What’s it all about?
Get to the heart of good writing and uncover the essence of your novel with advice from Gary Dalkin
What’s it all about? Not the meaning of life, but your novel (which of course might just be about the meaning of life). It sounds like a big question. Subtext, theme, the heroine’s journey. Or is it just about 542 pages? Or perhaps it’s 30,000 words too long and something has to go and you don’t know where to begin?
Wondering what your novel is really about can sound pompous, pretentious. Especially if it is a book designed purely as an entertainment with no thought to being a literary award winner. But the question of ‘about’, of theme or subtext in any fiction, is not necessarily a matter of profundity. Rather, it is about discovering the essence of the book so that everything can be focused to bring out that essence to full advantage. And that applies whether that means making a cosy romantic comedy as funny and heartwarming as possible, or ensuring a subtle exploration of a soul in torment gets unerringly to the heart of the matter.
Whether the lightest read or the most demanding experimental novel, all stories are about ‘something’. Stopping to think about what that something is (and it may be more than one something) enables us to bring it out, and at the same time helps you, the writer, decide just what should be included in your novel, and what is unnecessary. What might even be hindering the book, dragging it down, killing the pace, distracting from what you are really trying to say, do or achieve. What should be cut.
Know your style
It is famously argued that there are two sorts of writers. Plotters and Pantsers. The former plan meticulously and know every last detail of their story before they ever write a word of it, while the latter fly by the seat of their pants, pouncing on a character or idea and following down the rabbit hole and along the yellow brick road to see where he, she or it will go, only discovering the story as they tell it.
The reality is more complicated than that, as some writers will adopt one approach on one project, and the other on a different book. Nevertheless, in his landmark book On Writing Stephen King writes: ‘Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort, and the dullard’s first choice.’ It is certainly the case that King sometimes starts with no more than some characters and a situation, and writes to see what happens. Once he put two characters in a room and let them battle it out, and the result was one of his best novels, Misery. Yet a novella like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption depended on a certain degree of advance plotting to make the mechanics of the story fall into place.