My Novel Writing Method
IT’S A HYBRID OF WODEHOUSE, MAMET, TARANTINO, SWARTZWELDER, AND THURBER
I’m writing a novel at the moment.
It might appear to the layperson that I am in fact writing a post, but it’s a post about novel writing. That’s the sort of important detail laypeople never notice, which is why you should never ask a layperson how things appear to them.
Fortunately, you don’t have to ask laypeople what they think. If your family is lucky enough to have access to a social medium, I suggest you stop reading books and making wise decisions for two seconds, Brainiac, and take a look at it.
Social media is essentially a 24-hour feed of non-expert opinion. Our parents had to wait til the weekend to hear from the clueless; now there is no time of day or night when you can’t log on and get an uninformed viewpoint. Often, for no extra charge, it will be clumsily expressed, it will misuse the word “literally” at least once per paragraph, and its plural nouns will come laden with vestigial apostrophe’s.
When I was younger, acronyms were just getting started, and for years my town only had two of them: BYOB and JFK. (Some neighboring towns, slightly ahead of the curve, also had XYZPDQ.) Social media has made it possible for hundreds of new acronyms to be created each day. This is good, because AAA! (Acronyms are awesome.)
If someone had asked me years ago if we needed a firehose of chowderheaded numbskullery that was convenient enough for us to stare at it while walking in traffic, I would have said no. I’m glad social media didn’t exist back then, because it would be embarrassing now to have a record of how wrong I was about the whole thing.
No innovation in our proud history has ever moved faster from posting cat and lunch photos to wrecking civilization. (Look it up if you don’t believe me.) There’s no better indicator of how evolved a civilization is than the red-letter day when it glides smoothly past the “checking itself” phase, and right into the “wrecking itself” portion of the program.
AND NOW I RETURN TO MY POINT
I am writing a novel, and more importantly, I’m telling you about it. You really got in on the ground floor of this situation, because once I have a novel or two under my belt, I’ll be too tired to talk about how I wrote them, or about how I managed to get them under my belt. If you get a look at me—a good look— you’ll doubt I could even get a business card under my belt without audibly snapping it and putting out a bystander’s eye.
Here is my novel writing system.
P.G. Wodehouse once said— that’s once that I know of; he probably said it again for people that had missed it— that you can make a scene out of anything. And the key to writing a novel was to have a bunch of scenes, and have as little as possible between them.
This sounded logical to me, so I made a list of scene ideas involving a character I had come up with. Wodehouse didn’t say anything about characters, but I figured he would have, if he’d had more time.
I strutted around, after this, in the little roped-off area I use for strutting. It now felt like I was pretty close to being done with the novel.
Then I made the mistake of watching a David Mamet master class. Mamet seemed to think that you needed to have some sort of plot linking all these scenes. Looking back on it, I suspect this plot business helped him get a Pulitzer prize. Plot, and a lot of swearing; the same system recommended by Aristotle in his famous work, “Aristotle’s Fucking Poetics.”
So, I took all the scenes on my list, and shifted them around into an order that suggested the existence of a plot. Example: I had a scene where my protagonist eats a sandwich, followed by a scene where the protagonist orders a sandwich. I’m not sure which guy would spot the flaw here more quickly— David Mamet or Aristotle— but this is the sort of thing we plotters need to be aware of.
I noticed another interesting storytelling technique in the cinema of Quentin Tarantino; it turns out that dialogue is more effective when the character is holding a loaded gun. I think that if James Joyce had Stephen Dedalus carrying a big gun around all the time, I would have made it all the way through Ulysses.
From Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, I learned the trick of writing a really lousy first draft, including a lousy beginning, a lousy ending, and (in the middle) a lousy middle. He suggested putting in some jokes, too, but taking the time to make sure they were lousy.
From James Thurber I learned the technique of rewriting everything 19 times. His approach was to look for things that didn’t work because they were stupid, and then rewrite them until they were smart. I won’t be using that method today.
I didn't know you were writing a novel. How did I not know this? Where do you find the time, considering you are also apparently reading every good short story known to mankind? Don't make me resentful, Karl. No one wants to see me pout.
Donnin' my pedant hat: Those are initialisms, not acronyms. Acronyms are pronounceable as words, e.g. Scuba, or NATO.
Bertie Wooster & Jeeves as Tarantino characters. Wooooo hoooooo.