How to Know When You Have a Novel's Worth of Material | Unpacking Scope

Lesson 1 of "How to Finally Get Started on that Novel"

Mariam Chagelishvili

Lesson 1 of 8 from “How to Finally Get Started on that Novel”

You have an idea, but do you have enough ideas to start with? What obsessions/mysteries/images/other forces are driving the prose? First, we need to make sure it's a novel's worth, and not just a short story or an essay.

Story vs Situation

Quick digression (already? Novelists!): I was once at a brunch with some parents of my kids’ friends, which is to say, Gen Pop people. “You’re a novelist?” exclaimed one of the dads, “I’ve never met a novelist!” Which, frankly, is impossible, since this was in Brooklyn. But then he said the thing. “I’ve always wanted to write a novel!”

His wife nodded. “He definitely has a novel in him.” 

What was this novel, festering inside of this innocent man like a literary terratoma? I asked to hear more and he said, “My idea is, it would be about the world of finance.” He was pretty stuck though, never able to write more than a few pages, and he didn’t get why this was.

What I didn’t say, because I was off the clock: The problem is you don’t have a story; you only have a situation.

“Boy wizard goes to boarding school” is a situation. “Boy wizard has to fight the bad guy who killed his parents” is a story. “Rich people get up to dangerous shenangans” is a situation. “A poor soldier amasses a fortune and then tries to win back his lost love” is a story.

A novel needs more than a situation. To write a novel, you need more than a wisp of an idea. You need more than the thought, “It could be fun to write a novel.”