14 | The Writer • April 2020
The ‘finished’ novel and the
elements of fiction
Novel writing is a craft, one that
requires an adept handling of many
elements, including character, point of
view, plot, setting, style, and theme.
But what does “adept handling” even
mean? And should you plan ahead to
ensure you skillfully balance these
components or just let it happen, trust
the process, and know you’ll be able to
fix everything in later drafts?
Caroline Leavitt, New York Times
bestselling author with 12 novels
under her belt, does quite a bit of
planning in advance of writing. Dur-
ing this stage, she seeks answers to
three crucial questions:
- What does the protagonist want?
- What’s at stake?
- What misbelief keeps the protag-
onist from achieving his or her goal?
Once she can answer these initial
questions, she writes a lengthy synop-
sis, which changes as she writes, but
the overall idea of the book does not.
Then, when she’s ready to share a
draft of her novel with her beta read-
ers, Leavitt seeks feedback on two
main questions: - Does the conflict presented in
the first chapter pose a clear question? - Is this question answered in the
final chapter?
If reader feedback shows she
requires further revisions, she makes
them. At this point, she’s ready to sub-
mit her novel to her agent, who gener-
ally asks for even more rewrites. “I
have safety measures in place,” Leavitt
explains – safety measures that keep
her on track for producing a complex,
balanced final draft.
Every author is different, of course.
Take Peter Nichols, a bestselling liter-
ary novelist who doesn’t plan ahead
before drafting his novel. The reason?
He doesn’t want to know beforehand
what’s going to happen.
“If I know early on in the writing of
a novel what’s going to happen, it prob-
ably won’t be a good book,” he says. “I
write to find out what will happen; if I
already know, it will bore me – and the
reader. If I am surprised, moved, satis-
fied, shocked, then maybe it’s close to
being finished.”
At this point, he’s ready to focus his
attention on two main fictional ele-
ments: character and plot. As to char-
acter, “I want to see all my characters
reaching some position of change that
resolves their need/situation when we
first meet them,” he says.
This doesn’t call for a “tidy wrap-up”
but rather “an organic development that
leads them, and the reader, to a place
where each character has achieved, or
not achieved, some goal or want,” he
says. “Better or worse off, they are in a
new place, or they’re back at the begin-
ning and know the place for the first
time.” They’ve grown measurably bynovel’s end: “Their perception has
changed; they’ve learned something –
and I’ve learned something about them.
Dramatically, they are complete.”
Nichols says the process for plot is
similar: “How has the early suggestion
of a character’s arc been realized or sat-
isfied? This is difficult to arrange or
project early on. You put characters in
play and then watch them, throw stuff
at them, and see how they react. Hope-
fully they get somewhere, as we do in
life, successfully or not.”
But do keep in mind that, with fic-
tion, one size never fits all – and that’s
certainly true of novel completeness.
As Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-
winning novelist, makes clear, com-
pleteness depends on the kind of
novel you’re writing.
“If your novel is, say, a murder mys-
tery, then the plot has to fit together ina logical way from beginning to end,”
she explains. If not, “the reader will
resent it if who did it, why it was done,
how it was done, and how the ‘detec-
tive’ figured it out aren’t clear.”
“At the other end,” says Smiley, “is
a language-based novel like Ulysses –
the reader doesn’t have to understand
it to enjoy it; she only has to take
pleasure in how the words express the
passing events.”
In contrast to these two types, a
character-based literary novel leads to
quite different reader expectations. In
this kind of work, “what the reader
wants is insights into how the charac-
ters think, why they act, and what it
means. The plot can fade into the back-
ground as long as the characters are
believable and interesting,” Smiley says.
No matter your genre, Smiley says
that “understanding whether you are
finished is both instinctive and analyti-
cal” – instinctive since “you also have
to listen to what I call your ‘reader
brain’ – the one that loved, say, Pride
and Prejudice. The reader brain often
knows when something is finished
because it has finished reading a lot of
novels – more than you have written.”
Mindy Mejia, author of the critically
acclaimed Leave No Trace, relies more
on the analytical method. Once she’s
taken her novel through several drafts,
she carefully checks to see if each
point-of-view character has undergone
sufficient character change: “I need to
ensure they’ve been transformed via
the action of the book. They can’t be
the same people in the final chapter as
they were in chapter one.”
She also attends to the various
demands of characterization, analyzing
her work for distinctive characters who
drive the story. “I have to review their
diction, their word choice, favorite
phrases, and dialogue with a fine-tooth
comb in final revisions, to ensure the
novel has become their story com-
pletely.” One final check she makes: “If
I can still see myself in it, I know it’s
not done.”
As for plot, says Mejia, “I need to
confirm that my stakes have been“I write to find out
what will happen;
if I already know,
it will bore me –
and the reader.”