How Do You Write a Novel?

Gee, I wish I knew, so I could sell my advice in bottles. Still, in an attempt to answer that question, I'm going to be teaching a workshop addressing novel-writing at the Stonecoast MFA program next month.

The idea behind the class is that the traditional workshop, while good for getting at what's wrong with a story or an individual novel chapter, is not ideally suited toward fixing what can go wrong with a project that spans two to three hundred pages. A workshop can't usually handle manuscripts that are more than twenty pages. Consequently, workshopping novel excerpts tends to lead to somewhat frustrating conversations that usually involve the author chiming in, "Well, if you'd read Chapter Five, you'd know that..."

To get around this dilemma, I've asked the students to provide what I'm calling "samples" rather than excerpts from their work. The idea is to get a sense of the whole from a part, rather than examine the scenes at hand as if they were stand-alone pieces. I've also asked students to provide a description of their projects, an outline of the major plot developments organized under the rubrics of "Beginning," "Middle," and "End," and a list of their major questions. Finally, I've asked the students to read two short novels and think about how they're structured.

When we meet next month, my plan is to work with exercises that get students to thinking about their books as a whole, rather than a series of scenes. The course will be divided into four themed days, in which discussion of student work will be interspersed with exercises on Plot, Character, Line-Editing & Setting, and finally, Getting Your Work Out into the World. I'm also hoping that as we go along, students will give me ideas for teaching tools that suit the longer form of the novel rather than a story or a scene.

I'm excited about this new venture, which I hope may eventually provide a useful model for the future...