Road Map To A Novel

By Pauline Bloom

Note: This work was originally published in the 1945 "Writer's Yearbook". Extensive research uncovered no copyright renewal.

Some of us are thinking about writing a novel but haven't yet put that first word down on the middle of page one. You can go places better with a map and this one leads you straight to "finis." The longest journey in the world begins with one step. A novel begins with one step too, and it ends with 20 steps. That isn't so much, is it?

You know what kind of a writer you are and what kind of a novel you want to write. Your novel will reflect your own personal sense of values, and no one else's. But if, knowing what you want to say you are a little uncertain as to how to go about saying it, here's a road map to chart the way for you. All it does is point and direct. You do the driving yourself, in all kinds of weather, on good roads and bad. But if you follow this road map, at least you won't get lost.

When a writer of any competence gropes for words, it's not because his vocabulary is inadequate, but because the idea he wants to express is not clear in his own mind. That's why it is worth a great deal of trouble, before you begin the actual writing of a book, to fix the big idea behind your novel firmly in your mind. Then, when you do start to write, the words will come faster than you can write them.

20 Steps to a Novel

20 steps, and here they are:

1. Sit down at your typewriter, insert 2 or 3 yellow second sheets (in order to conserve your roller), and write down: "I want to write a novel about...". Describe in very general terms the kind of a book you want to do.
2. On the next sheet write down: "The conflict is going to be...". This is the most important step in the whole journey. Even if you put it down in only one or two sentences, the nature of the conflict should be clear in your own mind and on the paper before you. For example, before writing "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser might well have said to himself, or written down something like this: "The conflict in this book is going to revolve around a weak young man who struggles to the point of murder, to lift himself out of his sordid environment."
3. Write down: "Bringing out this conflict, will be the following main characters...". To continue with the American Tragedy analogy, an example in this case could have been, "A young man with enough charm and good looks to arouse interest in people of better social background, but not enough character to improve his condition honestly. He will be torn between two girls, one rich and glamorous who will represent his aspirations, and the other on his own financial and social level, whom in the end he kills."
4. Write down what you want your book to say, its theme, your own philosophic creed which made you want to do this particular book in the first place. "American Tragedy" seems to say: A growing boy needs understanding and sympathy. Surrounded by economic, emotional and moral poverty, he will try to pull himself into a better environment. If he is not strong enough within himself to fight openly and honestly for what he wants out of life, and has no outside inspiration and direction, he will lose whatever scruples he had, one by one, until he is ready even for murder. This is not to say that your book should be anything like "American Tragedy." If you want to express a positive, optimistic philosophy, so much the better. But don't make the mistake of thinking that only a serious heavy novel has anything to say. The lightest, frothiest book should have a theme. Write it down so that you see it clearly. Viewed superficially, a novel is only a chunk of time out of the life of some imaginary person. But to be worth the trouble of writing it, a novel must be more than that. It must show the growth and development (or the disintegration), of characters in such a way that out of the experiences of these characters the reader arrives at a philosophic conclusion such as the writer had before he wrote the book—the theme which prompted him to write it.
5. Write a synopsis of the novel. It can be very short at this point, but the end must be seen clearly and decisively, so that everything you do from here on will lead inevitably to that end.
6. Write a short dossier of each main character. Describe him physically, economically, mentally, emotionally, psychically, both at the beginning and at the end of the book. Whether for better or for worse, in the course of a novel each character must change. As you block in the background of each main character, you will necessarily introduce some of the lesser characters. You may or may not use them all later, but describe each one briefly in order to understand your main characters more clearly. And orchestrate your characters in such a way that no two of them are alike. Even where you have a group of people doing the same thing, each one does it for a different reason. Each character must fight hard to achieve his objective. Even a character whom you present as a symbol of weakness, must be strong in the sense that he struggles to maintain his status, or to accomplish his ends, though his fight may be a foolish one, or a wicked one, or both. The main character has the biggest conflict, but every other character is himself trying to achieve some certain goal, and everything he does or says must somehow either forward or retard the main character's struggle.
7. The development of your characters will of course further develop your story. Amplify your first bare synopsis. From here on you will be doing this with each step that you take. The eliminations will come later. For the present just keep continuously adding to every step you have taken so far.
8. Write a short paper on the atmosphere or tone which you want to pervade your book, and add whatever notes occur to you as to how you can achieve this.
9. With the main characters already alive in your mind, some of the lesser ones beginning to take shape, and a good idea of the general direction of your story, you will now begin to see the locale pretty clearly too. Make one inclusive map, finding a place for each house, each store, each road, each brook, each tree or manhole that has anything to do with your story.
10. This part of the job is pure joy. What writer doesn't love to read? Go to the library, to the newspaper morgues, to your attic, or any other place where you would be likely to find newspapers and magazines of the time and place about which you are writing. Read everything, taking copious notes of the fashions, the political situation, the popular music, the slang, and every other fad of the times.
11. All this time you will be adding to and changing your map, your characters, your synopsis, and then one day you will suddenly discover that everything falls into its rightful place. Your map has become a real community. Your characters live there. They hate, love, kill, and do everything else that you once hoped they would do. You know that because you yourself have lived in that community and done everything that each one of your characters has done.
12. Write an amplified synopsis, as full and complete as you can make it. Build a rhythmic scheme of action, so that a series of minor crises leads inevitably to each major climax, and each major climax is a step to the action peak of the whole novel, the point at which the conflict is most intense, with relatively quiet scenes between both the minor and the major climaxes.
13. Break the synopsis down into three or four parts, like acts in a play with a high conflict peak at the end of each part. This will help you to see if your story line lacks these peaks in the right places. If it does, rearrange the action and intensify the drama so that these climaxes are there. Now is the time to do it if you want to save yourself a great deal of grief later on.
14. Break down each act into several scenes or chapters, and make sure that each chapter not only has a climax of its own, but that it also carries the story along that much closer to the big climax of the book. The big tidal sweep of your novel should have these other, lesser currents, and these in turn must control even smaller whirls and eddies. But each one, no matter how small, must, by its very movement within its own sphere, generate enough power to contribute to the larger forward movement of the more important conflicts, and must help to resolve the theme of the book itself.
15. Write a short synopsis of each chapter.
16. Fit these chapter synopses into a loose leaf book with plenty of blank pages between them for interim notes, and later for the actual writing of each chapter.
17. Decide how long your book is to be. Divide this figure by the number of chapters you have outlined, and you have your rough wordage allotment for each chapter. Some chapters will be longer, others shorter. But at the end of your writing job you will find yourself with a book which is at least physically normal, not an unbalanced, mis-shapen glandular case.
18. Under each chapter synopsis, collect everything that will go into it, historical data, descriptions, bits of appropriate dialogue, technical research, factual material, etc., etc.
19. If you're a real writer, this is the easiest part of the job. Write your novel one chapter at a time. For the purposes of the first draft put in everything. The cutting and selection will come later. Set yourself a regular working pattern and stick to it—three pages a day, a chapter a week, or whatever your routine calls for. Don't revise at this point. Just sail through the first rough draft with as few outside distractions and as much concentration as you can manage. During this period, the reality of the book should be more real than the reality of your own personal life. When you have come to the end, put the book away to cool and turn to something entirely different. Don't celebrate. It's too early.
20. Revision:
    • Read through the story quickly and objectively at one sweep, and then consider it and weigh it only from the point of view of structure. Decide whether your strains and stresses and intensities are where you want them, and whether they are proportionately right in relation to each other.
    • Revise for changes in pace and approach. Some parts of the book must move more rapidly than others. Some parts of the action must be viewed from a distance, other parts must be seen close up with a wealth of detail.
    • Check each of the points here set down, one at a time, against your finished novel—subject, conflict, characters, theme, tone, map, etc., etc., and make the necessary revisions.
    • Revise for smooth transitions, style, color, sensory images, polish, etc., etc.
    • Put away for a while and revise again for anything that occurs to you as you go along.

A novel must be well integrated not only within itself, but also as one small unit in a much larger sphere. Not only must everything that happens in a novel be related to everything else that happens there, but the novel itself, its theme, the statement it makes, should have a definite relationship to the flow of life as the novelist sees it. A good novel should have ties with both the past and the future. There's your road map—when you do start?