6 Tips to Help You Get That Novel Written

Many people have a deep desire to write a novel but just can't seem to get it done.  Here are six tips that should help.

1.  "I don't know where to start."  Most folks who want to write a novel already have an idea for a story but simply don't know where to begin.  An old Hollywood adage is:  "Start on the day that's different."  Presumably your hero's life is fairly routine until some event happens (called the Inciting Incident) which triggers the entire story and launches the hero on his/her journey.  Start just before that event takes place.  This way you don't bore the reader with too much explanation and ho-hum material

2.  "I just don't have the time."   John Grisham wrote his first novel on a legal pad while working full time as a lawyer, in work snippets as short as ten minutes.  I wrote the entire Lust, Money & Murder trilogy during one-hour train commutes between Oxford and London.  If you truly want to write a novel, you can find the time.  One trick is to put yourself on a regular writing schedule, even if you write only 30 minutes per day.  It's helpful if you can do this at the same time of day or night, which ties the activity to your biological clock.  You’ll soon start feeling an urge to write when that time rolls around, which is a great help in propelling you along.

3.  "I get lost after the first few pages."  Learn to think in scenes, like in a movie.  First, some important thing happens to your hero.  Then, another important thing happens.  Then another.  Etc. Write your novel in this way, like a film, all the way to the end.  Start each scene quickly and get to the important action, then exit and move onto the next.  Don't waste your own time, or the reader's time, with a lot of warmup material or filler.

4.  "I keep writing the beginning over and over again."  This is usually because you're second guessing yourself and editing your work prematurely.  Resist the urge to edit ANYTHING until you reach the very end of your novel.  Charge ahead like a bull and don't let anyone or anything stop you.   Keep up the momentum and let your creative voice flow freely all the way to the end of the first draft...then you can come back and edit.

5.  "I keep getting stuck in the middle of the story."  Virtually everyone who writes a novel suffers from writer's block at some point, and usually it's because they've lost track of where the story is going.  One good trick is to jump forward and write out the scenes that you KNOW will be in the book.  Later you can come back and fill in the gaps and connect all the scenes all together.  You'll find that the more scenes your write, the easier the whole process becomes and eventually everything will fall into place.

6.  "There's a critical voice inside my head that stops me from writing."  All of us have a so-called Inner Critic that says such inspiring things as "You have no idea what you're doing" and "Who are you to think you can write a novel?" and "No sane person would ever read this drivel."  It's impossible to write a whole book with this negative voice jabbering away in your head.  You have to make a deal with it.  Simply say,  "Would you kindly keep your mouth shut until I finish the first draft?  Then you can criticize all you want."  What you'll find is that the farther along you get, the less power that critical voice will have, and by the time you reach the end of your novel you'll be much more confident.

In closing, I have one final tip, perhaps the most important one of all: HAVE FUN.  If at any point your writing starts to feel like drudgery, stop and take inventory.  Go over this short list of tips again and see what might be tripping you up.

Happy writing!

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Does Bruce Willis Have a Dog? Less is More

I’ll never forget the first time my wife read one of my novels.  As she was finishing the last few pages, I sat at my computer, pretending to work,  butterflies in my stomach.  Would she love it or hate it?

When she was done reading, she set the manuscript aside and gazed over at the TV set.  She seemed lost in thought.

“Well?” I said uneasily.

“Mike, does Bruce Willis have a dog?”

I was taken aback.  “Excuse me?”

She went over to the VCR and picked up the videocassette case for Die Hard, the movie we’d watched the night before. 

“In Die Hard, does the character that Bruce Willis plays have a dog?”

“Well...hell if I know!  I don’t remember any dog in the movie.”

“Exactly.  We don’t know whether he has a dog or not because it doesn’t have anything to do with the story.”

I looked over at my manuscript.  “What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is that you could have a really great book if you did a lot of cutting.  The way it stands, the story is bogged down with too many irrelevant details.”

Irrelevant details?  What an insult!  A long, heated discussion ensued, and I viciously defended each and every word in the book.  It ended with me shouting “What the hell do you know?” and storming out of the house, vowing to never let the moron I married read another word of my writing.

But after a little time passed and I calmed down, I opened up the manuscript and started reading it myself, trying my best to be objective.  I decided there were maybe one or two places where I went overboard, explaining too much about the hero’s background and other details.  Finally I went back to my wife, apologized, and gave her the manuscript and a yellow highlighter.  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love for you to go through entire book and mark each and every word that you think isn’t necessary.”

“My pleasure.”

When she was done, there was so much yellow on the paper it looked like Bruce Willis’ nonexistent dog had taken a leak on it.

As a writer, this was one of the most eye-opening processes I’ve ever experienced.  What I learned from it is that if you’re writing plot-driven stories, like I usually write, each and every bit of information you include should have something to do with the story.  If it doesn’t, the words needs to be mercilessly cut.

In the famous words of William Faulkner:  “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

Die Hard is a very good example of how important this principle is.  In the movie, do we know if the hero (John McClaine, played by Bruce Willis) has a dog?  No, we don’t.  What about his home—does he live in a house or an apartment?  Again, we don’t know, because there are no scenes set in his home.  What about his family?  Does he have any aunts or uncles?  Again, we don’t know, because that has nothing to do with the story.

Now, in contrast, consider The Wizard of Oz. 

Do we know if Dorothy has a dog?  Of course we know this—the dog’s name is Toto.  We know it because Toto plays a key role in the story.  Among other things, it's Toto that pulls back the curtain to reveal the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz is nothing a harmless old man hiding behind a bunch of fancy equipment.  

Does Dorothy live in a house, or an apartment?  We know that, too—she lives in a house, which is sucked up into the tornado—this is inciting incident for the entire story!  Furthermore, the house lands smack on top of the Wicked Witch of the East and kills her, which is what gets Dorothy in so much trouble in Oz.

Finally, does Dorothy have an aunt?  We know that, too. Good old Aunty Em.  Dorothy misses her terribly when she believes she’ll be stuck in Oz forever and can’t get back to Kansas.  The aunt plays a key role in the story.

So, back to the original question:

Does Bruce Willis have a dog?

In Die Hard, it doesn’t matter.

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Close Encounters of the Seedy Kind: Why I Left Hollywood to Become a Novelist

When I first started to take my fiction writing career seriously, I decided to try my hand at screenwriting.  I’ve always loved movies just as much as books.  Plus, I figured writing screenplays might be easier than writing novels, as you don’t have to put in a lot of fancy description in film scripts (In hindsight I don’t think it’s any easier, but that’s what I thought then)

I was lucky with my first screenplay.  The working title was Art & Soul. It was a tight psychological thriller about a romance novelist who eavesdropped on private cellphone conversations to get his story ideas, and who falls in love with one of the women he’s been spying on.  I pitched it over the phone directly to producers.  I soon had one interested, an indie film producer who had won the prestigious Palm d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival a few years before.

“Mike, you’re a fantastic writer,” he told me with great sincerity.  “You should move to California, where the action is—you’ll do very well out here.”

I packed up and headed West, giddy about my seemingly fast-track Hollywood career.    

The man was a seasoned producer, in his 60's, and planned to finance the movie himself.  He bought a one year option on my screenplay, meaning that he had a year to pay me the full price for it.  He planned on doing that as soon as I'd made all the “minor” changes he wanted.  

A soon as I arrived in LA, he took me under his wing.  “Mike,” he said, putting his tanned hand on my shoulder, “before we start working together, there's one thing you should know about Hollywood.  Out here, we all practice The Golden Rule.”

“The Golden Rule?”

He grinned.  “He who has the gold, rules.”

We began “polishing” the script. I worked long, long hours, with me doing revision after revision, making small changes that he wanted.  He'd started out as a screenwriter himself, and he taught me a lot of subtle tricks  that greatly improved the screenplay, made it more gripping and engaging.  Some of the changes he wanted me didn't feel quite right.  But I remembered The Golden Rule, and I ended up making all the changes he wanted anyway.

Then, when I thought we were almost finished with it,  he said, “I think Melina (the young woman my hero falls for) should be a long-legged, fiery redhead.”

I wasn’t sure about this.  “But Melina isn’t a ‘fiery’ character.  She’s just the opposite—she’s cool and collected.”

“Trust me, Mike.”  There was deadpan look in his eye.  Don't forget The Golden Rule, it seemed to say.

I made the change.  But when I reread the script, I felt the story no longer worked.  With Melina’s new personality, her actions were no longer believable.  I mustered up my courage and decided that at the next script meeting I would tell the producer this in no uncertain terms, Golden Rule or not.

Well, he brought his new girlfriend along to the meeting.  She was about 1/3 of his age.  It happened that she was a long-legged redhead with a fiery personality.  Coincidentally, she had recently had started taking acting lessons.

The producer began asking for even more changes, telling me to crank up the “voyeurism.”  He wanted new, more titillating scenes added, scenes that were beginning to turn the film into—in Hollywood parlance—a schlocky B movie, the type that would bypass theaters altogether and be released straight to cable TV.

“It may be a little schlocky,” he admitted, “but schlock sells, Mike.  This film will be profitable right out of the gate.”  He gave me a winning Hollywood smile, his bleached teeth nearly blinding me.  “You can write your dream script later.”

I soon lost all my enthusiasm for the project.  I vividly remember staring at the computer screen one day, reading one of the seedy scenes I’d just written, and thinking I can’t do this anymore.  I felt like I was turning my own well-raised, cultured daughter into a cheap tart.

I called the producer and told him I was quitting.  

I left the Great State of California.  I began working my first novel. 

Believe it or not, I don't have any hard feelings about this experience—I pretty much knew how things would be in Hollywood.  Today—20 years later—readers often tell me that my novels have a tight, cinematic feel.  I have no doubt that this is a key element of my “unputdownable” style, and results from the intense training I underwent working with on that first screenplay.

Still, I was disappointed that Art & Soul was never made into a movie.

Maybe one day I will go back out to Hollywood and give screenwriting another try.

But not until I have accumulated enough gold to make the rules.

A Tribute to the Late, Great Sidney Sheldon

Author Sidney Sheldon

A few days ago, a reviewer of my book Lust, Money & Murder said “Not since Sidney Sheldon has a male author captured the female perspective so well.  You’ll be hooked!”

I was deeply moved by this comment.  So moved, in fact, that I decided to write a post about Mr. Sheldon. 

Why?

Because Sidney Sheldon was my favorite contemporary author, and he was my hero.  It’s not at all surprising that he had a tremendous influence on my writing.

Born in 1917, Sidney Sheldon first worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award, and then went on to become one of the world’s bestselling novelists, penning 19 books over the last 35 years of his life.  Sidney Sheldon books have been translated into over 50 different languages and sold over 300 million copies.  He died at the ripe age of 89, still writing.

Sidney Sheldon was not my hero because of all the books he sold.  Sidney Sheldon was my hero for the countless hours of entertainment he gave me and millions of other lucky readers.   Curling up in a chair and reading the latest Sidney Sheldon book was the literary equivalent of eating a moist slice of Death by Chocolate cake, an experience you relished every moment of and left you hungry for more.

His plots were packed with twists and surprises.  Do you remember in The Other Side of Midnight when you found out that the obnoxious bum that came on to the hero was actually a decorated air force pilot?  Or when the assassin in Memories of Midnight turned out not to be one of the three men you suspected, but the meek office boy the hero befriended?  Of course you do—these literary moments are unforgettable.

But Sidney Sheldon’s books provided far more than entertaining plot twists.  His heroes were truly inspirational, strong women who also maintained their softness and femininity.   Even though I'm a man, his books gave me hope when I was down, inner strength when I was weak, and gave me the courage to pick myself up again after my most dismal failures. His books were so engaging that I could become completely absorbed in them, so much so that when I finished, I often had new perspective on things.

Who can forget Jennifer Parker’s struggle to become a successful lawyer in a men’s world in Rage of Angels?  Or Tracey Whitney’s determination to avenge her mother’s death in If Tomorrow Comes?   Sidney Sheldon’s characters never gave up, yet even the most ambitious protagonists always showed tenderness and compassion.

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But probably the biggest reason that Sidney Sheldon is my hero that he wrote to entertain.  Unlike many authors, he did not put on airs, show off his knowledge of obscure French phrases, or try to impress you with how beautifully he could describe a sunset.  He entertained you.  Period.  He nailed you to the first page and kept you turning them all the way the end of the book, increasing the tension to the point where you’d stay up all night just to know how it all turned out!

This is precisely what I aim to do in my books.  Whether I succeed or not is up to readers to decide.  But it’s not surprising that many people see similarities to my work and Sidney Sheldon's.

For Sidney Sheldon was not only my hero. 

He was my greatest teacher.