Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The Flavors Which Tie a Novel Together

Ok, I promise no more cranky screeds about WUI (writing while intoxicated). At least, not this week.

Update on the novel: Novel #2 is really starting to gel at this point. I have my outline done, which will probably be cut to shreds by the time my first draft is complete, and I have what I call a "Novel Wiki" written. My Novel Wiki is a set of notes on characters, settings, locations, a timeline, mystery elements and a few other tidbits which I can refer back to for continuity and to figure out the needs of any particular scene, chapter, act etc. I've written a nice, tense prologue so now it's on to the meat of the novel.

This is the tricky part.

Because I'm in the mystery genre, I like to write in sequence rather than jumping around the timeline. I think it helps me keep in mind what information the reader has at a given moment rather than say, "Oh, I would have told them about this in Chapter 6." So, I have to start at the beginning. That means I'm focused on two things. 1) keeping up momentum and maintaining reader interest and 2) introducing the characters and their present situation. Since this is a sequel, I thought introducing the characters could take a back seat in the first act, but in reality I have to negotiate a six-month gap in which every character has changed and their motivations must all be explained. That makes keeping up momentum very difficult.

Oh, and as always, I need to establish the theme of the novel.

"It's a mystery novel, not literary fiction. Do you even need a theme?"

I know mystery readers don't expect something like an overarching theme to exist in their novels, but I can almost certainly assure you that one exists in any novel, mystery or otherwise, worth paying for.

I wish I could tell you all about the dozens of ways I used the theme of my first novel to shape its plot structure. However, I'm trying to use this blog as a mild advertisement platform (whaa?!?), and thus spoiling the plot for potential new readers would be detrimental to my goals. So, I promise to keep any spoilers limited to the selection of text you can read in Amazon's preview, or roughly Chapter 2.

The theme of The Tide Washed Her Away: "The people who know you best are the people who care about you."

There are two main plots in the novel. One involves Jessica Carter coming home after a failed career and having to reconnect with the friends she alienated, while the other is learning about Corinne Masterson's life before she was murdered.

So how does the theme fit with these plots? With Jessica, she has no idea what her friends' lives have been like since she left them behind in Hampton. She really doesn't know her friends because she stopped caring about them, and that bothers her enough that she promises to change her ways early on. But as much as Jessica has stopped learning about her friends, they too have stopped learning about her. They think she's arrogant and self-assured when her reality is quite different. Those initial misperceptions on both sides lead to conflict, and Jessica's pursuit of the truth behind her friends' lives becomes a driving motivator as the novel progresses.

With Corinne, the theme centers more around how people who don't know her are more likely to judge her unfairly for a life she was rumored to have led. Jessica seeks to change people's opinions of Corinne by writing about her life, but since Jessica has been gone during this period she has no choice but to seek out people who cared about Corinne.

In the end, people probably won't even notice the theme playing out. That's not the point of having a theme. It's more like cooking a gourmet dish. There are tastes which bind the various pieces together, but the diner isn't necessarily going to be able to point it out. Without an overarching theme in a novel, the plot can lose cohesion.

I really hope to someday pick apart The Tide Washed Her Away and show just how much the theme is used. Unfortunately, this blog post is getting long and, again, I refuse to spoil readers.

The theme for the next novel is a slight variation on the first. "The people who care about you influence who you become." It is, like any good sequel, an embellishment on the first theme, expanding and adding to it while keeping the flavor of the series consistent.

That's it for this week. Maybe by next week I will have figured out a way to explain to my wife's family why she's working her butt off to pay the bills while I write make-believe... Heh... I'm a dreamer, not a miracle worker.

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