The novelist’s Highway Code
Before you embark on your novel, make sure you know the way. Author and lecturer James McCreet guides you.
Something unexpected happened a few years ago when I first took the job of lecturer on an MA creative writing course. Even before I met my first classes, I was obliged to participate in the end-of-year marking period and to assess a number of completed student novels. These manuscripts, which ranged from 80,000 to 100,000 words, had to be judged on a variety of criteria, the most important of which was: is it publishable?
I was pleased to find that most students had learned well from their seminars and reading. The overall standard of prose was admirably high. Yet not a single one of those novels I marked was publishable. Why not? Because every one of them failed on structure – the most critical arbiter of whether a book is readable to the end. Structure can mean many things: pace, story, consistency, character arcs, thematic development... the list goes on and on. Had these students seen, or even considered, such a list?
This was also about the time I met my supervisees: students who were at various stages of writing a full-length novel. Most were at least a year into their project and had written tens of thousands of words. On reading these words, I saw exactly the same thing: there was simply no structure. Perhaps the novel began well, but it slowly dropped to pieces, or meandered, or lost pace, or lost characters, or became a different story entirely. Sometimes, multiple drafts written at different periods meant that each part of the novel was in a different voice. One of them was almost entirely without incident until the last ten per cent of the novel, when loads of things started to happen. I had to inform this disappointed author that no reader was ever likely to reach the last ten per cent.