Hello,

I'm newly registered and hoping for a little help.

I have written bits and pieces, short fiction, poetry etc. occasionally for years (just for myself) but am currently planning my first novel. Gulp.

I am reasonably clear about the beginning and the ending but the middle section - i.e. most of the book! - is just a mess swilling in my head. I cannot imagine how I'm going to keep the story going for, what, 30 chapters?

Is this an indication that the story hasn't 'got legs' or have I just not put enough effort in yet? The whole business is a bit scary but even in my least scared moments I can't see a path through the woods.

How many times can the action be eased up and down, how many obstacles can be strewn in the protagonist's path, before the story becomes hopelessly melodramatic and cliched? (sorry, can't do accents). Or is it a case of fewer conflicts, more subtley written?

Sorry, this must sound like a very basic, amateurish question but any guidance on how to keep my story shapely and moving in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi, and welcome, pc.

What a difficult question to answer! Two small thoughts, though:

1) Have you got enough in the way of sub-plot and minor charcaters?

2) Don't feel that every section has to sing and dance first time through. Bash out your story, see where it takes you, get to that ending which you alreday have in your head - and you can always go back and inject some more drama into any saggy middle bits later if you have to.

Good luck!

Rosy

It's so hard to know at the planning stage how a book will pan out. I'd agree with Rosy that you may need to go for it, see what happens, and be prepared to make it up as you go along.

FWIW, the middle is the bit of a novel that stays hazy for me for the longest, whereas I do have to know where I'm starting and where I'll be finishing before I can begin the actual writing. As long as you keep scribbling ideas for later in the book as they occur to you while you're working on the early stages I don't suppose it'll be a problem. Of course, this kind of thinking on your feet will mean you'll be revising furiously once you've finished the first draft, and know what you're dealing with, but then you'd be doing that anyway.

Best of luck with it. Your first novel is a huge learning curve, and nothing you write or decide or delete will be wasted effort, however it works out (or doesn't) in the end.

Emma

Thank you both for responding so quickly.

Rosy, regarding sub plots and minor characters, enough of, the answer is really - I don't know! It's all too nebulous at the moment, but I shall remember your comment when I start to sort this mess out.

Emma and Rosy, I'm sure you're right, I shall start writing and see where it takes me.

I think I'm most nervous of writing irrelevancies that don't move the story along.

Thing is, all the books talk about making every word count and sometimes I wonder which ones do and which ones don't. I mean, you could tell any novel-length story in a half-page synopsis, but who wants to read that?

Will plough on and, hopefully, all will be revealed to me. Thanks.

Oooh, I'm crap at middles. I tend to just try and make the beginning meet the end. In fact, if you write the beginning and then the ending and work forwards and back, the middle generally takes care of itself, I find.

JB

Thanks, JB, am clearly not alone in finding the middle rather boggy ground.

Can I just ask - how many (and length of) chapters/1,000s of words are considered 'right'? Although I'm sure these things aren't set in stone.

I wouldn't worry too much at this stage. As has been said before, I'd just jump in (with a notebook to hand which you can write in all the ideas and bits and points of conflict that you may like to include later).

As far as length goes, I'm a firm believer that it should be as long as the story (as long as it's not reidiculously short or long - 80k ish, I'd say, would be something to aim around). If that makes sense. Don't try to pan it out or cut it down, especially not at this stage. Every word should count, but don't take that too literally. Write what you feel needs to be written; don't labour over each and every word.

Just going back to length again... Before I started the book I'm working on at the moment (just finished the sixth or seventh draft) I was certain that it would be no longer than 20k words (it's a children's book). As I'm typing this (I've just checked) it's a shade under 50k. But that's cool because that's how long the story is.

Hope that helps/makes sense.

And welcome to ww!

Nik.

As Nik says, at this stage, in a first draft, what you're trying to do is work out (find out?) what the story wants to be. Even exact pacing and plot may not settle down for a few drafts: I sometimes think of first drafts as the ultimate in hugely detailed plans, rather than an attempt at the finished article. Certainly chapter lengths and wordcounts come later, and usually sort themselves out once you know how the ebb and flow of events need to be. Some people only chop the beast up into chapters at all when they're about to send it out. Others (like me) think and plan in chapters right from the beginning. FWIW, each of my ten chapters is around 9,000-13,000, so there's no rule about it.

But you're much more likely to make the right judgements about every word counting and there being none missing if you're concentrating on plot, character, dialogue and the rest, than if you're trying to spin it out or cut it down for the sake of the maths.

As to length, when you do come to start worrying about it, commercial fiction, arguable, is fussier than literary novels: the former, I guess, you could work to 85-120,000, with something more literary maybe 75-130,000?

Emma

The every word counting thing i imagine is more relevant to redrafting or editing in my view. Otherwise you might just block yourself. Obviously it would be nice to write a book really efficiently and not agonise and waste words and time and have to chop stuff out and be able to use everything. But unless you're very lucky I don't think most people find it works like that.

On your other point about sagging - I don't know if this is useful but I find I tend to have a key scene/crescendo/turning point or something worked out not too far into the book to give me something to aim for and keep everything motivated. I write comic fiction so that might not be relevant to you - but I think having something you are aiming at/moving towards a few chapters off (not the end in other words) is helpful in a lot of writing.

Hope that's of some use.

Thanks, all.

Other threads here proving very useful, particularly the new thread 'Finishing'.

Just had a read through of your various advice once more and was struck by Emma's comment:

Even exact pacing and plot may not settle down for a few drafts: I sometimes think of first drafts as the ultimate in hugely detailed plans, rather than an attempt at the finished article.

As you are a published novelist, Emma, I'm sure you know what you're talking about, certaianly you know way more than me about writing a piece of full-length fiction.

However, to me this sounds like a recipe for boredom and for writing the freshness out of a piece. Do you really approach your work like this?

I guess we all approach writing differently, but to me the 'hugely detailed plans' should be separate from the writing of the piece, so that the 'finished article' is at least started from a place of knowledge with a route map to follow and the first draft, whilst almost certainly not the 'finished article', is at least fairly close to what you have planned and you are engaging your best 'writing self' when you are working on it.

It's like you're reserving the best of your writing for the final draft? Maybe this does work but, my, what heavy going it must be! Or am I misunderstanding?

Pretty sure you are missing something, Jill.

As I read it, Emma is just describing a first draft as the equivalent of a detailed plan - all or part of it waiting to be fleshed out and fashioned into the finished article.

Yes, I only tell myself that the first draft is a huge plan if I'm having an attack of perfectionism, and fiddling with existing writing rather than doing the more daunting business of spinning new words from thin air. "How do I know the new words are right? Maybe this is a Bad Idea," is paralysing. Many days, the only way I can get myself going is to reassure myself that everything is provisional, nothing is set in stone, so as long as I get some words down, I can change every one later.

But I have to say that I think 'freshness' doesn't come from something being not being worked over and over and over, it comes from being truly deep in the writing, and having a full toolkit so that your deep, instinctive knowledge of character and situation can emerge. Much of that toolkit can only work on words that already exist. Tired writing is writing that you do on auto-pilot, defaulting to lowest-common denominator devices. If revising is making writing lose freshness it's the wrong kind of revising, or you're not yet confident what it is you're writing, and so defaulting to those devices: revisions ought to make work more itself, not less.

Emma

Jill, all writers work differently. I'm absolutely with you on the freshness thing. I hone my work as well as I can in terms of the writing the first time through, because I know that at the editing stage, although I can sometimes do some useful smallscale tidying, if I try to rewrite the prose to any major degree I lose any bounce it had first time round. Like beating the bubbles out of your gooseberry fool by going at it for too long. I prefer my fool forthy, even if it has a few 'lumps' of fruit and unmixed cream!

But as to the sagging middle, I do find that I can go back and tinker with the plot all right - adding whole sections and so on to spice up the drama - without losing the bubbles. It's only going over the writing in detail that I can't do without killing it.

Rosy

I suppose a lot of this debate boils down to the nature of the inspiration you start with.

If, before you start writing, you have a fully formed concept of the whole novel in your head, then it would seem to make sense to draw up a detailed plan to help you get it down on paper.

On the other hand, if you just catch hold of a random idea by the last strands of hair on its tail & are trying to haul it back out of its burrow before it disappears without trace into the bowels of the earth, you may have to just pitch in and start writing with no clear idea where you're going to end up.

You may find that when you've hauled it into the open air and inspected it, it's not a novel at all but quite a different animal. Then you let it go, reclassify it, or toss it into your mental cooking pot. Or it may be a novel underneath, but you'll have to haul away at it and bash it into shape before it becomes one. I've heard that a lot of novelists write up to 15 drafts before they've completely nailed it.