How to write a novel - Part One
Roman is a prosaic narrative literary genre that reflects a fictional reality, revealing the deep layers of human life. Regardless of what type of novel you want to write-literary or commercial, romantic or sci-fi, an epic about war or a family drama-you will need boundless creative energy and the ability to express yourself through your romance, patience for the realization of your design, this is a painstaking and lengthy process that requires special assiduity and consistency in the editing and finalization process.
1 Inspiration. Writing a novel is a creative process, and you never know when a good idea can illuminate you. Therefore, you should always be fully armed and carry a notebook and a pen with you, so that you can write down ideas as they arise. You can feel the inspiration during the morning trip to work, or over a cup of coffee. Inspiration is unpredictable, so listen to your thoughts and try to fix them on paper so you will not forget. To be a writer, you need to be as long as possible in a state of inspiration. Sometimes, writers find it difficult to generate ideas. Almost all writers face this problem, and inspiration is the best way to solve it. The source of inspiration is not necessarily a book. It can be a TV show, a movie or even a visit to an exhibition or an art gallery. Inspiration comes in infinitely diverse forms! Use your laptop to write down everything that comes to your mind. These can be notes describing your observations, a few paragraphs or even just scrappy sentences that will later form the basis of your novel. Try to think through all the stories that you heard from people you know and loved, starting with the stories of your great-grandmother and ending with stories from TV news and even your childhood memories. Try to think about an event that happened in childhood or in the recent past, which somehow populated in your memory. This may be the mysterious death of a woman in your city, the strange affection of your neighbor to pets, or your tour to London, which you keep remembering all the time. For example, the famous scene, the code the colonel before the shooting recalls how his father led him to look at the ice from the novel. One hundred years of solitude was based on the childhood memories of Marquez. Some say that "you need to write about what you know well." Others believe that you should "write about what you do not know." Think up or think out something from your own life that does not leave you indifferent, that excites you, awakens your inspiration, interests you, gets you started and try to develop this topic in more detail in the novel.
Constantly ask "How to write a novel?" - Read on, and you will be able to write your first narrative.
2 Select a genre. Not all novels have a clear attachment to specific categories, but it is very useful from the very beginning to determine to which genre your work will belong and on which audience it will be oriented. Try to read as many classical works of the chosen genre as possible. This will allow you to get an idea of how to build a novel in accordance with existing standards. And if you have not stopped on a particular genre or are going to create something new, which is at the junction of different genres, then you will simply need to study all these styles and their characteristics. Consider several possible options: The novel is a literary work, permeated with a deep understanding of life, symbolism, which uses sophisticated literary techniques. Try to read more classical works of great novelists, guided by the list of "100 best books of world literature according to the version of the newspaper" The Guardian ", and refer to" 100 Greatest Novels of All Time ".Commercial (or tabloid) novels are created in order to entertain an audience with one, and on the other - with the expectation of selling the maximum number of copies in a wide genre range, from science fiction, mysticism and fantasy, to thrillers, love stories or historical novels. Many novels of this type are produced in series and have predictable interchanges. There is no clear line between commercial and non-commercial novels. Many science fiction writers and authors of thrillers created complex and profound works that can rightly be considered the pearls of classical literature. The fact that the novel is popular does not at all mean its low quality and belonging to pop culture. Just need to read as much literature as possible in the genre in which you are going to write your novel. This will allow you to make a complete picture of the traditions, rules and style of the genre in which you intend to self-actualize and help you in your work.
Read the continuation of this article - “How to write a novel - Part Two“ in the next part and you will be able to write your first novel!