You want to write a good book, but what does a good fiction novel look like? It’s engaging. It’s compelling. You can’t put it down. It’s like gorging yourself on an entire package of cookies without realizing it. No? Just me? Okay. How about it’s like mixing a cake using the exact same ingredients as someone else and having it taste completely different from another baker’s cake.
Whatever metaphor you’d like to use here, the point is the same. We all use language to express ourselves, so how do we write an engaging book that doesn’t look, feel, or read like someone else’s? Well, here are some interesting and novel ideas to try a slightly different approach to writing fiction (hat-tip to James Scott Bell & his appearance on Writer’s Digest).
1. ‘Opening Disturbance’ – the book typically starts with the set up of the ‘happy’ life of the protagonist, which sets up the point from which the shift/catalyst/tragedy kicks off from. Here, though, it doesn’t. It starts with their normal life, which may not be all that happy. It could be, for example, an accident, it could be debt collectors banging on the door, blood gushing from a cut, or a dark family scene of violence and anger. Or could be the day your character gets fired, dumped, lost in the woods, etc.
All of these starts puts your reader directly in the middle of the action – the BEST way to hook them in – which is why it is effective. And different, because it sets up how different your characters are from any other book out there. Even Tolstoy started Anna Karenina off with an unhappy family: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It wasn’t a huge unhappiness – small petty debts to deal with – but it was still an unhappy start and it pulled the reader in.
One thing to keep in mind with this one, though, is to make sure you don’t have a happy life scene that is radically different from this opening mood and tone slightly later in the chapter or book. If you start out a bit disturbed, you need to keep that tone until it shifts into Act 2.
2. Have the threat of death – physical, professional or psychological – hanging over every scene. This is putting death on the line in a real sense, because that fear must be felt throughout the book. Keep in mind that the fear level can be a pendulum and swing from worry to anxiety to terror or back again and if it is not present, the reader will notice and it’ll be jarring. If you go this route, keep it consistent throughout the book.
Remember that you want to play on the tension, which means don’t have the same level of tension throughout the book (unless you’re the real and original Robert Ludlum, who was amazing at this sort of storytelling). You want it to rise and fall, just like you want your story to rise and fall in specific places in the plot.
3. Avoid fluffy dialogue – mushy, vague, too sweet, too indistinct to pull apart – is something you definitely want to address in your drafts. That could be achieved in revisions which is where having a beta reader or an editor comes in handy. You want to be concise (see my post on the topic), have distinct voices for your characters, cut out unnecessary language and always include some sort of tension.
Recently, during my own book writing journey, I was writing a scene where my main protagonist returns home after 12 years and is riding in the car with her aunt, whom she loves, but they haven’t really spoken much, if at all besides surface life stuff. Thus, the dialogue between them needed to reflect that. Awkward pauses, odd stilted questions, rushing to fill the silence, etc. I played with it and thought of my own awkward conversations which helped remove the fluff, but also keep the core emotions intact.
4. Add something unexpected in each scene. It’ll keep the reader on their toes and they won’t figure out the mystery 20 pages in. You don’t want to be predictable. You don’t want to just rewrite someone else’s novel with different settings and character names. A favorite thing to try – have someone shoot your protagonist; throw a monkey in the scene – literally; build up where the reader thinks its going to go and do the opposite – like don’t have the protagonist in a horror book lock themselves in a wood shack outside. Instead, have them create boobytraps for the psycho killer or trap their friends for him to find first.
All of these little surprises keep the reader wondering what’ s going to happen next and they will continue to turn the page to read more. It keeps it engaging and interesting.
5. Find a way to regain the spark of your story when it sputters out. The best way to do this is to go deeper into your backstory – focus on characters. Start with the protagonist – tell a backstory that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Pick a year, an age, a setting, and write it out. Do this with all of your characters and that should be the juice you need to get started again on your book. Write about your setting: the house they live in, what it looks like, where the doilies came from; the town it’s in – what does it look like, how did it get its start?; or any other setting that is the backdrop for your story.
I’m on the messy middle of my book and I know what’s going to happen – sort of. Rather than get stuck there and not write anything, I decided to fill in the character outline for my main Big Bad, which led to rewriting a chapter and knowing exactly the next step in the story. It does work – you just have to approach it from a different angle to get it started again.
These are just some of the tips you can use to write an interesting novel. But remember, even if it is an exact plot for plot point set up that appears in another book, it will still be different, because you are the ingredient that makes it different. Our experiences color our perception of the world and the characters we create; no two writers given the same writing prompt create the same exact story. And that’s what I love about books – the variety of viewpoints each writer brings to the table, even if I disagree with them.