8 Lessons Learned From Writing A Novel
- kahansudev
- Sep 15, 2022
- 8 min read
Eight Reasons You Should Go Ahead and Write that Novel You've Been Thinking About:
When truly invested in the honesty of your work, life becomes a living hell, and literature is your only way out.
Here is what I have learned through my experience writing novels:
Introduction
I was never one of those who aspired to be a writer from when they were eight. I was never a fan of reading growing up.
The decision to write occurred to me when I woke up to the fact that I could not help but write. I noticed I was writing when I was drunk, when I was in the toilet, at work, at concerts, at airports, and in subways; I would somehow find a pen, a piece of paper, and scribble. The action was never conscious or forced, so it took me a while to understand and label what I was doing as writing.
Towards the end of 2020, I sat across my laptop for the first time with the intention to write. Most of what I had written up to that point were cathartic poems: little equations I was creating for myself to figure out and define my existential experiences. So when I sat to write long-form, I didn't know what I didn't know.
Any form of writing to me, be it long-form or short, were simply desperate attempts to find my place and hold on to a sort of form in this chaos between my internal and external worlds. And when I read what I wrote, I understood that it came out as fiction, horribly written fiction.
It is 2022 and I have written 3 novels since. I scrapped the first project, the second one is in circulation getting queried for and the third is being written as we speak. I have also ghostwritten about 5 non-fiction books and I would like to share with you what I have learned.
1. Narratives Always Have A Form
Almost everything we look at, as humans, is through the lens of cause and effect. Though I see this as a factor that restricts our ability to further our understanding of life, beyond and beneath, this is all that we have to work with.
Coupled with the above is how we understand and make sense of things. We do this by creating stories. This is not just limited to stories we tell of ourselves and of our ancestors, even scientific data, which are mostly a million rows of digits, is made into a narrative.
When a story moves from cause to effect, the effect now in turn becomes the cause. Though this pushes the narrative forward, there is a sort of cyclic progression to the information conveyed. The narrative always returns to familiar territory, and this happens when the effect becomes the ("new") cause.
The cycle can be broken down into three parts:
Act 1: The Setup
Act 2: Conflict and Quest
Act 3: The Resolve
Not only is the resolution the setup for the next cycle, but it brings the story back to a familiar place to close the loop.
Dan Harmon, the writer of Rick and Morty, went further and broke the story into eight parts that make a cycle:
You: The protagonist or you yourself as a reader when the story starts.
Need: The part that is missing, which needs to be found for its possession is required to complete the story.
Go: Embarking on the adventure, or the journey.
Search: Searching for the missing thing begins.
Find: The way to fulfill the need has been found. There is a way.
Take: The path towards fulfillment is taken.
Return: Once the path is taken, one returns to the familiar state.
Change: Having returned to the same place one notices that the journey has changed the character or the situation, and at the same time.
The circle is not only observed in the story as a whole. Every chapter of the book, every page, and every paragraph tends to follow the circle.
The circle is complete when the work is done and the book is closed, and all you are left with (apart from the change) is the eternal you. Here is a great video that relates the circle to the movie and explains it;
2. A Story is a String of Many Smaller Stories
Walking through a story is walking into the unknown. You may have an outline for your book, but the outlines are mere guides who are often betrayed by the writer, for to write itself it to dive into the uncharted.
When we dive into the uncharted, we will be hitting many dead ends and facing crippling failures. Without these failures, the story simply becomes:
There was a man who wanted something. He got what he wanted. The end!
These dead ends and failures become an integral part of the story and to be able to write means to be able to sew them together.
3. Failures are Essential for the Story and For the Writing Process
Continuing from the previous point, these dead ends and failures are important because they do not stop the protagonist or the story from carrying on. These failures are the failures of the story and the writer to get to the solution.
They are not just great detours that add pages to the book, and they are not just the writer working through his confusion, they contribute to an irreplaceable value that is known as honesty.
Every dead end brings to light what the story is actually looking for. Often, the object or the factors that the protagonist or the writer desires are merely illusions. The desire is usually to fill a certain empty space. These failures are not just a disappointment of a certain expectation, it is also the failure of these dead ends to stop the story.
If the story is able to move past a failure or dead end, then you actually have a story in hand. The problem/equation you have set out to solve is yet to be solved.
4. A Book is a Metaphor
Don't be in a rush to give your book a title. Take your time, write down a hundred titles and I would almost recommend you to wait till the end of the book to decide.
How does one pick a book title? How to name your book? Don't worry about it and just get to writing. When you get to the end of the book and start reading it, take a step back and read it.
Remember all the failures and dead ends that put you on a certain track? Be mindful of that track. It is hidden beneath the narratives, the detours, the plot, and the characters, and it often is very quiet. This is the primary blood vessel of your book and within this lies your title.
Take a step back, analyze your book, stand in front of the mirror and bring out your harshest critique. What you have written is a metaphor that invariably signifies you.
5. Time is Rhythm
If the narration and cause and effect are the melody, your content and honesty become the bass, anything and everything to do with time becomes your rhythm section. Time here includes the timeline, the timing of delivery, and the pace of the story.
This is mainly manipulated with the plot and sentence construction. Language has a rhythm, and when you play with the rhythm, you play with the pacing of the images in the reader's head. The best way to listen to your own rhythm is by reading out loud and recording yourself.
Your writing doesn't affect just the rhythm of your book, but it plays with your life's rhythm. And if it can teach something about time, it is patience. You will grind, you will cry, you will orgasm, but above all, you will wait, and wait and wait. For what? I don't know, but you will. This will break the flow of life as you know it with no substantial results. But in exchange, it will gift you patience.
6. Write as Yourself, Edit as Your Mentor
My first draft was done, and I began reading. At that time, to me, what I had written was the worst piece I had ever read. I stopped and vomited a few times and went to bed.
While writing, the rotting garbage collected from the day we were born all come out on the sheet. The presumptions, the pretentious vanity, the self-loathing, the delusions, the embarrassing naivety, your father, your mother, your lovers, it all gets shat out on the white screen like you were sick from amoebic dysentery.
When you do sit to read, it is important that you do not read it as the writer, but as your own mentor. If what you have written feels like garbage, do not delude yourself by thinking that your writing is not a reflection of who you are.
What you write is who you are, but there are no ultimatums in who you are. There is a ton of space for change and the best way to figure out where to make those changes is through editing.
My experience with editing is that when I do edit, I am able to sculpt not just the book, but my being. Editing is pretty much sculpting and a sculptor once said to me:
It is all about removing all the negative spaces.
7. Expectations are For Amatures
As we watch life through the lens of cause and effect, we can't help but tie up our every action to a sort of expectation for desired results.
We write so we can call ourselves a writer. We write a book to get published or get laid. We write to get paid, we write to avenge the kids who bullied us at school, and we write to compensate for our daddy issues. "Visualize," they say, "ask and you shall receive," they say; be an optimist all you want, but you are going to suffer and fail, and your brittle expectations are going to be shattered.
Write a novel only if you are okay with it never being published, for most likely you will never be published; you are never going to get laid, avenge your childhood trauma. And when you write a book spilling your blood, guts, and tears, and you realize you may never be published, you stop burdening your actions with expectations.
8. Life is One Big Narrative
The structure of fiction to my surprise was no different from the stories I had been listening to all my life. The story of the old man reminiscing his youth, the stories of the hysterical nymphomaniac trying to make you jealous, the story of child abuse victims begging for pity, the story of recovering drug addicts who are trying to replace drugs with "bringing awareness", the stories we tell ourselves to compensate for our inadequacies, stories of our humble beginnings, and the stories of our miserable ends.
These stories have in them the same principles that structure literature and dreams. The added advantage of being a writer is that in making up these stories during our waking hours, we are once again in a dream state. And dreams in turn become as inspirational as events in life and in it too are stories waiting to be told.
Everything that has been learned in the course of writing novels (patience, the structure of narratives, rhythm, time, failures, metaphors, the importance of the little stories of everyday life, becoming one's own mentor) is applicable to the dream-like state I wallow in when I am awake.
"I am a writer,"; "my life is saved because of writing,"; "I write because for me its either writing or death,"— these highly melodramatic sentences are narratives that I have fabricated to identify my being in this heavily crowded presence of ours, just like I did with my novels. But don't mistake fabrication for dishonesty.
Conclusion
If you have always wanted to write a book, go ahead and write it. If you are standing in front of a blank page and don't know what to write, start slamming on your keyboard till you being to type. Write rubbish, read your rubbish, and understand what you are, who you are, and where you are.
You think mirrors do a good job reflecting who you are? Write a novel and read it out loud, and criticize yourself as your bully would, and mirrors will become irrelevant. Honest writing is not for the faint-hearted, but if you do have a faint heart here's a way to exercise it.
The most important thing that you will understand, a lesson above all the lessons is that you will learn that you have the power to create your own narrative and define your own story. Do you realize how strong of a superpower that is?
Kahan J Sudev
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