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”

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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.”

I’d say, at bare minimum, to get started with a novel you need:

• A protagonist who wants something. This desire should be for something tangible, which stands in for something existential. 

• A antagonist or antagonizing force. Someone or something that is keeping the protagonist from getting what they want.

• A plot (but don’t worry, that’s mostly about the aforementioned desires of the characters and whether or not they will get what they want). A subplot or two? Probably.

• And most importantly: a mystery. I don’t mean like it has to be a mystery story, I just mean that for you the writer, there should be something you can’t quite articulate, something you can’t stop thinking about, that draws you to the story. Something you’re writing to discover, or clarify, or articulate. We read to be delighted, to see things in surprising ways. Leave some room to surprise and delight yourself as you write. 

Now just to be clear, this is all highly subjective. These are the things I need to know before I start working on a novel. And this is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many other, more specific elements that novels require, some of which we’ll discuss in the weeks ahead. But having worked with many writers on their novels, I’m pretty convinced that whenever someone gets really stuck midway through, it’s because they are missing one or more of these elements. 

A Word on Outlines

Let’s talk about outlines real quick, just to clear the air: I know some of y’all love an outline. And sometimes, if you’re really stuck on a project, or get overwhelmed by the thought of beginning, or have very limited writing time and need to find a way to write as efficiently as possible, an outline can be what frees you to create. 

You don’t have to start with an outline. Often I find a precise, chapter-by-chapter outline comes later, once you’re in-progress, rather than before you’ve begun.

In those early, still-falling-in-love-with-the-novel stages, I like a loose, hand-written outline – a square for each chapter, perhaps, with vague notes that make sense only to me, about the kind of work each chapter will do. It doesn’t work for me if a book is completely figured out before I’ve even begun writing, laid out like an equation or a scientific proof. The heat is gone. It’s already taxidermied and thus (as I understand taxidermy) no longer alive. Again, this is just me! I know novelists who create incredibly detailed pre-first-draft spreadsheets that would make a Virgo shiver with erotic delight. And generally, their plots are a lot tighter than mine, so there you go! 

Eventually, in some draft or another, you’ll need to make sure each chapter or story block reveals character or advances the plot. You can outline this out first or not. I’m sorry to tell you, you’ll have to revise a lot either way. 

I know there are lots of story-shaping formulas out there, and I know they work for some people. To me, writing a novel is about art, not science. A loose Three-Act Structure can be useful. I appreciate Dan Harmon’s story cycle (yes he’s the Rick & Morty guy but ok look it’s useful), though in practice most novels are more complicated and nebulous than this. I think these structures are perhaps more useful for analyzing a story once it’s in place. Personally, I would find it difficult to start with an empty structure. What would I plug into it? That’s why to me, the novel-writing process starts with characters and their problems and desires. 

I cannot stress enough: find what works for you. 

I don’t think fancy software is neccessary  – come at me, Scrivener-heads – but whatever helps you is totally fine. Just don’t let the novelty of some new program/software/formula/theory allow you to costume procrastination as productivity.

Don’t worry, we’ll talk about three-act structures a little later in the Plot lesson! But just remember that you don’t have to figure out everything about the book all at once, or before you begin. We’ll get there. The actual key – the only real absolute novel-writing-rule there is – is that in order to write a book, you have to figure out what works for you within the actual life and brain and writing time and energy and interests that you actually have. 

What you really need is something to say, or some intriguing-to-you premise, and your own way of telling it.  

What to Read When You Want to Write

There are some wonderful craft books out there, but if that’s not your speed, don’t sweat it.  What I think is truly useful is reading novels that you love. I always tell students to find things to read that truly appeal to them. Just make sure you’re reading widely. Read the classics, yes, but also read your contemporaries. After all, you’re writing for contemporary readers. 

Find books that you adore, and then think about why you love them. Look at how they are made.

I’ll go first: I love Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve read it more times than I’ve read any other novel. I also know fellow writers and big readers who find it incredibly boring, and none of us is wrong. For context: it’s the famed modernist Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, published in 1925, known for its “stream of consciousness” style. It takes place over one day in June during which upper crust Londoner Clarissa Dalloway is getting ready to throw a party. 

Sounds like a page-turner, doesn’t it?

My love of Dalloway reminds me that I’m drawn to novels with beautiful sentences, lush sensory detail, deep character development, and a narrative project of telling truths about what it’s like to be a human. I see the value of (and sometimes enjoy reading!) page-turning thrillers, romantasy full of world-building, super-plot-driven novels – they just aren’t what really excite me. 

The key here is to be honest with yourself. Maybe you’re the kind of reader who’s like wow plotless novels about people talking? NOPE, give me horny fairies. Great! Perfect! You have to write the novel you want to read. (And if you don’t read novels… dude, how did you get here?)

Once you’ve honed in on what kind of novel you’re writing, your next task is to choose your constraints, i.e. narrow the scope. Where will the book take place? Over what stretch of time? Who are the main players? What is at stake for them? Answering these questions will help you get started.

A Study in Scope: Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway, like any novel, is defined by its constraints, by the choices that the author made. It takes place over one day, in one city. That’s a pretty tight constraint. But the point of view ranges all over the place, and there is a hefty dose of backstory, allowing for a little more air.

Something interesting about Mrs. Dalloway is that it started as a short story. In “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” Clarissa Dalloway is a middle-aged, upper-class London woman on an errand to buy some gloves. We are a few years out from World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, and the shared trauma of what everyone has lived through lingers. We are deep inside the character’s consciousness, as we tend to be when Woolf is in charge, and receive the connective way Clarissa experiences everything – the way “a leaf of mint” brings back her childhood, for example. She muses about aging, past lovers, London, class, and how things have changed since the war. By the end of the story, she has obtained her gloves. 

This is a great scope for a short story: our protagonist wants something both tangible (gloves!) and intangible (for things to feel simple, the way they did to her before the war, and in her youth). We know why the story ends when it ends. She has her gloves, and while she hasn’t exactly had a moment of epiphany, the reader has.

I find it instructive to look at what else had to be woven in to expand this story into a novel (albeit a short one, clocking it at under 200 pages). In Mrs. Dalloway, we have Clarissa – still middle-aged, still upper-class, still shaken from the war, still wandering London. We have a narrative constraint like the story’s mission to buy gloves, but here it’s expanded – Clarissa is preparing for a party that will take place that evening. The stakes are high at this party, too, once we learn that her old flame Peter – the one that got away – will be there. He represents a hinge moment, when she might have chosen differently and had an entirely different life, and so of course she’s jangly all day over this. 

What’s more, her old coulda-woulda-shoulda Sally is going to be at the party! A flashback: “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a storm urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world had been turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally.” (HOT!) 

So you see, already we have more stakes, more urgency, and more emotion here than in the story version. 

What’s more, the novel gets a whole additional subplot, weaving in threads about Septimus Smith, a young soldier suffering from what was then called shell-shock. Woolf wrote in her diary as she was writing the book: “Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side--something like that.  Septimus Smith? is that a good Name?” (It’s a great name, babe!) 

This addition cracks the book wide open: Clarissa gets a foil; the portrait of class and care in London gains another layer; the narrative project of examining how one puts together a life that feels worthwhile is expanded. Woolf gets to explore and critique not just the social systems Clarissa exists within but the way mental health was treated in this time and place – two shifting worlds she was enmeshed in. 

I guess the takeaway here is: So much of writing a novel is about making choices and sticking with them. To get started, you need to decide on your constraints. What’s the scope? What do you want to explore and/or critique?

You don’t need to know exactly what you’re going to say in your novel (if you did, it might turn out more like propaganda than art anyway). You just have to know what you’re interested in, what questions you’re honestly invested in answering. What mysteries about human life will interest you over the course of the years it takes to birth a novel from idea to book on the shelf? 

Can you imagine a more exciting project?? 

Exercises

1. Write a love letter to your favorite novel. (And/or: make a bulleted list of what you love so much about it.) 

2. Make a list of what your main character wants, both tangible and intangible. 

3. Do some free-writing – quickly, don’t think, just write – about what questions you want your book to be asking. 

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Up Next (Thursday Nov 7) → Whose story is it? Do you know your protagonist? Like, REALLY know them? Thursday will be all about character development!

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Amy Shearn is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming Animal Instinct, a queer exploration of divorce, sex, and surviving the pandemic. She works 1:1 with writers, teaches for the educational cooperative Writing Co-Lab and elsewhere, and writes a monthly newsletter called How to Get Unstuck.