PLOTTING YOUR NOVEL

I have been agonizing over my novel. I'm happy with Act One, about 200 pages, but have been at a loss to make the story build toward the climax, which I have in mind.

Then I realized that it takes time. My friend Harry was in a movie once that I thought was terrible. He told me the studio only gave the screenwriter three weeks to write the script.

No wonder it was so full of cliches, which are quick and easy. The people at Pixar Animation, the great studio that did "Finding Nemo" and the "Toy Story" movies, take five years to produce a movie. They take three years just to develop the story, and they are bunch of pros.

OK, that makes sense. Stories are complicated. If it takes them so long, I should take my time and not expect to do it overnight.

That makes me feel better. So I have a new attitude, a new feeling about plotting my big hairy 600-page novel.

I felt like I was hacking my way through the jungle with a machete, blindfolded, and wondering why I was getting nowhere fast.

I feel a lot better. I thought there was something wrong with me.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

A LITTLE MURDER, PLEASE

I don't know how much danger we need in life. I think a certain amount of risk keeps our blood pumping. I knew a cop one time who said when he arrests people, "I don't like 'em to go too easy."

I get the point. I used to race motorcycles off-road and cars on the street, and for years I rode mountain bikes. I especially liked the tricky downhill stuff where there were rocks and cactuses and you really didn't want to fall.

On the other hand, I didn't like riding next to a 200-foot dropoff over a lake. A little risk was fun, but a big risk was not.

We need a certain degree of risk in fiction, too. For women, I think, they mostly want emotional risk. Will Martha fall in love with Sam, even though Sam is married to her best friend Jill? For men, we need physical risk to keep our yah-yahs up. Will the cop stop the man who killed his partner before he kills again?

For the writer, the question in fiction is how much risk and when. You don't want it to be too outrageous. Fiction has to be more believable than life, as Borges says (in a book called "Borges On Writing").  

In the novel I'm writing now, my main character is going up against a very scary guy, the scariest character I've ever invented. So just being in the same room with the guy is a risk. The trick is playing it out in the scenes so the reader feels it.

This scary guy, I suppose, represents an aspect of myself. I think all the characters we create are aspects of ourselves. We like to see them play out their anger, their obsessions, their madness, to "murder and create," as T.S. Eliot said.

We just don't want them to murder us, unless it's on the page.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle