The Author's Handbook

11. Five Ways to Write a First Novel

11 Five Ways to Write a First Novel SOMERSET MAUGHAM WAS GUEST-LECTURING TO A CLASS in English literature, so the story goes, and a student asked the inevitable puzzler, “How do you write a novel?” Maugham answered, “There are three rules.” Every pencil poised at the ready. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Even without such a prestigious disclaimer, we wouldn’t presume in one chapter to try to teach you how to write a novel. There are whole books on that subject—and most people who follow them assiduously still produce nothing publishable. Even more than the craft of writing nonfiction, the art of fiction writing has to be absorbed through the pores like venom from a noxious weed. Once absorbed, it could leave you scratching at a keyboard for the rest of your life. The best we can do for you is to describe the processes that various novelist friends have gone through to get their first novels written and sold. You can probably pick up hints from each. You might even identify closely with one of the five in particular, since each of our colleagues chased the dream from a different perspective. Feel It in Your Blood When Kentucky-bred Margaret George was all of seven years old, she wrote her first novel—a melodramatic saga of a horse. She expanded on it, illustrated it and, at the age of ten, persuaded her father to ship it off to an editor at Grosset & Dunlap. It didn’t have just a title page and chapter headings but a dedication page, a table of contents and a copyright notice. The editor didn’t buy her novel, but did send a warm, personal rejection slip that urged Margaret to keep writing and send another manuscript after she put some years on. Most ten-year-old writers grow up to write teenage love letters. Margaret’s intention to publish never wavered. When she was sixteen, her first work appeared in print, an article in Teens Today about why some older girls date younger boys. Two years before that, she’d completed the first draft of her first full-length 138 adult novel, Island. Not only that, but she recognized—at fourteen—that it was just a first draft, badly in need of polishing. Teen responsibilities kept getting in the way but, “When I was twenty, I just had to finish it. So I took the whole summer between years in college, went back to Paducah, and did nothing, absolutely nothing, but work on that book.” Since finishing that second draft, she’s done three or four more versions of Island, a romance set on a desert island peopled by noble savages and three shipwrecked young Americans: a macho but dumb male, a not-so-macho bright male, and a beautiful but brainless bikiniclad blonde with a good heart. By fourteen, Margaret knew the elements of the commercial novel. Well she might, having already read hundreds of them. In fact, she recalls, “I started writing because I wanted to put my own endings onto the stories I was reading. Pretty soon I was writing new stories, beginning to end.” In her mind, that’s still the way she works: “I just have an innate need to dramatize the nondramatic. To be honest, I do it with all my life, not just my writing. It’s like spending your whole life in the movies.” Margaret never shoved Island into a box for mailing to one publisher after another, the strategy of so many budding novelists. She stuck the manuscripts of her many drafts into a closet and set her sights on a science career, wifedom and motherhood. “Then in 1971 I saw BBC’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII and got interested in Henry himself. I did some research and found that nobody had ever written his point of view. I wanted to exonerate poor Henry. Also,” she added, “that genre was popular then.” For half a dozen years, Henry and Margaret became such intimates that a friend said of her scientist husband, “Paul lives in the here and now while you’re in the then and maybe.” While accompanying Paul to Sweden for a year, Margaret wrote a rough hundred pages of her planned fictionalized autobiography of Henry VIII. Back in the States, a friend at Voice of America read and liked it. (Most friends, you will find, like most of what you show them.) This friend encouraged...