Finishing the novel

[butterfly133]

Okay lovely MNers
I have a novel that's about 1/3 complete - it's been hanging around for years. I have now made a plan to finish it! I have 3 sessions per week where I can really get stuck in - one of them being now....it will be different each week due to rota and family but there are def 3 session per week of 3 hours. Then there's any extra time. (I'm beginning to think I need to use my commute to do something as well, though that seems a bit overwhelming).

the structure is all there so I do know where it's heading, I just need to put bum on chair and do it. I hope some other "finishers" might want to join this thread and update?

My hope is to have it finished by end of September. Yikes! I really must sit down for the 3 sessions per week because I have previously done it in chunks and then I've had to reacquaint myself and ended up wondering "why" I made certain storyline decisions, only to go through the process again and make the same one!

so fingers crossed for more continuity and focus.

now I must tear myself away from browsing MN.....

imperial, funnily enough I'm doing that now. I think one mistake I made - partly because of meetings with agents I guess - was to try and too much in full. I ended up feeling resentful because I had full scenes written which ultimately don't belong.

I have been looking over yesterday's commute notes and you know what, I barely remember making them!!

I am about to concentrate solidly on this novel for an hour so off I go....

I hope you did the hour! Have you seen groups called "Shut up and write" online? There's a RL group in Manchester, too.

I really like it when I can't remember writing something down - it often turns out to be better than the stuff I can remember!

I've done it. It was okay. I don't know why I have so much trouble with this when it's usually okay when I get there.

I've seen those, yes. The one I saw they were charging for though - or you have to log in and report....blah...not for me.

Going to do another hour after a cup of tea and a browse here. Thanks for chatting, it helps

Imperial - if you are still looking for readers then I would be happy to help.

Slog on. I am so proud of you all. I have a number of unfinished projects but I am totally not in the right head space to do what you are all doing. ....DO IT!

Hi all.

I've been cracking on slowly but surely.

One of the universities where I work has an open day today, so I shall soon be meeting and greeting, smiling and nodding . My DC are coming too (both year 11).

Then I'm briefly meeting my agent's new assistant (who lives in the same city as the university) to introduce myself and chat about some ideas he's had.

Hopefully I can spend this afternoon, writing in the garden!

Word, may I ask your advice about something?

I'm going to need to do some fact-checking with a SME with regards to some aspects of my plot. I have a working knowledge of the subject in question, so know 'enough to ask', if that makes sense. I'm feeling a bit daunted about getting in touch with the relevant people. Do you have any advice around this? I have this idea that I'll come across as a silly little woman writing a novel and that the approach won't be taken seriously.

And I know too that that's supremely unhelpful and that I should be faking it until I make it!

But any thoughts would be most welcome (though, as usual please don't feel obliged to dispense free advice ).

Pastaeater, I'm PM'd you, thanks.

green i would just brazenly ask! I've found most people supremely helpful. And even the ones who didn't want to, were perfectly polite.

That said, I'm shockingly cavalier with the boundaries of fact and fiction and regularly make shit up. And contrary to popular belief, I don't get lots of readers putting me right on things .

:) That's good to hear, Word - I've taken a fair amount of poetic license in my novel.

I'm a bit in limbo at the moment, waiting for the proof copy to give to various people to read, and starting on the second in the series - I've got 8,000 words down but they don't feel quite right - not flowing as well as usual. I think it's because I need to wait and see if the first one works with readers, and then I may get my motivation back - I really want to see the story out (it's a trilogy) and have a fairly detailed plot down but the nitty gritty of it isn't quite coming at the moment.

I have a NF book I'm working on in the meantime but that's really slow.

Any tips for these non-motivated times?

Interesting to hear about the various awards. I could go for the fish one as mine is a YA novel but I'm not sure about waiting for results for several months and not being able to self publish / seek agents in that time - I think that would set me back a lot with the other books and I might lose the thread of the story. I'll have a look into some of the other awards, though.

How are you all getting on this hot and sticky day?

Have just done a full in-one-sitting read through of my novel before starting another edit. It's left me a bit puzzled as to where the re-edit should be going, tbh.

I know that I need to make it easier to the reader to enter the mind of one of the narrators initially, to humanise her more, and to make a central relationship more intimate and dramatic, all of which are fine and actually quite interesting to do.

But I worry that the real issue isn't solvable. The novel has two narrators, who are close friends - one first-person, one third-person - and moves back and forth in time from the present to both their shared and separate pasts and their relationships with the same two people. Each chapter has the place and date at the top, and the two narrators are easily distinguished, but I'm worried that a reader will just find the time shifts disjointed and bewildering. But there's no other way of writing this novel, honestly, that I can see...

Do look at the t and c of the awards, Madhair - some of them certainly accept self-published novels, and they're not all on the same page about agents and contracts ruling you in/out.

HaleMary, I've read a few books like that and you just get used to switching between times and people. When I was doing my MA an agent came to talk to us and said multiple viewpoints were the hardest thing for a novice writer (ie us on the course) to get right because it was so hard for the reader to 'hear' the characters differently.

If there's a logic to the time shifts, readers shouldn't find it bewildering, though it might take a couple of turnarounds before they're used to it.

I've just finished reading The Husband's Secret which has multiple viewpoints and because the first character gripped me from the start, I was willing to carry on with it. I think the opening chapters for each character have to be really good, though.

hale you seem to be describing a parallel narrative?

I can certainly recommend some novels with that structure to give you some idea how others have tackled it?

Please do recommend, WordFactory. I read very widely in literary fiction, but am always interested in new recommendations from a 'watching how other people do it' point of view, in any genre.

Yes, it's a parallel narrative. Diary entries and letters from the first-person narrator alternate with the third-person narrative. The switch between narrators doesn't worry me, Imperial - they're sufficiently different in voice, situation, etc not to be confusing, plus one is 'straight' narrative, the other diaries etc. also, I think people are used to alternating narrators now.

What is bothering me is that both narratives move around in time - the basic scenario is 'four people with complicated interrelationships are brought together by a crisis in the "now", and as the crisis unfolds, chapters set at various points in the past show how the current status quo came about'. The 'now' is 1907, but I am wondering whether a reader will follow a chapter set in 1907 (narrated by A) followed by a chapter set in 1902 narrated by B, followed by a chapter set in 1905 narrated by A, followed by a return to 1907 by B - if you see what I mean. Even if these are all signposted with the date and place at the start of every chapter, will it be too difficult to grasp that it's not just Now Vs Then, it's Now Vs different past moments...?

Aargh. This sticky heat isn't helping me think...

Parallel narratives.

Possession.
The Hours.
Cloud Atlas.
The Mathematics of Love.
Tokyo.

I've read Possession, Cloud Atlas (both of which I admire) and The Hours, but not the crime novel or the Emma Darwin, thank you.

I am dedicating today to doing the characterisation edit where I know what I'm doing, and will worry about the structure and whether I can streamline it better later.

Hale, I think parallel narratives are fine as long as they are marked clearly. I do get annoyed with 2 person - or more - narratives written in the first person, when they expect you to read a few pp of the chapter before figuring out who the narrator is.

I think one of the problems with deciding on structure is that there are so many ways to do it - and quite likely they will all be fine, so you end up analysing 7 structures to work out which is best.

I am an utter structure geek!

Unreservedly interested in that part of writing.

And I do think writers often don't give enough thought to it. They're concentrating on themes, settings, characters, plots, or the minutae of the words.

But to me that's like building a house without deciding how it will stand. Choosing curtains before deciding where the windows will be placed and what size they will be.

When I set about a project, choosing what structure I will use is usually my first decision. It has to be the right one. It has to not only assist the narrative, it has to reflect it, be part and parcel of it.

Choosing the wrong structure, then having to restructure a novel later is massively time consuming.

TheWordFactory - I totally agree but I realised quite early on that my own novel could be structured in a few different ways and it would still turn out the same, but just be a matter of choice of how you like to read things.

I had that chat with the agents I met and all they could tell me was what they would "prefer". So I ended up going with the one I thought was the best in terms of what you have said, but it doesn't reflect the advice they gave me.

I wish there were writing courses on DVD. I have seen a few structure courses around but I can't face an extra day of trekking into Central London - to say nothing of the price.

Word - thank you for your advice. That's encouraging :)

On structure - Hale, I can appreciate your concern about the 'different points in the past thing', it's something I'm struggling a bit with at the minute. But I think your approach will be fine, I think readers quite like having the time stamp clearly marked?

I had been considering going with a parallel narrative too because I was struggling with some voice/perspective unevenness, so felt that maybe there needed to be two characters narrating instead of one. I've since changed my mind and I think it's one or bust. She has to carry the whole narrative and it's up to me to thread the voice evenly all the way through.

I have two novels on my desk that do the 'start off in present and narrate epsiodes from varying points in the past with frequent returns to the present' thing (what the hell is the technical term for that?). One is Carol Shields' Unless (an exceptional novel IMO). The other is John Banville's The Untouchable, which is not only a great yarn but technically pretty astonishing.

Arghhh.

butterfly - out of interest what was the agents' preferred approach?

Word, you're entirely right, of course - the structure should be thought about and made watertight right at the start of the planning, or everything else goes to hell in a handcart. I'm already doing this in advance as I think myself towards novel 2, which involves a contemporary frame about the making of a film and the discovery of an archive, and the discovered archive then comprises an embedded narrative from the 1930s. I imagine that being a crime writer, you have to be particularly exact about structure?

BUT I made a bunch of classic debut novelist errors with his one, mostly caused by writing the individual narratives 'straight through', rather than thinking about how the two parallel narratives would need to counterpoint one another as I went. It's also based very closely on historical people and events, so I'm stuck with certain time parameters. One big issue is that while one narrator's plot reaches back as far as her childhood, the other narrator's plot doesn't start until she's in her late teens, and is far more focused on her own (dramatic) recent past. Which feels a bit ungainly.

Green, I agree Carol Shields is very good - Banville at his best is very good, but I think at times he almost self-parodies. (Plus he's such a dreadful man I can never entirely forget that when reading him, unfairly...) I forget whether I've read The Untouchable, though.

I would know, now, never to do this again, ever, believe me, but I can't actually fully rectify any of these structural issues now, not without actually scrapping it and writing an entirely different novel. I can't ditch one narrator, because the link is both narrators' relationships with a famous man and his mistress. The best I can do is damage limitation now.

Butterfly, do say more about your structural options...?

At least it's cooler! How is everyone else's work going?

Greenstone - I saw 2 agents and they both had a different preference, but they were very clear it was just their preference!

When I wrote my first novel, I paid very little attention to structure (well to anything really. I just wrote it!).

Fortunately, I lighted upon writing it as a fairly straight forward multiple POV narrative. I think most were third person, past tense. I just made their voices different.

I think this is probably the easiest way to write a book?

Easier even than using one third person POV (because the other characters' POV scenes allow you to introduce back story/alternative perspectives/info the MC doesn't know/sub plots etc). And much easier than one POV told in first person, which is actually quite tough, I think.

Since then, I've become hugely interested in structure and have played with tons of permutations.