A book on how to write and sell your first novel, co-written with literary agent Ann Rittenberg and with an introduction by author Dennis Lehane.
“Your First Novel offers the spark of inspiration that gets a writer both mentally and physically geared for the task. Then it delivers something equally vital: clear-headed, positive advice about the business side of writing a novel. It’ll inspire you to create, challenge you to be great, and bolster you with the wisdom of two seasoned professionals.” – George Hagen, author of The Laments
Excerpt
Whether the voice you have chosen for your novel is first or third person, whether your genre is literary or horror, whether your style is clipped or Victorian, your novel can be improved by reviewing it with a poet’s ear. I’m not suggesting you sprinkle in flowery or antiquated phrases. What you want to do is to find just the right words to make your prose resonate. Your choice of verbs, the details you choose to describe, your metaphors and similes, all make up your personal poetry, the quality in your voice that makes it stand out.
One way to improve the sound of your writing is to transform your clichés. If you find your pages full of worn out phrases like “sweltering heat” or “pouring rain,” look at the scene with new eyes. Would it be more telling for your protagonist to notice that it’s so hot it feels like his eyes are cooking? Maybe your antagonist finds the rain so brutal it scours the paint off his car like acid. Catch a glimpse that is unusual, but that rings true to your narrator. What is it that your character might focus on? Hail stones the size of babies’ teeth?
Sometimes it’s not that a cliché has been used, but a bland phrase has crept in here or there. If you find yourself using the same words over and over – he turned, she looked at him, he moved to the door, she walked away, they sat down across from her – you might want to go over some of the sentences with a poet’s ear. Sometimes a Thesaurus helps to stimulate the imagination, but don’t just look up synonyms for the over-used words. Think about other phrases that would have the same function, but be more interesting. And decide whether the boring bit is even necessary.
In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck could have written: “Lennie grabbed Curley’s fist in his big hand and crushed it.” He could have flipped through a Thesaurus and tried: “Lennie snatched Curley’s fingers in his huge paw and pulverized them.” Instead Steinbeck wrote: “Curley’s fist was swinging when Lennie reached for it. The next minute Curley was flopping like a fish on the line, and his closed fist was lost in Lennie’s big hand.”
