (Wait, am I really that old?!) SVC has teamed up with Northshire Bookstore to create The Shire Press Series (see the press release below with my quote included). This is an opportunity for SVC students to learn how a real indie book press works, and not only get their hands dirty with submissions, editing, production, and marketing, but each student comes out of the process with their own published book to sell in the bookstore or elsewhere. Cool, right?
The end of April and beginning of May have been frustratingly slow in terms of writing progress. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block so much as being lost in the woods—figuratively for me, literally for my characters. It's not the type of situation where I don't know what to write, but I keep writing and getting deeper and deeper—and what's worse—more lost.
No matter what genre of fiction you write, be it horror, mystery, YA, erotica, or more literary fare, there’s one very basic thing all fiction writers have in common—we LOVE coming up with perfect place and character names. I know some writers who seem to pull names of people, towns, rivers, roads, and ranches out of thin air, as if these fictional locales have always existed in the recesses of their minds. I can’t always do that, and maybe you can’t either, so here are some ways I go about gathering names for the characters and places in my own books and stories.
I enjoy re-reading Stephen King’s On Writing every few years. Not only is his personal, humorous, accessible prose in the book a pleasure to read, but as I grow older and more experienced in the writing world, I find so much of his advice to be spot on. But there’s one particular tip in his book that seems to have struck a chord in my writing life. In the long run, the piece of advice he offers is very true…but it took me a few drafts of one of my novels to see the light, and to develop my own equation for coming up with a book that, at least to me, is complete and satisfying.
That piece of advice? Put on your mathematician's hat and get out your pencil, because this is one equation you’ll want to write down and remember, and then revise and make your own.