How Not to Write a Book

Plot: Not just a bunch of stuff that happens
As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn't matter if the plot is emotional (“Will Jack's fear of commitment prevent him from finding true love with Synthya?”), intellectual (“But Jack, Synthya's corpse was found in a locked room, with nothing but a puddle on the floor next to her and a recently thawed leg of mutton on the end table!”), or physical (“Will Jack's unconstitutional torture of Synthya Abu Dhabi, the international terrorist, lead to the location of the ticking bomb?”) - as long as it compels the reader to find out what happens next. If your reader doesn't care what happens next - it doesn't.
Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyse her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.
The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors one after another. This is followed by scenes in which they interact with each other in different combinations, meanwhile driving restlessly to restaurants, bars, and each other's homes, all of which is described in detail.
A great many plot problems that show up in unpublished manuscripts can be resolved with a single strategy. Know what the chase is, and cut to it. Do not write hundreds of pages without knowing what story you really want to tell. Do not write hundreds of pages explaining why you want to tell the story you are about to tell, why the characters are living the way they are when the story begins, or what past events made the characters into people who would have that story. Write hundreds of pages of the story, or else you'll find that what you write will not be shelved in the libraries of the future but will instead form the landfill on which those libraries are built. In fact, employing any of the plot mistakes that follow will guarantee that your novel will be only a brief detour in a ream of paper's journey to mulch.
Beginnings and Setups: A manuscript comes screaming across the sky ...
Many writers kill their plots in their infancy with an ill-conceived premise or an unreadable opening. Try any of the strategies we've collected in our extensive fieldwork, and you too can cut off narrative momentum at the ankles. Take for instance:
The Long Runway In which a character's childhood is recounted to no purpose
1
Reynaldo's first memory was of his mother, the Contessa, dressing for an evening of card playing. That night, the scandalous Marquis vin Diesel came to pick her up in his elegant horse-drawn Louis Quinze brolly. The sight of the matched Angora geldings in the gathering dusk, harnessed in ampersands and cornices after the fashion of the day, would forever be burnt into Reynaldo's memory.
“Good night, sweet Prince,” his mother called from the door. “Do sleep thou tightly.”
“I entreat thee and simper, mother, stay!” baby Reynaldo said, gesturing at the fearful dark behind the damasked street lamps. “Doth there be not danger?”
“Oh, that is a silly Leviathan of thy youthful imaginings,” his mother scoffed uproariously, and pulled the door to. She returned later that night unharmed, and gave him a caramel merkin she'd won in a final tempestuous hand of vingt-fromage.
2
Thirty-five years later, Reynaldo tumbled out of bed, laughing heartily at his manservant Hugo, and went about his morning toilette.
Soon, glistening with ambergris and jauntily sprinkling himself with exotic tars and raisins, Reynaldo called out: “No need to tune the pangolin this morning, Hugo, for I have decided to cancel my lesson and rendezvous with the Infanta for shuttlecocks.”
For mysterious reasons, many authors consider it useful to provide a story about a 40-year-old man-about-town with a prologue drawn from his life as a five-year-old boy. It is equally common for such authors, in the cause of thoroughness, to go on to provide scenes of the hero at 10, 15, and 25 before arriving at the age where he will actually do something. Presumably this is meant to yield insights into the hero's character and the key events that formed it, which is a good idea when presenting a paper at a symposium of psychoanalysts. Your reader, however, was hoping for a good yarn. (There's only one letter's difference between “yarn” and “yawn”, and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories.)
Radical Surgery for Your Novel: In media res
If your novel is getting bogged down in introductory background information, consider this time-tested kick-start technique.
Pick a pivotal action scene and start your novel in the middle of it,introducing your character when he is already in the middle of some gripping conflict, to immediately get the reader involved. This may be the first exciting event in the novel, but writers sometimes begin with the final climactic confrontation and then use most of the remaining book to bring the reader full circle, back to the big shootout, mass suicide, or spaying incident. Once the story has some momentum, you can pause the action to bring the reader up to date with any background information that's necessary.
“Action scene” doesn't mean this technique is limited to novels in which things blow up. “There I was, dressed in nothing but a towel in the most expensive suite in the Plaza Hotel, the man who thought he was marrying a seasonings heiress expec-ted any minute. But that wasn't who I found when I answered the door ...” works just as well as “There I was, dressed in nothing but a towel in the most expensive suite in the Plaza Hotel, the gunfire from the hallway getting closer and closer ...”
The Gum on the Mantelpiece In which the reader is unintentionally misled
Irina entered the nursery to ensure a fire would be roaring when her two beloved sisters arrived. Before bending to stir the coals, she plucked from her mouth the moist pink wad of gum she had been chewing since coming to Petersburg from the family's country estate. The mantelpiece was bare, and Irina planted the large, wet bolus of gum firmly upon it.
At that precise instant, Uncle Vanya, passing through the conservatory, paused at the piano to play one eerie, dissonant chord, which seemed to hang suspended in the air, presaging misfortunes to come.
“Irina!” Masha said with delight, entering the nursery. Her cheeks were pink from the wintry winds, and cold still rose up off her thick and luxurious furs. Of the three, Masha had always been the most fashionable, and treasured her furs more than anything, except perhaps for her beloved sisters. Masha threw her arms wide and crossed the room to embrace dear Irina, the sleeve of her most beloved sable coming very very close to the sticky lump of gum, kept soft and warm and really sticky by the flames that now leapt below it as it lurked there on the mantelpiece, nearly itself a glowering presence in the room, hungry and malevolent, like a sea anemone waiting for prey to swim by. It seemed only through some divine intervention that the sleeve was unharmed.
“Irina! Masha!” cried Natasha, as she entered the room to see them warmly embracing. Natasha was the prettiest, and the most vain, and her sisters had lovingly teased her since they were little about her long blonde hair, which she wore always loose, though it wasn't the custom. Just as Natasha ran to her sisters, an ominous wind blew through an open window and lifted up her long, beautiful hair to swirl about her shoulders, floating like a defenseless blonde cloud, innocent and unaware of any danger, only millimetres - counted in the French style - from the gum on the mantelpiece.
“Come, let us go to another room and slowly reveal to each other our unhappinesses!” Natasha said.
“Yes! Let's do!” said Masha, and the three departed.
* * *
Later that day, Uncle Vanya came in from the cherry orchard and cleaned up the gum.
The good news is that as a writer of fiction you get to create your world from scratch. The bad news is that because you create your world from scratch, everything in it is a conscious choice and the reader will assume that there is some reason behind these choices. Sloppiness in these matters can lead to any number of unintended consequences, foremost among them what is known by writers as the Gum on the Mantelpiece. This is an element introduced in the beginning of a novel that seems so significant that the reader can't help but keep one eye on it, wondering when it will come into play. If it does not, your reader will feel unfairly dealt with. Remember: if there is gum on the mantelpiece in the first chapter, it must go on something by the last chapter.
For similar reasons, details that would go unremarked in real life -a quick glance across the room, the lyrics of the song that's playing when you enter a bar - take on much greater significance in fiction. If you have to run dripping from the shower to sign for an unexpected package, it is probably the gardening clogs you forgot you ordered from Lands' End. But if your character is interrupted in the shower by the arrival of an unexpected package, it tells your readers that the package will unleash a momentous chain of events.
A common version of this is:
The Deafening Hug The unintended love interest
Anna put her arms around her brother and held him close. He could smell her faint perfume, and the warmth of her body made all his troubles drain away. She had filled out since going away to college, and the gentle, persistent, pressure of her breasts was distinct through her thin T-shirt. He let her go at last and said, with a slight blush, “Why can't I talk to Amanda the way I talk to you?”
Anna laughed, but couldn't meet his eyes. “I don't know. Maybe 'cause she's beautiful?”
Hal choked on his response. To him, no one could ever be as beautiful as his little sister. If only she could see herself as others saw her! But he drove these ideas from his head. He had to concentrate on his troubles with Amanda, even if he was beginning to suspect he would have to look elsewhere for the real passion he was determined to find.
Sometimes the author is the last to know. It is all too easy to create a love interest where none is wanted. We call this the Deafening Hug for obvious reasons, and for reasons just as obvious, it should be avoided.
The Red Herring on the Mantelpiece
A red herring is a well-planted false clue, sleight of hand that makes the reader watch one thing while you are busy doing another thing, a thing that will surprise and delight the reader when it is revealed at a time of your choosing. The inadvertently misleading element, “The Gum on the Mantelpiece”, can sometimes be turned into a red herring and made to work for you instead of against you. If your novel is feeling a bit thin because too little is going on, the addition of a decent red herring can lend it some substance and depth. By tying things together and creating a greater sense of interrelatedness, you can convert mantelpiece gum into incarnadine fish.
A classic red herring is the obvious suspect in a whodunit (the smirking gigolo with a hair-trigger temper, the perverse countess) who looks increasingly suspect - until the last scene, when the culprit turns out to be someone else entirely. An equally time-honored herring is the shallow Lothario the heroine is in love with for 200 pages, or so she thinks.
Always make sure that your red herring is an integral part of the story. When you perform sleight of hand, every movement should seem natural. So the murder suspect should be a character who is an established part of the world of the novel - typically it's the lover, close relative, or longtime colleague of the detective or the cadaver. We will not feel the same pleasure in being misled if the suspect is just an unlucky stranger who trips over the still-warm corpse in the dark and, in falling, catches hold of the murder weapon, leaving a perfect set of fingerprints.
And when your red herring no longer serves a purpose, do not simply drop it, leaving a frustratingly loose thread. When the lover is rejec-ted, we want to see his reaction. The heroine will also be thinking about his feelings, and a failure to address these points will erode the reader's sense that the character is real.

©Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman, 2008This is an edited extract
How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra NewmanPenguin, £9.99; 272pp Buy the book