How to Write a Novel - Chapter 1 by Dr Koshy AV

 In preparation for Nanowrimo.

A novel and its aspects.

I have written some novellas or long stories and novels, and they are all in cold storage and one is lost. But I find writing on how to write novels more interesting than writing novels. One was published in Scream and other Urbane Legends, a novella, with moderate success, but it needs probably a revamp and a relook. If ever. It was initially a novel but I dumped most of it.

So for Nanowrimo, I am going to write a series of notes on novel writing or creating a novel or composing it.

Let us start with something obvious. A novel should have a setting. The setting must be rooted in time and place, and in a "space." The setting will have mini settings in it. There may be more than one, and many settings in it. In Charles Dickens's Hard Times, there are two major settings. One is the industrial city of Coketown, based on cities like Manchester, and then there is the real Liverpool. So one is fictional and the other real, but both are set in the nineteenth century's first half, naturally, as it is a realistic Victorian novel. Dickens wanted to write to his audience about their life so he could improve it for the better. The point is he knew clearly where he was going to set his novel. If you are going to write a novel you need to, too. Novels can be fantasy, or futuristic, or imaginary, or realistic, dystopian, historical, myth-based, utopian, sci fi, steampunk, gothic, whatever, but what are its settings going to be?

In Coketown, for instance, in Hard Times, the novel also shows us a school, an inn, the streets, the inside of a church working people go to, a disused mine, two homes of rich people, one of a poor person, the river dye'd purple with the effluents of the factory, the factory, the bank, the bank's staff-quarters etc.

This is detailing. Remember scenery can foreshadow as well as needs to be detailed along with milieu, atmosphere, tone, and mood if you mean business. Dickens meant business.

"CHAPTER V

THE KEYNOTE

Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!

No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not. It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of concern. Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this, because there was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main force. Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same people would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk. Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium. Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top moral specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated by cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short, it was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen; that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable. In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:

There was an old woman, and what do you think?

She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;

Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,

And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds*? Surely, none of us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown working-people had been for scores of years, deliberately set at nought? That there was any Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in convulsions? That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief—some relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation were repealed? "

I am old fashioned. I like this as here Dickens not only describes but shows us the atmosphere, mood, tone, and milieu social or otherwise. And how does he do it? By using all the tools of poetry sans meter. He is philosophical, religious, sociological, economic, psychological, and political by turns and always fittingly sarcastic and skeptical. He uses vocabulary, diction, alliteration, repetition, figures of speech, imagery, and sense words we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as well as organic imagery and onomatopoeia and kinetic imagery.

"It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. "

This is how to write setting. This is how to foreshadow and kill suspense if at all one must. Some may not like the richness of his writing and prefer the minimalism and the spare writing of a Hemingway but one should learn to appreciate his kind of writing too with its purple passages. They wear well too. That is why he was called the Shakespeare of the novel and English prose, due to the same richness in prose that Shakespeare had in his dramas.

* To understand this reference and the one to Gradgrind and Bounderby you have to be familiar also with the first four chapters of the novel, dear reader.

You can read it from here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm .That is also where the extensive quote comes from, from Chapter 5.