BRANDON: Hi. Brandon here. It is National
Novel Writing Month. This is a challenge that happens every year where writers are
challenged to write a novel in one month, loosely defining a novel as 50,000 words. That
definition is kind of vague. Most of my novels are quite a bit longer. But 50,000 words is a doable
but difficult challenge for one month of writing. The goal of this challenge is
to get yourself out of a rut, to force yourself to turn off your internal
editor, and to just write. It’s a really great exercise. I did it numerous times before I became
a published writer. In fact, The Way of Kings, which my new book in the series is coming out
this month, was originally written as part of a national Novel Writing Month challenge. So
I think this is a very worthy challenge. Like all things in writing, it might not
work for you. You may try it and find out it just—your personal writing psychology just does
not mesh really well with this type of challenge. You might find that the writing you write
trying to follow a challenge like this just is not as good as if you didn’t. In that case,
feel free to abandon it. However, for those of you who want to try this and have never done
it before, I’m going to give you five hacks, five ways that you can kind of start writing a
novel, perhaps without very much preparation, and kind of force yourself to try this challenge.
First one is something that a lot of us authors do, which is called borrowing your structure.
Now, it doesn’t happen with every novel. In fact, it doesn’t happen with
every writer. But a lot of times, books that we write come from us watching a movie,
reading a story, hearing about an event, and really liking that genre or that type of story and
saying, “Man, could I write something like that?” Then, as a writer, we dig into that
subgenre, say, the heist novel, and say, “What are some of the aspects of this
type of story that make them really interesting? Why do I like a heist novel? What about it is
great? You know what? I really like that heists involve a crew of different people who all have a
different specialty, who come together and apply their specialized talents to achieving this really
difficult goal.” And suddenly you have a story that has a structure to it.
You realize, hey, we have a scene where we outline the problem. We have a scene with
each of the characters being recruited, whether it’s Oceans Eleven, or whether it is Armageddon,
or whether it is Inception, they all share some hallmark pieces of their structure. You
are followed by some extra training or gathering of equipment where they plan on how they’re
going to do this, and then you have an ending where you bring together everyone’s specialized
talents to overcome the problems that pop up. If you have a favorite genre of story or a type
of story, or even just a movie you’ve loved, one way to get yourself into writing and kind of
maybe have, so to speak, some training wheels on, is to go watch that movie and say, “All right.
Can I boil this down to its fundamental structure, then rebuild that structure with a new set
of characters, and a new problem to solve, and a new character arc that is my own?” A
lot of times this works really well if you transpose the genre. If you, say, really love the
stories that are told in Regency romances done by Jane Austen. And you say, “What if I took this
same structure and I made it a western instead?” These sorts of transpositions can also help
you add a little more flare, a little bit more of your own style, but you still, like I said,
have those training wheels. Doesn’t have to be training wheels, though. A lot of professional
writers will do this same sort of thing when coming up with a story. They’ll look to the
successful stories told of this trope in the past and borrow that structure. Do be aware that
you shouldn’t be enslaved by that structure. You should be able to adapt it to your story. But it
really can help, particularly if you’re trying to write something in one month, to have
a structure, an outline, already provided. Number two, cool way to start writing a book
if you’ve never tried it, is to begin with a monologue. Even if your story isn’t going to
be first person perspective, meaning it’s not going to be told from one character’s viewpoint
telling the story as they experienced it. You can still really get into a character by basically
interviewing them or having them tell you about a really important time in their life. And you write
it out as if they were sitting there and telling you about their story. A good friend of mine, Dan
Wells, several of his books began with him saying, “All right. If this character were going
to explain their life to me in five pages, what would it be?” And he wrote those five pages,
and then that was the character kind of explaining themselves to Dan. Really, it was Dan figuring
out interesting things about this character. Now, this probably won’t end up in your
final book. But one of the cool things is, if you design it the right way, this can become,
pieces of this can be the little blurbs, we call them epigraphs, at the start of chapters, could be
excerpts from the character’s journal or diary or something like that. Maybe you’ll just love this
format and write what we call an epistolary novel, which is a novel written entirely in
journal forms, or in people’s writings, kind of the found footage version of novels. So
give that a try. Just have the character, write as if you were them explaining about their life.
Number three. One way to really dig into a character is to ask yourself, “What does my
character want? What do they need? How are those two things different? And why can’t they have
either one?” And if you ask yourself these things, it can help you to generate and construct a plot
even on the fly. You start writing your character. Just sit down, start writing their everyday
life. Figure out what it is that they really want. Ask yourself how that’s different from what
they need. Just do it as you’re exploring this character’s life in the first few chapters. Then
start to construct the obstacles that keep them from having these things that they want. This is
just a really good way to start making sure that your story is character centered. If your story is
turning around this character’s needs and wants, then you will naturally be including the
character in a lot of the story decisions. One way you can go wrong with a book is by
making the character not want or need anything. And a lot of times what will happen is
that character becomes an external observer of some really interesting story happening with
some other character. As a writing professor I see this quite a bit from new writers where
they’ve picked the wrong viewpoint. Someone really interesting is doing something, and this character
that they thought would be their main character is just observing and commenting on it. You want
to avoid that. You want the story to be personal to your viewpoint character. You always want to
be picking the viewpoint character who is either changing the most, having the most conflict in
their life, or who is actively working on getting what they want the most. Those are good ways to
choose who the protagonist of your story might be. Now, number four is going to go hand in hand with
this. Let’s say you’re working on this, but you’re like, “Brandon, I still don’t have a structure
for my story. I know what my character can’t have. I know why they want it so badly, and I know the
difference between their want and their need. I know what they think they want and what will
actually make them happy, but I don’t have a structure for my story.” In this case, number
four tip is choose your type of progress. I have an entire lecture on this, but if I boil
it down, stories are built from three ideas. There a promise, progress toward that
promise, and a payoff on that promise, and the progress part is the important
part. That’s what the bulk of your story is. We get pulled through stories, things
become page turners because we can watch progress toward a goal. And books naturally have
this just in the shape of the book. You get to watch. You’re like, “This book is 500 pages long.
As I read, I’m getting closer to that ending.” But you want to reinforce this with some sort
of plot that you are showing progress toward. Now, in a lot of stories this might be,
for instance, a travelogue. You say we are starting in the shire and we are going to end at
Mount Doom where the ring was forged. And we can watch on the map as the characters get closer and
closer and closer. We can see their progress. We can see where they get diverted and can’t go the
direction where they thought they were going to go because it’s difficult. You want always in your
story to be moving in a direction, mostly forward, sometimes backward. And this progress does
not have to be travelogue. In a mystery, usually the progress is clues. It’s information
progress, meaning you have a mystery. You don’t know who killed this person. Your characters are
going to get clues, information that build upon one another. And some of them are false clues.
Some of them are steps backward. Some of them lead you the wrong direction. But you can get a
sense as a reader that more clues are gathering, and the image of who did this is
becoming more and more and more clear. So decide your type of progress and make sure that
you are signposting that progress is being made. Most of the time when readers complain about a
story not moving quickly enough, not having good pacing, or not being a page turner, it’s because
the author is not signposting the type of progress that the story is supposed to be making. You
can misalign this sometimes. You can say you’re writing a romance when really, you’re writing an
adventure story, and so you signpost the romance. But the reader’s feeling like, “We aren’t making
any progress,” because you gave a bigger signpost about the adventure and the reader thinks this is
what the stories about. It is possible to do both hand in hand, and a lot of stories do this. But my
tip to you is decide what type of progress are you going to expect the reader to feel moving through
the story, and make sure you split that up, divide it up. Give us a trail of breadcrumbs along the
way indicating that we’re making that progress. The last piece of advice I would give
you to try to write a book in a month is to prime your mind. Before I write, I really
like to do something else for a little while.
