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    A Novel in a Year: A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist
    A Novel in a Year: A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist
    A Novel in a Year: A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist
    Ebook208 pages3 hours

    A Novel in a Year: A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist

    By Louise Doughty

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    About this ebook

    'The art of writing,' Kingsley Amis said, 'is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair.' So start now. Take up a notebook and pen, and write one sentence…

    Can you write a novel in a year? If you simply sit back and think about the enormity of writing a book, it will seem like a vast and unconquerable task, impossibly daunting. The way to make it less daunting is to break it down into its constituent parts, to do it bit by bit. Over the chapters herein, different aspects of technique are divided up into bite size chunks, the better to aid digestion. The book will look at different aspects of writing, with set exercises to help the reader along in their confidence and technique. It is designed to be read a chapter aweek, with the aim of the fledgling writer having a body of material at the year's end which should form a solid start to their novel. Deeply practical, with sound advice at every stage, A NOVEL IN A YEAR is essential reading for any would-be novelist.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateSep 4, 2008
    ISBN9781847394781
    A Novel in a Year: A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist
    Author

    Louise Doughty

    Louise Doughty’s novel Whatever You Love was short-listed for the Costa Book Award and long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Doughty is the author of several other novels and a book of nonfiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her hugely popular newspaper column. She also writes plays and journalism and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 4. She lives in London.

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    • 4/5
      Apparently I started reading this book about four years ago. I finally finished it today, having re-started it a month ago. The difference is that I ignored the layout and intended time-frame.

      What this book consists of is 52 short chapters, which were originally published as weekly newspaper columns. Every other week there was a short exercise (so, 26 in all) which encouraged reader participation either by letter or on a dedicated website forum. Apparently there was widespread enthusiasm and involvement, and a great deal of discussion. Essentially a huge online writing support group was formed for this period.

      But it doesn't work like that in book form, so I decided to read the book in a month, doing six exercises per week. Taken as having a newspaper column style of writing, it's very well done - light-hearted, with plenty of personal anecdotes, and some gems of good advice thrown in. It's not a guide to writing a novel - the title is perhaps misleading - but has ideas to kick-start creativity and to get a stagnant novel going again. So we write biographies of our characters, think about incidents from the point of view of someone in another country, invent a chapter when someone breaks a thumb, re-write paragraphs without adjectives... and a whole lot more. I didn't think the exercises were necessarily relevant, but pretty much any writing exercise can lead to something more constructive, which is what I found.

      I don't know that I learned anything new about the novel-writing process, but I found the book inspiring nonetheless. I found the last few exercises a bit disappointing - looking back, looking forward, noting what I had learned, etc, and didn't do those ones. But the bulk of the book was very readable and helpful, and I would recommend it to anyone who has read umpteen guides to writing, and perhaps started several novels that have not gone anywhere. This is a different kind of approach, and I found it refreshing.
    • 4/5
      Very useful (and reassuring) while not being dictatorial about process. Doughty has a more organic approach to finding out what your story's arc and themes are than some of the charts and worksheets and outline points writing tomes out there: you'll get there by doing more writing (not necessarily writing that will be in the novel) than by making lists or filling in structure charts.

    Book preview

    A Novel in a Year - Louise Doughty

    WEEK 1

    Some years ago, I was sitting in a café with a writer friend. He was a comedy-sketch writer whose first full-length work for television was in production. I was a part-time secretary who had published a few book reviews, had a play accepted by BBC radio and was working on my first novel. We were both living in cheap rented rooms, earning a living doing bits of this and that and full of hopes and ambitions for our professional futures.

    My friend had just come from giving a talk to a group of sixth-formers. One of them had asked, ‘Why did you become a writer?’

    ‘You know what?’ he said to me, stirring his cappuccino. ‘I gave them some flannel about the joy of language and the process of creativity, but actually, the real reason I became a writer was so that I could move to London and sit in cafés with other writers and talk about why I became a writer.’

    I knew exactly what he meant. For those of us, like me and him, who come from decidedly non-literary backgrounds, there is something wonderful about Being a Writer–all the shallow stuff we are supposed to despise: the café talk, the book launches, the scanning of literary pages feeling guiltily gratified when a friend gets a bad review. Forget for a moment the loneliness and fear, the paranoia and financial insecurity, Being a Writer is great fun.

    But there is a catch. You have to write. This is something that would-be writers sometimes seem not to have grasped. Like many novelists, I often give talks at festivals or teach on residential writing courses, and the commonest question is, ‘How did you get your first novel published?’ This is a perfectly valid question but I sometimes feel the motivation behind it is suspect. What was your trick? is what they mean. Tell me your trick, because when I know it, I will be published too. It would sound arrogant to reply, ‘I was published because I wrote a good book’, but it would be more honest and perhaps disabuse aspiring writers of the notion that being published is some kind of holy mystery, or only happens if you have ‘contacts’. For the record, I had absolutely none, even after I had done the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, a course widely and mythically believed to offer a passport to publication. I got an agent because I won a runner-up prize in a short-story competition that was open to all unpublished writers. I got a publisher because I eventually wrote a novel good enough for the agent to sell. If you are a would-be novelist, it may seem baffling to you that so many bad novels get published but it doesn’t change the very unbaffling fact that if you want to publish a novel yourself, you have to write a good one.

    Very few people write a good novel on their first attempt. I certainly didn’t. My first published novel was actually the third one I had finished, and that’s not counting the numerous false starts, often thousands of words long, novels that came to nothing after months of work. If you, too, have had those false starts, it is important not to get disheartened by them and to remember that they are a necessary part of the process. I always chortle when I read an earnest biographer writing of Mr or Mrs Great Dead Author, ‘If only he/she had not destroyed those early manuscripts, what treasures must have lain therein!’ Poppycock. Mr or Mrs Great Dead Author burned the early stuff because it was rubbish.

    The work you will produce if you follow the remaining chapters of this book may well be one of those false starts–if you don’t have a good idea for a book, then there is nothing I or anyone else can do to plant one in your head. If you do the exercises I set, what you will end up with will not be a novel, it won’t even be the first draft of a novel, it will be a body of work, the raw material, which you may one day be able to shape and work on until it becomes a book.

    How long does it take to write a novel? Well, it depends. My first novel, Crazy Paving, was written while I was a part-time secretary and took me eighteen months. That’s quite quick, actually, but I was young and single and had no domestic commitments. By the time it came to writing my second, I was theatre critic for a Sunday newspaper, which meant I had all day to write before leaving the house, owl-like, to go to the theatre in the evenings: as day jobs go, it was a corker. Dance with Me was written in seven months. My third novel was sold on the strength of a one-page proposal when I was pregnant with my first child. I promised my publisher the book would be delivered before the baby but I was lying through my teeth. Baby arrived when I was one chapter in. My partner worked full-time and we had no childcare but I still had to finish the book as we had spent the advance on buying a flat to have the baby in. Honey-Dew was written in eight months while I was half-dead with exhaustion. There’s a reason why it’s my shortest

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