Now that I feel like I’ve got a lot more experience writing fiction, I find reading books about how to write fiction a lot easier – partly because there are a lot of things I already know so I can skip over some bits, and partly because when I find a useful tip, I can immediately think of a situation in my own writing where I can apply it.

Novel Shortcuts: Ten Techniques that Ensure a Great First Draftby Laura Whitcomb was a book I wasn’t sure about at first. In fact, my mother saw it lying on my kitchen table and raised her eyebrows a little at the title – and it’s true, Novel Shortcuts does make it sound like it’s some handbook on how to cheat and write a bad novel really fast. Fortunately, that’s not actually the case – Whitcomb’s premise is simply to give you some stuff to think about before you start writing so that your first draft may not be as terrible as it otherwise would be (and I know I’ve had some extremely terrible first drafts. Salvaging them is difficult; getting them “more right” the first time would be great).

Anyway, some of Whitcomb’s ten techniques are good; some are a bit fluffy. Just the same, I wanted to keep them in mind, so to summarise, her advice goes like this:

1. Figure out the core of your novel – try writing the jacket blurb to do so.
2. Decide on stuff like point of view, voice etc before you start.
3. Think about crosshairs moments – the pivotal moment of the book, and the pivotal moment of each chapter – and write toward and away from them. I like this idea and will go back and look over some of my stuff with this in mind.
4. Think in scenes. Seems obvious but I often forget and have “half scenes” or odd transition things going on. Whitcomb has quite a detailed technique for planning scenes with quite a lot  of pre-writing – not really my kind of system but worth having a look at.
5. Get the balance of scene, summary and reflection right. I think I do this intuitively but I should have a detailed look at something I’ve written and see if that’s true.
6. Outline and plot before you write. Not much new here.
7. Get ideas and inspiration from similar passages in other novels. This totally wouldn’t work for me. If I’m reading anything too inspiring while I write then I end up copying that style entirely and having to go back and rewrite it.
8. Put deep emotions into a novel by using music and pictures around your workspace for inspiration.
9. Fix problems – Whitcomb has a long list of common problems with character, setting, theme and so on, with advice on how to fix them – it’s a useful list.
10. Set goals and celebrate your milestones. Mostly pretty fluffy, but I quite like the idea of planning the party to celebrate your first published novel!

Anyway, I definitely got a few ideas out of this book, but it would be even better if you were just starting out.

Tags: how to write a novel, Laura Whitcomb

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