How to Write a Brilliant Novel: The Easy Step-By-Step Method of Crafting a Powerful Story (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (14 page)

Build the five
senses:

Sound:
Birds singing. Kids splashing in the pool. The hiss of sprinklers.

Smell:
Freshly cut grass from the golf course, the smell of the club restaurant—maybe steaks grilling on the deck. Chlorine from the pool. Hot vinyl seats? The baking pavement?

Touch:
She feels grimy, so maybe her legs stick to the vinyl seat, or crumbs have gone down her shirt? Maybe the tingle of greasy hair, or the feel of cotton across her teeth? Maybe there’s a wind blowing and it curls into her car.

Taste:
This can be a memory of actually tasting something, the sweet tang of ice cream on her tongue. Or it can be a feeling. She could taste the dread, welling like acid in the back of her throat.

Sight:
The lilacs hanging from the trees, the pots overflowing with thick impatiens on the porch, the aqua blue of the pool.

All you’re doing is creating a thesaurus, a pool of images to pull from as you’re creating your scene/Storyworld.

But we’re still not done!

Building Storyworld isn’t just about putting your character into the world. It’s also about moving your character through it. A static Storyworld is boring. We need to see your character engage with his surroundings. And that means they need to interact. Which means dialogue.

I used to live in Tennessee. And I’ll never forget the first time I walked into
The Southern
, a restaurant with foreign food like grits and chicken-fried steak, a name which still confuses me. I’ll never forget the waitress, a woman in a pink and white uniform, smacking down an egg-stained menu in front of me. When I ordered eggs and bacon, she asked, “How do ya like yer yellers?”

Your world has people in it and they talk. How
do
they talk? What colloquialisms do they use? How do they say different things?

Consider this scene from
Taming Rafe
:

They pulled up to the unpainted house. It sat in a dip between two weather-beaten, grassless hills. The effects of the last dust storm had piled dirt against the barn and porch. Dirty curtains flapped from the open windows, and a pot of dead geraniums told her that Mrs. Thatcher—God rest her soul—had been a woman of hope.

Matthias’s bulk jiggled the car as he got out. “Preacher’s inside. Hurry up.”

Mary thought he might grab her case from the jump seat, but he marched into the house without so much as a glance backward.

She had no time for tears. Rosie needed a home. She needed work. Mary eased open the door. Weakness rushed through her, a ripple of despair that had the ability to crumple her. She couldn’t do this. A tear squeezed out, and she wiped it against Rosie’s head, brushing her lips against her daughter’s skin.

“Mary!” Thatcher stood on the porch, the preacher behind him. She saw anger in his eyes and stiffened.
Please, Lord, help me.

“Can I get your case for you, ma’am?” The voice beside her, a soft drawl, seemed calm against her racing heart.

I hope you can hear the difference between the hero and the villain. But also, you can guess the time period by the dialogue. Matthias says, “Preacher,” an old- fashioned term for the pastor. Instead of “bag” or “suitcase” a character says “case,” a term used in the early 1900s, or even before. And then, “ma’am.” Up in Yankee country, the only people who use “ma’am” are servicemen and cops who pull you over. Down in the south, however, it’s much more common.

Figure out what speech or dialect is particular to your setting, and insert it into your scene.

If you don’t have dialogue in your scene, one way is to throw in signs, like I did with Rafe and the neon blinking Times Square sign. But a weathered sign tacked up to an old oak pointing the way to “Ender’s Holler” would also speak volumes about your Storyworld.

So, let’s go back to our scene we’re building for PJ and apply the Voices.

We’re in Minnesota. We Minnesotans are non-conflict people. We say things like, “Whatever” and “You betcha” and “That’s quite a deal.” We’re not really expressing opinions, it’s more like a placeholder, an acknowledgement that two people are in the same room. So, if I were to write PJ’s scene, I might throw in a “whatever” or a “you betcha.”

Or even show the sign to the country club, and how it’s elegant and snooty. Now, this is where we start really sharpening our writing.

We’ve
already
gathered
our
anchoring
elements—the
Five
Ws,
and
filled
out
the
five
senses. We’ve also thrown in some dialect or speech elements.
Now we want some details that really
make
the
scene
specific
and
create
the
emotional
connection
with
the
reader.

Think: What is the
one
detail you could highlight that captures this Storyworld in a nutshell?

New York
– a cabbie, gesturing out the window, his dark eyes saying more than his sign language. It communicates the “don’t get in my way” feeling of Manhattan.

Montana
– a pair of cowboys, nursing cups of coffee in the middle of a sunny afternoon, their boot heels hooked onto the low rungs of the barstools. Doesn’t that convey the “slow down and don’t worry” sanguine aura of the west?

Moscow
– the precise placement of the red brick cobblestones, nearly three football fields long, shadowed by the hovering expanse of the Kremlin over Red Square. Doesn’t that juxtapose the life of the communist worker and the control of the government?

What
you’re
looking
for
in
the
scene
is
a
metaphorical
statement
that
conveys
the
sense
of the place. The
emotion
you want to convey in the scene.

Look at your scene: What metaphors do you see embedded in the scene? Think of it as a pool of objects, from which you’ll pluck one to create the feeling you’d like to convey.

Let’s think about Florida. The ocean, a common metaphor for new beginnings, or fears. Waves, washing away something, or bringing in something new. Or what about Colorado? Mountain peaks—challenge and adventure. New York—crowded, choking. or opportunity and hope?

What are you trying to convey, and is that metaphor already in your scene?

PJ wants to fit into her former world, but doesn’t know how. She’s no longer used to the country club life, but she can easily remember fitting into it. I use the sight of the new addition to the building to show that maybe some things, once destroyed, can never fit in again.

We’re almost ready. And you may have already done this in your five senses and metaphor search, but now I’m going to let you in on a secret.

Use
Specific
Language
. Specific nouns and details do more to evoke emotions and create place than commonalities. Rhododendron is different than Bougainvillea. And they grow in different places. As do birch trees and cottonwoods. And they also look different. A mahogany desk is different than a metal office desk, and arouses different emotions. I could have said the smells of New York nauseated Rafe. Instead I described them, using specific details.

Do this with every Storyworld. You won’t use all of your notes, but make a list of items particular to each Storyworld. This is especially important when working with historical novels. Clothing, cars, architecture. Do your research and know the world you’re entering.

Let’s put our Storyworld together

The five Ws, the five senses, the dialogue or speech, the metaphor and the details.; Think of a movie scene, starting wide and then zooming in closer, adding texture as we go.

The Scene: PJ’s in her car, driving along Main Street.

She (PJ) had the urge to toe off her flip-flops and drive barefoot as she turned off Main at the theater, driving past the red-bricked high school, then out to the country club, with its neat hedges, its white terraces, the tidy golf course.

Before she could stop herself, her gaze swept the employee parking lot for his Kawasaki. (Start wide, pull in close, add dialogue.)

“You’ll
be
back
someday.
And
maybe
I
won’t
be
here.”
Boone’s
voice,
low
and angry.

Oh, she dearly hoped so.

The new kitchen wing, now nearly ten years old, jutted out past the old foundation. It felt too much like visiting a war monument. She had the urge to stand over it, say a little prayer for lives lost.

Namely, hers. (Metaphor)

She pulled up at the far end of the parking lot, cataloguing the changes. The weathered, white-tiled pool boasted a new slide and, on the high dive that had once trapped her at the pinnacle, a fresh coat of paint. A crisp white flag fluttered on the tenth tee, in plain sight to anyone who might be looking.

She hadn’t really noticed that before, and for a second, nearly put her car into reverse. But it wasn’t likely that she’d see old Ben Murphy or Ernie Hoffman again, was it? Or that they’d still remember finding her entangled with Boone in a sea of mauve chiffon on the smooth putting green blanket.

Behind her, a guest slammed the door to her silver BMW, balancing in her arms a gift wrapped in pink. PJ glanced in the rearview mirror. Why hadn’t she stopped outside town to change? No, she had to show up smelling like she’d spent a week under a bridge, her short red—no, auburn—hair greasy, in frayed jeans, a tank and flip-flops.

“Oh, boy…” She sat in the car, hands wrapped around the steering wheel, debate gluing her to the seat. “Oh . . . boy.”

“Don’t even think about coming back here, PJ Sugar. We’ll arrest you on sight.”
PJ closed her eyes against Director Buckam’s warning in her ears. Just because she’d been banned from the country club premises ten years ago didn’t mean they’d recognize her today. She was taller, for one. And not wearing chiffon.

Whoever is in Christ is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come.

Right. The New and Improved PJ Sugar.

Her cute little lime green bug looked pedestrian and forlorn as she grabbed her bag off the front seat, got out of the car, and climbed the broad, white steps, pushing open the door to enter the grand foyer. Polished wood, worked leather, Turkish wool rugs—the smells of tradition rushed back to her. She smelled Sunday lunches on the verandah, Saturday morning swimming lessons, heard the slap of wet feet running through the main hall from the locker rooms, and felt anew the air conditioning prickling her skin before she hit the humidity of the summer. She could almost see Boone in his caddie uniform, his wide shoulders under the green polo shirt grooming him into the preppie boy his father hoped to create. How one could hide behind the aspirations of an ambitious parent.

“Hey baby, want to go down to Hal’s after I get off work?”

You get the scene: PJ wants to embrace the memories, but she can’t get past the shame, and the sense she doesn’t belong.

Ways that I convey that? Aside from the internal monologue, you have words like “prickling” and of course, “War Monument,” and “lives lost.” Especially the crisp white “surrender” flag from the tenth tee, which we find out later was a pivotal location in her life.

Now for a few tricks:

Don’t front load the Storyworld
. The key to building a great Storyworld is weaving this in between the action. The passage above was pulled out and put together from a longer scene, filled with other action, like people getting out of cars. Storyworld should be three to five sentences at the most. Even the last paragraph had only four sentences of Storyworld. Long passages of description tire the reader, but we need to see the world, so weave it in.

Think
action.
Give your character something to do in the scene, don’t just have him or her stand still, looking around. Maybe he’s buying a hotdog from a New York City vendor. Or ordering eggs and bacon at a greasy spoon. Or asking directions. Or trying to find someone or something. As your character moves through the scene, you describe it without the reader even realizing that they’re slowly being drawn into the world.

Use nuance to trick your reader.
Use verbs that convey the emotion of the scene: prickling, wet feet slapping the floor (running, fleeing), prayer, gluing, hiding.

Although the verbs are used in different places, subconsciously they raise the sense of dread for the entire scene.

Use one of the five sense every now and again to draw readers in.
Just like interspersing the world between actions, sprinkle the senses throughout the scene, enabling your reader to see or taste or hear the Storyworld. If you don’t, it’s like the sound
suddenly
going
off
in
the
movie!

Storyworld is the one thing you can do that will make your reader want to revisit your world over and over. Expend the effort to do it right.

• Who
  
• What
  
• Where
  
• When
  
• Why
  
• Smells
  
• Sounds – (including voices!)
  
• Sights
  
• Touch
  
• Taste
  
• Details you could use for a metaphor –