No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (10 page)

In my quest for writing that would last for generations, I managed to write a book that wore out its welcome in less than three days. Having packed almost every single item on my MCII list into one overwrought package, I lost interest in the main character and her morose life after about 5,000 words, and it was just out of sheer stubbornness, force of will, and a terrifying dearth of any other plausible novel ideas that I was able to see the book through to its predictably depressing finale. The lesson here is this: If you won’t enjoy reading it, you won’t enjoy writing it. If you truly are fascinated by the plight of the nation’s mentally ill, the ongoing politicization of religious sects in Saudi Arabia, or inner city high-rise housing projects as metaphors for racial injustice and miscarried modernization, by all means put them in your book.

But if, in your heart of hearts, you really want to write a book about a pair of super-powered, kung-fu koalas who wear pink capes and race through the city streets on miniature go-karts, know that this is also a wonderful and completely valid subject for a novel.

As you plan your book this week, remember, above all else, that your novel is not a self-improvement campaign. Your novel is a spastic, jubilant hoe-down set to your favorite music, a thirty-day visit to a candy store where everything is free and nothing is fattening. When thinking about possible inclusions for your novel, always grab the guilty pleasures over the bran flakes. Write your joy, and good things will follow.

THE PREWRITING PARADE: NANOWRIMO WINNERS SHARE THEIR TIPS ON STORY

RESEARCH.

I’m the king of random input. I read all of my character’s horoscopes and run their biorhythms. I draw cards from Trivial Pursuit and force myself to incorporate the answers on the back, I click the random button on LiveJournal.”

—Irfon Ahmad, 32, two-time NaNoWriMo winner from Toronto

“During the month, if I needed to know something that would take more than fifteen minutes to look up, I just made it up and wrote in ALL CAPS to signal during the editing that I needed to get the actual information.”

—Michele Marques, 39, one-time NaNoWriMo winner from Toronto

“As tempting as it may be to insert historical figures, characters from other stories, or actual facts in your novel, don’t do it unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of the topic in question. Failing that, having a certain looseness of clarity can bail you out of some fairly tricky situations.”

—Andrew Johnson, 29, three-time NaNoWriMo winner from Christchurch, New Zealand

“I make scene notes on index cards, using color to separate what characters are involved, or what kind of plot thing is going to happen, and spend the last week in October laying them out like tarot and studying and rearranging them. That way I can see holes in my plot. Once November starts, I can look at a card and know basically what has to happen in the next scene—very good for those moments when I have absolutely no inspiration. Cards enable me to keep slogging. But I only plot through about three quarters of the book—I need some suspense to keep me interested in what’s going to happen.”

—Suzy Rogers, 46, two-time NaNoWriMo winner from St. Paul, Minnesota

“For my novel, which I realized early on was going to have subplots galore, I not only made an outline (actually lots of outlines), I made a timeline as well. But not a wimpy computer timeline or something sketched on an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper. No, I got my boyfriend to bring home a piece of butcher paper, and I made a HUGE timeline that covers my entire bedroom wall. I think starting out with a lot of clear outlines really helped me. It served as a bird’s-eye view of the entire novel.”

—Michelle Booher, 24, one-time NaNoWriMo winner from Alameda, California

-------------------YOUR BOOK IN TEN QUESTIONS OR LESS

The gilded MCI and dreaded MCII have provided you with a personalized list of noveling Dos and Don’ts. Now it’s time to put these insights to use in thinking about your story and its characters, plot, setting, and point of view.

The following discussions are meant solely to help guide you as you ponder the sweet mysteries of your book in the coming week. Brainstorm, make lists, and give every silly idea that occurs to you a chance to make a case for why it should be in your book. After a week of mulling, massing, and discarding, you will have a few book ideas you love and a handful of others you can live with. And then the fun will begin.

SHADY CHARACTERS

Whether you noticed or not, from the minute you decided to write a novel in a month, the Central Casting wing of your imagination began contemplating contenders for the dramatis personae. Over the next week, you’ll start seeing friends and strangers in a different, more apprising light. From the muttering, pimply florist who sells tulips in front of the grocery store to the executive who talks in hushed tones about her evening’s sexual conquests on the subway ride to work, the personality traits, quirks, and annoyances of those around you will suddenly be transformed into rich potential fodder for your novel.

But with the huge number of possible characters vying for a role in your book, how do you know who should get the part?

Your Magna Carta I is a great place to start. Looking over my list, I would be wise to keep my eyes peeled for a main character who lives in an urban setting, has a quirky job (maybe working with feisty old people?), and tends to be hopelessly entangled in a quest for true love. (In fact, this describes the main characters in half the books I’ve written.)

But another great rule for choosing good characters is to simply pick people you would enjoy getting to know better. Remember: You will be spending a lot of time with these people. As you consider a possible character for your story, ask yourself this question: How would you feel about going on a month-long cruise with them? Even the unsavory characters in your book—the black-hearted villains and nine-headed gorgons—should be interesting enough that you wouldn’t mind playing shuffleboard or sharing the lobster buffet with them every day for a month.

And once you’ve decided you’re going to invite someone onboard your noveling vacation, sit them down with a Mai Tai on the poop deck and ask them as many questions as you can cram into your seven allotted research days. Some good questions include the following:

-How old are they?

In some ways, a character’s age will decide the timbre of your story, and each age comes with its own set of desires, dreams, challenges, and financial realities. The “write what you know” contingent would probably advise that you only have characters your age or younger. I’m in the “write what you’d like to know more about” camp, so I say the life cycle’s the limit. It’s true, however, that it will be easier for you to write characters who are close to your current age.

-What is their gender?

Writing across gender lines (meaning male authors have female lead characters, and vice versa) is a snap for some people and completely untenable for others. If you’re not sure what sex you want your main character/s to be, I’d recommend writing your novel from your own sex’s standpoint. This is especially true if this is your first novel.

Once you decide on their sex, begin thinking of ways you can plumb it for plot wrinkles or juicy potential conflicts. If your character is female, where does she depart from traditional notions of femininity? If your character is a man, is he stereotypically male? Or does he cry at commercials featuring babies and kittens?

-What do they do for work?

If your character is between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five, he or she is likely going to spend a vast portion of the novel at work. Whether you depict their time on the clock is up to you. As I mentioned in my Magna Carta list, I love to fill my novels with the weird goings-on at offices and workplaces. Jobs are places where people who have no business ever meeting spend more time together than most married couples, making work an ideal hotbed for plot-generating alliances, rivalries, and schemes.

-Who are their friends, family, and love interests?

The more close friends and nearby family a character has, the more material you’ll have for your book. But a larger social circle also means more work for you as a writer (this is especially true if your character has children living at home). Because I am a lazy novelist who gets overwhelmed when I have to juggle more than a couple of characters, I am a sucker for protagonists who have just ended a relationship (instant emotional resonance!) and who have recently moved to a new place (blank social slate!).

More imaginative writers can be a little more ambitious in their cast, but my one big piece of advice for first-time authors is this: Keep it simple. Fifty thousand words will come much faster than you think; getting bogged down in a long digression about the protagonist’s second-cousins will give you less time to focus on the meat of your book.

-What is their living space like?

This question isn’t about general location, which we’ll discuss under “setting” on page 97, but about the inside of a character’s apartment, kitchen, or bedroom. The way people organize their home often mirrors the way they organize their life, and descriptions of the microcosm of the homefront are often nicely subtle ways to flesh out each character’s likes, dislikes, and neuroses.

-What are their hobbies?

I love afflicting my characters with a wealth of strange pastimes, from arcane collecting manias to participation in obsolete and pathetic sports. What do your characters do when they’re not at work?

And who do they meet while doing it? Are they on a team? Part of an Internet chat group? What attracts them to the hobbies they do have, and how much time do they give over to recreational pursuits?

-What were they doing a year ago? Five years ago?

This is where we get into the nebulous world of “backstory”—the things that happened to the characters before the book began. Some characters are entirely consumed by something—a murder, a breakup, a misplaced winning lottery ticket—that continues to haunt the rest of their lives. You may or may not choose to allude to these things in the book, but knowing what a few of them are will help give you a deeper understanding of your character.

Because I have trouble enough coming up with a front story before I write, I usually let various backstories emerge during the writing process. If you already have some pretty well-defined characters, you could start delving into backstory now: What did they think they were going to be when they grew up? Did they go to their high school prom? Who in their life has had the biggest influence on them?

Has their life turned out not quite the way they had expected?

-What are their values and politics?

Your characters’ ideologies and politics will probably rarely come up directly in the novel, but slipping some telling reactions into the book’s background can help flesh out each character’s personality. Questions you can ask might include: How would your characters respond to being asked for change by a homeless person? When was the last time they went to church? How do they feel about violent movies?

HATCHING YOUR PLOT

This is the biggie. If there’s one thing that keeps most people from diving into novel writing, it’s an absence of the mysterious thing called plot.

As intimidating as it seems, plot is simply the movement of your characters through time and over the course of your book. Which means that by having characters in your book, you’re guaranteed to have a plot. The plot may be subtle, or it may be the kind of thing that causes people to walk into trees because they couldn’t put your book down. It’s up to you.

Some writers are dazzlingly adept at coming up with the series of unexpected developments and juicy revelations that we commonly regard as a story’s plot. If you are one of these people, you are lucky indeed, and the chances are good that you already have a semicomplete story arc in mind for next month’s project.

If you do already have a sense of your plot, I recommend you spend as much time as possible

“pitching” it to yourself before writing. Talk through the story from start to finish, as if you were laying it out for a particularly patient agent or producer. Be sure to explain the climaxes and the highlights, and try to add a couple of minutes onto your pitch with each retelling. For the rest of us, the great majority who are unsure of what exactly will, or should, be happening to our characters next month, I say this: Fear not. No plot truly is no problem. The act of writing is a 100

percent reliable plot-forge. It may seem a little scary to leave your story’s backbone to chance, but fusing character and setting into an engaging, readable narrative is what our imaginations are best at. Just focus on creating vivid, enjoyable characters, and a plot will unfold naturally from their actions. As I discovered the first time out, characters will eventually demand that certain actions be taken, and there’s something uniquely thrilling in that moment when you see them take charge. However, you can help the plot percolation process along by taking another gander at your Magna Carta I list. What of the story-oriented items from that list seem most exciting to you as a writer? And which of the things you love would lend themselves well to a short-term novel-writing feast?

Also, if you already have an idea of your characters, you can help sketch out the first plot points by taking some time to think about the dramatic changes, turning points, or horrible events you could inflict on your characters over the course of the book.

Here are some time-tested plot-providers to consider: Can someone in your story get fired? Can a marriage or relationship implode? Can someone get a disease? Can someone die? Can an unexpected windfall occur? Can someone be wronged, and set out to exact vengeance? Can someone find a precious or unusual object? Can your character set off on an impossible quest or journey? Can someone try to become something they’re not? Can someone fall in love with someone who is off-limits or wildly inappropriate? Can your character be mistaken for someone else?