Theme: Incentives

—“CAN I WRITE A 1000 PAGE NOVEL TODAY?”—

1. It’s economically unwise at present to write a 900 page novel. It is much better to break it into three books, and edit to provide rewards for the reader at the end of each.

2. It is extremely difficult to accumulate sufficient life experience to provide character, plot, and environmental novelty (entertainment) for 900 pages. That’s why people don’t do it – they can’t.

3. The current trend is simply ‘more’ characters, plots, etc in an effort to move beyond the exhausted 90-min plot lines, that books were written for, in the hope that they would be optioned as scripts.

4. To answer the question, I would need to understand the plot, theory, or experiment you’re trying in the book, the number of characters, and maybe a few of their story arcs.

Authors you might know:

RRMartin (Can I reverse the good vs evil exhausted plot line through continuous character development using epic character arcs over a long period of time, written for teens, and young adult heroes with adult subject matter,).

Rowling ( can I reach a young adult or teen audience, with a stereotypical boy’s adventure, written from a girl’s perspective and voice, played by a boy to to maximize my book sales, using one year of schooling at a time, where the character grows with the audience and books are released in parallel to the audience’s growth.)

Stephenson (Cryptonomicon: can I write the seminal work of the Cyberpunk era, combining Ludlum’s thriller, King’s Characters, Tom Clancy’s scale, tech entrepreneur life in the dot com boom, And in doing so explain the the history of cryptography across generations, construction of the world banking and economic system, and how it could change in the future, shifting the world power balance. Maybe gibson was more influential, but Stephenson wrote the canon literature of that era.)

Eddings (can I merge with wizard of earthsea, pohl’s ‘scientific magic’, and tolkien’s epic wars between civilizations, and do the characters well enough to get a away with it and not be called a hack? Add a hundred other copycats using the formula after him here….)

King (It, the Stand – most of his books – Can I weave an entire village , an enormous cast of characters, into an epic of mythic consequence mystery and scale, and succeed with most of the characters by producing an backstory, dialog, and character arc the audience will empathize with despite so many of them you need a score card to keep track. I mean, the stand is a dark sci fi attempt at Tolkein’s epic. We should note that while King does manage to produce some archetypal characters in a novel context he failed in the stand to achieve his goal of maintaining character empathy, and audience interests, for the duration.)

Rand (Atlas Shrugged can I write a play that the reader will empathize with, that creates a middle class heroic mythos of creative excellence, where the characters represent political archetypes, instead of writing another work of philosophy that will be ignored? (it worked despite cutout characters. Not as clear as plato’s socrates, but she did it.) )

Tolkien (Can I create the largest most detailed alternate world ever tried by the reconstruction of the tradition of anglo saxon, germanic, proto-germanic european, mythos as a means of exploring ancient tongues. Can I write an anglo saxon world we would be desperate to live in, because we sense it is more moral than the world we live in today? Don’t over analyze Tolkien. ).

Michner: (can I learn about and teach history of different areas of the world by weaving long intergenerational family stories over many generations with interesting plots with strong characters instead of writing a history book or set of biographies – and will that sell to readers? Absolutely.)

Gone With The Wind … (The experience of the entirety of the civil war in the south?)

War And Peace (the experience of the entirety of the napoleonic invasion of russia and leave a lasting memory of it as a monument? Yes.)

Don Quixote (Can I write a homeric epic of equal meaning, and greater tragedy because modernity traded knowledge and prosperity yes, but destroyed chivalry, honor, nobility – and his idealism is considered insane and useless in the face of modernity.

You get the point.

What are you going to deliver in 900 pages of novel that is novel, and novel enough to hold the reader’s attention when his or her attention is competing with every other demand for his or her attention? What do you have to offer?

I wish I could get people to write write an overview of their plot (a theory of the book), then some back story. then some character backstories. Then write a few SCENES. So then you can immerse yourself in a world and weave your way through it because you have enough to work with that you won’t just imagine the most recent stereotypical thing you encountered.

Try to write the skeleton of the story while inspired, in just one to t three weeks. Even if you just throw it away. Then pick scenes that you feel inspired to work with. You will find that you will create anchors, and then ask “why would my characters get from A to B”.

Research. Fill your head with whatever your character’s head would be filled with in the circumstance. then your writing won’t be trite.

If you sit down and try to daydream a novel you will create precisely nothing novel.