In this article ❧ I explain you how to write a novel that provides an emotional elaboration and a rich plot

Novels are amusing theories of cause and effect: they tell and explain why something is happening. The drama keeps them far from being tedious.

What most novels do is provide entertainment with a cocktail of emotions. We drink it with the expectancy of elaboration with little pain (and no boredom, none!). The preparation of the cocktail is faraway improvisation. (We can say that fiction is the product of improvisation as much as a jazz pianist could expect that his drummer improvises correctly.)

To create a good theory, the writer needs to set a story, a charismatic hero, sidekicks that make sense, "plates" (more on this later), hooks, over fifty scenes, and a fictional world. In this article, I address the first one.

A Novel is a safe place

A good story is a dramatic account of an event in the life of a hero. By calling it a drama, I underlie the psychological function of novels.

Literature novels follow a similar pattern but use fancy and complex elaboration that entices just 3% of the population.

For the rest, reading a novel is an act of elaborating emotions without intellectual expectation. A formula could be 80% of safe emotional experience and 20% reason.

How do events determine our lives?

Read the following passage from Deborah Chester in The Fantasy Formula:

“As you walk to work, perhaps you see a child playing dangerously near a busy road. You run to push the child to safety, then continue on your way. The child grows up to be a surgeon who marries your daughter and later performs a life-saving procedure on your wife. Or the child grows up instead to become a meth addict and thief. He steals your identity, and once you see him caught and jailed you wonder why you saved his grubby neck when he was little.”

The example reminds me of The Butterfly Effect or Run Lola Run, movies in which the effects of different chains of events constitute the subject.

As a worthy note on The Butterfly Effect (a Science Fiction film that many of us have seen on TV), I quote Wikipedia:

“The film had a poor critical reception; however, it was a commercial success.” This film even “won the Pegasus Audience Award.” Critics hated it, but audiences loved it. Ashton Kutcher is a part of the equation but is his presence enough to explain the success? The film addresses some emotional needs of people (again: non-intellectuals, the rest of the population).

Run Lola Run received critical acclaim and 1/5 of The Butterfly Effect Box Office. Wait: the film received “the Audience Award” from the Sundance Festival (who goes there?)

A Novel is a Damocles Sword

The writer has to make up how to toss the hero into trouble, not for sadistic habits, but because its social responsibility is to provide safe and amusing emotional elaboration to the readership.

In other words, the novel suspends the sword of Damocles over readers; of course, it drops toward the hero’s neck (over the middle of the book, to be accurate). Once you read the story of Damocles, you see that being a novelist is also having the courage to mull over day life perils.

Plates

"Plates" are subplots the writer should place along the novel —especially in the first half— to set the right combination of I’m waiting for the climax, and I want to read five pages and still get something. Plates avoid the reader feeling tedious by enriching the main and long plot with candies that the writer scatters with good prose.

There are some variables to take into account when designing plates.

1) The mystery should be fine but simpler than the central problem. And it should make sense in the character profiles (and help reveal them). These subplots allow readers to know the Director’s casting halfway through the novel.

2) Delay: any plate used to have a delay from the moment it arises till the characters find the answer. A delay longer than a few pages should be mentioned over and over up to its resolution.

Spooc Or How To Make A Blueprint

This acronym SPOOC stands for Situation, Problem, Objective, Opponent, and Climax. It summarizes the first thing the writer has to solve when designing a novel.

Story’s Opening

In a 50,000 novel, the opening takes more or less the first three chapters (after that, there are over 15 more chapters and three more for the Climax.)

In this first step, the text needs a hook in the first sentence, a developing problem that casts trouble over the protagonists and, ultimately, motivates the reader to keep going.

You also have to introduce the protagonist and his main goal; the central story question. Remember: when readers are hatching they stick to the first thing they see (provided that first is interesting.)

In these first lines, the writer has to provide a viewpoint, location, and time of the current action. Thus, the text sets a steady reading in which the reader feels in good hands.

A confident reader feels sympathy for the protagonist, so he’s willing to go with on her adventures.

It is also a good idea to introduce an immediate antagonist, whether he is the main villain or not.

Finally, don’t forget to plant many hints for later developments: one of the ways to build general curiosity and have readers make up subsequent subplots.

Hooks

There are as many types of hooks as creativity allows.

Having said that, here there is a list:

• Action
• Danger
• Unpredictable situation
• Change
• Vivid exhibition

Bond

A bond with the reader arises when the hero copes with the trouble the writer places on her road. Showing emotion through action increases involvement because readers have to figure out the characters instead of just reading what the writer depicts in flat narrations. It also encourages emotional transfers. (Emotional transfers are unconscious attributions of past experiences to a person or situation in the present).

Background or The World

There are two ways to have the readers undergo “the world” the writer has created for them. The boring way is to report them, like an ethnographer on an unknown planet. The exciting way is to permit the characters to build their identity through action and dialog. The main advantage of this method is that readers create their minds, which promotes engagement. Writing like that requires more work, but it is worthwhile because fiction buyers are very different from anthropology or history buyers. They could be the same person but in different moods.

Once readers and characters are attached, the bond makes readers lure for information about the hero and her world. Once Act 1 finishes, the author can hand out some features with narration; nevertheless, most of the time, it should be set through action.

This article is the first part of my review and essay on Deborah Chester in The Fantasy Formula