So You Want To Write A Novel…
By J. P. Kurzitza
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the author.
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All characters appearing in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 J. P. Kurzitza
Cover design: J. P. Kurzitza
ALSO BY J. P. KURZITZA
FICTION
The J.A.S.O.N.D. Saga
Book 1 – JULY
For my grandmother who taught me to water the plants regularly if I wanted them to grow.
Unearth the Story (one sentence at a time)
Characterization—Who Are They?
Template #1—Victories & Defeats
Template #3—The Tragic Hero, or The Absent Antagonist, or Three Strikes
Hello, my fellow newbie-writer in pursuit of perfect prose. Welcome to my instructional booklet that offers practical tools to help get your butt in gear and finish that book you’ve always dreamed about writing.
Let me first start by saying that I wrote this booklet with the assumption that you already have an awesome story idea that is just yearning to be turned into a novel. While I can help you plot and plan the skeletal aspects of your future book, sadly, if you don’t have a clue what to write about, I can’t help you.
Someone once wisely said, the story is everything. If you don’t already have that, then this booklet won’t be of much use to you. No amount of exceptionally written pages or well crafted sentences will do enough to make your book a page-turner if you don’t have a compelling story. It’s like spraying a skunk with perfume—it just masks the inevitable stench that will surely follow. Being an English major doesn’t necessarily mean you can come up with a great story idea, although you may certainly know how to write the crap out of a sentence.
You don’t want your story to be a 3 dressed up as a 9 (as Trooper once said), do you? Nobody does, and especially not your readers. They can see through all the smoke and mirrors of well written sentences that lack the foundation of a rich story. So make your story a 9 dressed up as, well, a 9!
Long story short: find a compelling story idea!
I’ll be honest with you again—this booklet was expressly designed to offer you my three story templates I’ve developed. They’re awesome, let’s just get that out of the way right now, and should really help you organize what most often becomes the daunting task of planning a novel.
Also, it’s probably important to stress that this booklet was also designed expressly for writing fiction novels. YA, Adult, it doesn’t really matter what genre. The templates herein will work for any fiction sub-genre. If you’re writing non-fiction, or how-to books, this may not be the best resource for you. Sorry.
However, because of my kind-hearted nature and willingness to help you succeed, and because of all the struggles and hours I spent figuring out how to do all this stuff while narrowly avoiding confinement to a psychiatric ward, I will briefly touch on techniques to help with characterization and story-idea development.
You’re welcome. Yeah, I know I’m a nice guy.
So, I suppose we should do things in an orderly fashion, much like you would do when planning your first book. Organizing and planning your steps will be a key issue throughout your writing process. Everything from developing characters, to building plotlines, to developing chapters, to developing scenes for each chapter will demand that you be methodical and, dare I say, even maniacal when putting things in the right order.
In following with the order of all things relating to writing, you can’t do much unless you have a good story, so let’s go ahead and begin the process of making one up.
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UNEARTH THE STORY (ONE SENTENCE AT A TIME)
I read somewhere that being a writer is like being an archaeologist. All of our story ideas are usually right in front of us, buried deep down somewhere, and it’s up to us to carefully sift through all the rubble and the obstacles that tend to cover them up, and expose them for the whole world to read.
I paraphrased a bit, but you get the gist.
You’re saying, okay, Mr. Smarty-pants, so where’s my story? My answer to you would be: ask yourself a hypothetical question regarding a moment or scene in your mind, or about something you’ve witnessed at a bus stop, or in the grocery store. Once you’ve come up with an enticing question, put it into a synopsis sentence. The synopsis sentence should encompass the essence of your entire story in one line. But first, the question.
“What if” questions are great ways to start things off. Example: We’ve all driven by a police cruiser that’s pulled a car over to the shoulder of the road and we’ve all rubber-necked and wondered what kind of trouble that person may or may not be in. So, what if the guy being pulled over was an off-duty officer? What if he’s a rookie cop on the force trying to expose police corruption within his precinct, and now he’s being hounded and harassed by crooked cops?
Sure, this may be a clichéd story idea, but it’s strictly for the demonstration purposes of this section. Now that you’ve got a story idea, write out a synopsis sentence encompassing the general story idea. It’s important to be succinct with your sentence—no longer than 16-20 words. It’s supposed to be general. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to expand and add all the detail during the actual writing of the story.
So, with the story idea we’ve come up about the pulled-over vehicle, here’s a synopsis sentence example I’ve come up with: A naïve rookie cop dealing with corruption within his precinct uncovers a citywide conspiracy that threatens all citizens. Not bad. Intriguing for those readers that like a good thriller, I’d say. Now it’s your turn. Come up with your own story idea and put it into a thesis sentence.
Let’s try another example of unearthing a story and writing the corresponding synopsis sentence. Rain falls and pools around streets, and flows into sewers. But where does the water really go? What if the rain was highly toxic? What if the government was siphoning some of this water into a special classified reservoir that they used to create hybrid humans? What if some of the water collected at the bottom of an open sewer in an urban neighborhood and a boy found out about it?
Now the synopsis sentence for this story: A boy discovers a secret reservoir of super-water containing properties that grant special powers to those who drink it. Sounds like a pretty good Juvenile fiction book to me. Now you give it a try.
That’s the beauty of fiction, isn’t it? Seemingly everyday ordinary occurrences can be transformed and shaped into anything you want with a little imagination. I hope I don’t scare you off, but that was the easy part. Now comes the tougher part—still fun, don’t get me wrong—but requiring a bit more effort.
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CHARACTERIZATION—WHO ARE THEY?
So we’ve developed two fairly compelling stories to work with, and now we want to populate said stories with equally compelling characters. But it’s not as simple as plugging in Randy the rookie cop, or Owen the boy. We need to take time and carefully mould and shape our characters first. Yes, story is everything, but a protagonist who’s one-dimensional and boring, or unsympathetic won’t keep the readers attention for more than a few chapters.
Before I introduce you to my story templates, I have character templates that I use and wish to share them with you now. For this purpose, I’m going to work with the second hypothetical story we developed involving the boy and the super-water. Let’s call the book idea Hydro-boy.
For the purpose of this example, let’s develop three characters for the story—two main, and one supporting. Our hero, the protagonist, will be called Owen. The villain, the antagonist, will be called Professor Von Baddie. The hero’s friend, the supporting cast, will be called Zachary.
The focus for character development is to get personal with each character, even if they are minor characters. Knowing intimate details, even if some of these details are never revealed to the reader, will help you when you write the characters into your story. You’ll have that extra feel and personality when writing your characters that will make them seem like the genuine article.
For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to expand too much in each character section. But it is important, when doing this for real, to go into as much depth and detail as possible for each character within each category.
Character 1
Name: Owen Wheeler
Nickname: Stubs
Description: Short and stocky, but not fat. Just solid. Has blonde hair, thick and short. He’s in grade 7, he doesn’t think he’s that smart, and he hates doing the work. He finds school too hard and has trouble focusing. He’d rather be running around outside and getting into trouble.
Bio: Owen is an only child. He’s been taking care of himself since the fourth grade. Both of his parents work and are gone before he leaves for school, and don’t come home until after he arrives from school. They eat supper together late, and then both retire to their work again, leaving Owen to tend to himself until bedtime. The one thing that gets him through the day is his friend, Zach, who’s in a similar situation himself. Because of all the unsupervised time together, Owen and Zach often find themselves on the wrong side of trouble.
Goals: To save his best friend’s life. To conquer his fear of failure and overcome his feelings of inadequacy.
Character Type: Major/ Protagonist
Character 2
Name: Professor Oscar Von Baddie
Nickname: N/A
Description: Tall, thin, bald, and wears a monocle. Walks with a limp. His voice is surprisingly deep for someone of his slight stature, and he has a distinct European accent. He is older than he actually appears to be.
Bio: A transplanted double agent from his home country determined to take over the world. He was a rogue scientist whose methods were far from conventional. It was concluded by his superiors that his talents would be far better suited in the world of espionage. A chance discovery while conducting experiments in America advances his pursuits for world dominance.
Goals: World dominance. To form a secret army of super-humans to crush America and finally transform his homeland into the ultimate nation in the world
Character Type: Major/ Antagonist
Character 3
Name: Zachary Boon
Nickname: Zach, Booner, Joker
Description: An outsider like Owen, but for completely different reasons. He’s tall and lanky with long thin hair. He’s surprisingly athletic for someone with such an awkward look about him. Has been repeatedly told that he has a hard time keeping his mouth shut. He has a wide mouth and pointed chin which have helped him inherit the moniker Joker from the schoolyard wise guys.
Bio: Also an only child, Zach clung to Owen immediately after they first spoke. Owen was, after all, the one person who didn’t make fun of him. Is usually the one that needs to get bailed out of sticky situations by Owen, mostly brought on by his big mouth. Zach’s brains and Owen’s brawn go very well together and make them a formidable team.
Goals: To not get himself into so much trouble. To make more friends and be popular. To get a girlfriend
Character Type: Minor/ Supporting
We’re doing really well. We’ve got our general story idea, and have developed the main characters to appear in our story. What’s next? It’s time to mesh the two together using the appropriate template.
Below are the two main templates I’ve employed when developing my novels. They are both different and present unique characteristics that may work better for one story and not as much for another. For instance, the story of the boy and the super-water would be better suited for the simpler template #1, while the rookie cop/ conspiracy story would be better adapted within the more complex template #2.
For time’s sake and to better explain what’s in each template, I won’t plug in the Hydro-boy story and characters into the template, but rather explain the sections in each respective template one piece at a time.
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TEMPLATE #1—VICTORIES & DEFEATS
Make it count. Make it juicy and make it so that the reader thinks, “What the heck is going on here,” and is forced to read on to find out more. Don’t make it arbitrary, but rather crucial to the eventual development of the story/character(s). A word of advice: if you can, refrain from calling this section an actual Prologue in your book as some readers tend to skip it and get right to the story. Why they do this, I don’t know. So save all your hard work and introduce it as a short first chapter with an apt title.
Introduction
A major event or happening could be inserted here if desired or warranted, but isn’t necessary if you have an appropriately gripping “prologue.”
Major players in the story
All of the relevant and integral characters in the story are introduced during the first few chapters if necessary; details, history, traits, conflicts (internal & external), etc. The protagonist and any sidekick are introduced. The antagonist is also revealed and briefly introduced.
Relationships start to grow and develop. Any supporting characters can certainly be brought in here or during later chapters as required.
1st conflict is encountered
This is where we get a glimpse of the protagonist’s worth—what he’s made of.
1st minor victory for the protagonist
This doesn’t have to be anything huge, but still a success. It can be directly or indirectly relatable to the central plotline of the story. Its main purpose is to show the reader that the protagonist can solve his own problems.
2nd conflict is encountered
This is a significant obstacle in the early stages of the story. The protagonist gets out of it in fairly good shape, but with a price.