How NOT to Write a Novel
200 Mistakes to avoid at All Costs if You Ever Want to Get Published
Penguin
Paperback
: 29 Jan 2009
£9.99
Look inside: How NOT to Write a Novel
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Synopsis
There are many ways prospective authors routinely sabotage their own work. But why leave it to guesswork? Misstep by misstep, How Not to Write a Novel shows how you can ensure that your manuscript never rises above the level of unpublishable drivel; that your characters are unpleasant, dimensionless versions of yourself; that your plot is digressive, tedious and unconvincing; and that your style is reliant on mangled clichés and sesquipedalian malapropisms. Alternatively, you can use it to identify the most common mistakes, avoid them and actually write a book that works.
Guardian Award shortlisted novelist Sandra Newman and veteran editor Howard Mittelmark have distilled 30 years of teaching, editing, writing and reviewing fiction into a hilarious and liberating guide that is the perfect read for anyone who’s ever laughed at a badly written piece of prose and for anyone who’s ever penned one – and doesn’t want to do it again.
Interview
What made you want to write this book? Was it more or less fun than writing a novel?
When we thought of it, it seemed a completely obvious thing to do. While it took a lot of work, figuring things out and getting everything right, it sort of wrote itself.
It was immeasurably more fun than writing a novel. There should probably be an entirely different word for it. It was in fact often the only chink of light in an otherwise unrelieved blackness of novel-writing.
If you could only pick one tip to give aspiring writers, what would it be (obviously, buying How NOT to Write a Novel is a freebie tip on top)?
Be the favorite child of someone in publishing, the higher up the better. Ideally, be a darling, cute child, cosseted by one and all of the crowned heads at Random House, et al, when they come by for drinks. These crowned heads will twelve years later be too tender-hearted to refuse your 600 page recounting of your years at school.
Other than that, the most helpful thing is to read more, and whatever you've been reading, read something else. Then read something else after that. Other than sitting down and getting writing done--which, as we know, has the potential to go wrong in at least 200 ways--the most important thing aspiring writers can do is probably to expand the type of books they read, which has the advantage of being very unlikely to backfire.
Even if you only want to write cozy cat mysteries, if you only read cozy cat mysteries, you're going to have the tendency to repeat what you've been reading, and it will be a lesser version of what you've read. It's like making a copy of a copy of a copy--they get weaker and less sharp with each generation.
But if you read outside of the canonical cozy cat mysteries, you'll start to bring new ideas to the classic themes of the cozy cat mystery, and different ways of expressing those ideas.
What do you think is the hardest thing about starting a novel, and how did you both overcome that?
HM: When you start, there are infinite possibilities. Before you write a word, it's still possible that you're going to write the best novel about the Barbary pirates that's ever been written. You have an idea in your head, a picture, a feeling, a story, and then you write the first page, and it's not perfect. Ack! It's so much smaller than what you'd envisioned. That first sentence there--couldn't it be better? What are people going to think of it? And so on.
So actually getting it down on paper can be kind of forbidding. You have to be doing the writing and not thinking about the result, or how it will be received. So, that could stand in the way.
Whenever I start something, I get around this by just assuming that nobody is ever going to see it. Until I have a real chunk written, I'm just fooling around, so there are no real consequences, I can always throw it out and start over. And I often do. I can start three novels before lunch. Now, finishing a novel, that's hard.
SN: I think the difficult part for me is inventing a voice that will carry a novel-length book. Since I'm generally writing some high-flown literary project, the voice is supposed to be dauntingly intelligent, but also original, and readable, and to cure scrofula, etc. So I will typically write about a hundred page ones, until at some point I start being able to hear the voice, and I can let it tell the story, more or less.
Which novels do you wish you had written most?
SN: Wish I hadn't written any novels. How rich I should be! I like to think I could have been a shipping magnate, if only I had listened to my mother.
HM: A novel about the internal struggles of a shipping magnate who wishes she had chosen the path of novel-writing instead, and so plots revenge upon her mother.
Why do you think so many people make the same mistakes?
We read the same books, and try to do the same things, often without being aware of all the work that went on behind the scenes, the mechanics of novel-writing. Also, nowadays, people are as influenced by tv and movies as they are by other books, and while a story is a story, the various forms they take don't always work in the same way;
sometimes things don't translate directly from one medium to another.
One example we cite in the book is the movie montage of a series of dates gone wrong, or failed job interviews. There are three or four that flash by in thirty seconds, and you've conveyed that the protagonist is unlucky at love. When you're watching that on a screen, it goes by very quickly, because all the information is there at once, but reading variations on the same failed experience over and over again, that's not much fun.
Also, we are all dealing with the same basic flawed equipment, the Human Brain, which is not designed to write novels at all, apparently, but to generate muddy, unreadable prose which other Human Brains cannot make head nor tail of.
What are the worst/most embarrassing mistakes you both have made?
HM: I find it all pretty embarrassing, but really, it shouldn't be. You learn and you get better, and while you hope early on that you're going to be that prodigy that gets it all right the first time, chances are you're not. At least I wasn't.
But, specifically, when I was first writing for magazines, I'd show off a lot, use foreign phrases and obscure words I'd only just seen for the first time, and I'd use them in a self-conscious way that told anybody paying attention that I had recently acquired them. (Soi-disant! Mutatis mutandis! Misoneism!--okay, not that last one, I just saw that for the first time and really wanted to use it in something.)
Fortunately, nobody was really paying attention, and this was before everything was archived online, so forget I said that. Never happened.
SN: I think I have made all of the mistakes, and since I have also seen countless people make the same mistakes in between flashes (or even sustained glows) of brilliance, I'm generally past being embarrassed. The only ones I still find embarrassing are those where I catch myself in an early draft revealing something of my personal feelings or failings, which are nothing to do with the novel furthermore; an effect sort of like the playwright suddenly blundering through the middle of a play in progress, drunk, yelling about a cheating lover...Product details
Format :
Paperback
ISBN: 9780141038544
Size : 129 x 198mm
Pages : 272
Published : 29 Jan 2009
Publisher : Penguin
How NOT to Write a Novel
200 Mistakes to avoid at All Costs if You Ever Want to Get Published
£9.99
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