I'm not writing a novel

But I am writing a bit of one

Lately, I’ve become increasingly obsessed interested in structure and the novel. Structure as in that old-fashioned three-act notion more usually associates with the novel’s jazzy cousin, the play.

Act I: It all kicks off (usually about 20% of the tale). The Hardest Bit.

Act II: They/we are in the deep dark woods and any bit of safety enjoyed or taken for granted back in the good old days of Act I have been well and truly squandered (this tends to be about 60% or thereabouts).

The slippery slide of Act III: the protagonist/reader stumbles helplessly down into that climax and falling action, which feel both unexpected and inevitable (the last 20%).

When writing my first novel The Estate, I was Writing A Novel. Same with the second one. It took a lot of teaching and critiquing and reading good writing books (like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream to name but a couple) to finally come to understand that actually, for me at least, that’s too big a mouthful of a thing to be doing. That the novel is actually composed of these three parts (actually four if you take Act II to have two parts - one leading to the midpoint of the story and one leading away). And that while I’m in Act I, there’s no percentage in worrying about what comes later. Because really, the only thing that will help the later acts is getting this one right.

For the first two novels, I tore all the way to the end of a draft, read it, got duly disheartened, tore through a second draft, which was still pretty disheartening. Eventually I started to get a real sense of my characters, and things began to sharpen or maybe deepen here and there until finally I started to get glimpses of the whole. But why did I do that racing to the end thing, instead of taking it slowly?

Fear I suspect is one part of the answer. And the other is my big fat ego.

I was frighten I’d screw it up. And I was frightened of really being myself where I had put my characters. So ego me told creative me to take a back seat, that it was going to figure this out. And then it kept screwing up. Because you can’t think out a decent novel. It just isn’t possible. It’s effectively pretending to write one. In the Arts Lives programme about Colm Toibin, there’s this bit where he says that writing comes from feeling. That if you write from feeling then the sentences might not look like much on their own, but they’ll add up to something. I think that is the maybe the most important thing to about writing fiction. It’s also the thing I really didn’t want to know.

I guess because writing from feeling is hard. It makes you vulnerable. Who in their right mind knowingly makes themselves vulnerable? (writers it turns out). It is full of risk, and therefore a faith in the journey.

It’s kind of a turtle and hare thing.

But now I’m writing my third one, for the first time I feel like a bit of an emotional penny has dropped in terms of these separate parts and how each of them has its own particular feeling, or quality. As I’m still in Act I, my next few posts are going to be about trying to dissect and deconstruct what this first part is exactly. What must happen at the start of a novel? What shouldn’t happen? What’s the energy like at this point in the tale? How must it end? I hope to start nerdily dissecting the Act I of a few novels and will share my gleanings, for what they’re worth. If anyone would like me to look at any novel in particular, drop a line in the comments and I’ll try to take a look as long as it’s not 1,100 pages or something.

So that’s all a bit slapdash but if you’re writing a novel or hoping to write one stay with me because I do believe there is some interesting stuff to come by with this approach.

PS Sorry about the ridiculously long radio silence. Life got very busy. I also was spending too long writing those early posts, like they were essays I’d to hand into a lecturer or something. I am trying now take a leaf out of the book of other lovely engaging substackers, like Ann Rawson Writes and Derbhile Graham at Write Words.