What is a Novel?
Big question. Lots of answers out there. Here's mine.
If you've taken ENGL 31, 32 or 51 with me, you have heard my formula for the short story:
Character + Situation + Complication = Story
I think I'm likely to stand by this definition for the next fifty years or so.
What it means is that the short story is essentially about a person. More accurately, a character, by
which I mean a fictional person.
This person is known to the writer of the story to be in and at a particular point in his or her life (and this
means more than age: it means where the person lives, works, goes to school; who the significant
others in his or her life are; what's presently "going on" in his or her life; etc.) -- this is the character's
situation.
And that situation is, at the beginning of the story, facing or about to face (or, if the writer chooses to
tell the story in retrospect, has just faced) a significant complication. This complication is something
certain to, or having the potential to, change the character's situation -- and the character him- or
herself.
The short story is built, most often, to engage the reader in this kind of compact drama (or comedy). It is
short for this reason.
So what's all this about the short story got to do with "What is a Novel?" Surely you can guess.
The novel is longer, because its concerns go beyond those of the (typical) short story.
It's not just character + situation + complication. Its focus can be expanded to many characters, multiple
situations, lots and lots of complications... and more than all that too.
One famous novelist, James Michener, was more interested in places than people. Well, let's say he was
interested in the ways in which places and people come to define each other. He wrote nice fat novels
with titles like Hawaii, Iberia, and Space. His books tend to include multiple characters who get large
allotments of narrative time to strut and fret upon the page, and their entire lives (each with its own
complications and crises) might play out for the reader's enjoyment, in this place that has grabbed the
writer's attention...
A short story would find all this difficult to contain.
Not all novelists, actually comparatively few, are as overtly focused on place and time (which together
we'll call "Setting" in class) as was Michener. But one of my primary edicts/bits of writerly advice to you
this semester is that in conceiving and creating a novel, you think of yourself as a muralist rather than as
a sketch artist. The short story can, and has been, achieved on a single sheet of paper -- think of it as a
sketch. The mural needs a wall. The space is large, because what you're going to fill it with is more than
the material of a short story. And so you think, mural: lots of people, lots going on, and the place and
time are every bit as important as any other element. Your setting can and must be an essential, integral
element in your conception and creation of the novel. It cannot be arbitrary. it must not go undefined.
The context (historical, geographical, cultural, social, climatological, etc.) in which your novel's story
unfolds is a vital concern -- if you don't keep it in mind, much can go wrong.
In fact, I won't be offering a formula for the novel because there are so many things upon which the
writer must focus. The formula would end up looking like one of those multi-blackboard equations in
Einstein's lab, and I'm no math teacher, let alone a physicist.
But remember that place and time, along with characters and events, are your novel. Plus...
Well, what else do Rivera's murals have? Bold colors? You bet they do. And those we'll equate to your
writing style. Your choices of words, syntax, sentence structures, metaphors and similes, Point(s) of
View and more, are your choices, inutitive or deliberate as may be, just as Diego Rivera's choices of
colors, brush strokes, shadings, etc. are his. Your novel will not read like another writer's novel; a Rivera
mural is not a Miro.
And Rivera's murals, they also have ideas in them. Attitudes. Beliefs. The muralist had things to say
through his art, and the novelist does too. (Most literature professors call this part of the novel's being
its "themes.") And there is simply no way that a novelist, yourself included, can write a novel that does
not engage and express ideas, attitudes, beliefs... though reading interviews with a number of novelists
will demonstrate that these are deliberately part of the work to wildly varying degrees.
In drafting a novel -- that is, in doing your initial imagining and rendering in words of people, places and
times, events -- I'd advise you to not think or fret much about any large, overarching ideas, beliefs and
attitudes that might be more or less subliminally helping to shape your creation. They're there: you
don't need to force "meaning" onto the story as it develops. (This is where we must part ways with
Diego Rivera, whose murals were, in their conception, dogmatic; their themes preceded and dictated
their content.)
It will be later, in revising the completed draft, when you will see most clearly what your novel is "about"
thematically. Then you can buff and polish to (among other things) emphasize or soften its themes as
appropriate to your own view of what your novel should be.
[A warning: a novel conceived above all as a vehicle for sermonizing, campaigning or otherwise selling an
idea or belief -- rather than exploring the fictional lives and conflicts of its characters in a particular place
and time, and discovering whatever there is to find in their ideas, attitudes and beliefs -- is not worth
your fiction writing time. Nonfiction outsells fiction these days, so go that route instead.]
To summarize: A novel is a book length work of fiction in which a potentially large number of welldefined characters experience crises and complications galore while living in specific, defined, detailed
places and times. And if first the writer, through revision of the completed draft, and then the reader,
finds that the fictional interactions and experiences of these fictional people thrum with life and
resonate with truths that exalt, shame, amuse, frighten and otherwise expand and deepen his or her
grasp of human be-ing...
Well that, my friends and fellow writers, is what this fiction writing thing is all about.
About Structure
Stating the simplest truth about the novel's difference from the short story ("It's longer."), is to offer a
basic structural observation. The two forms of fiction are made differently, in that one is made larger.
Between the two is an intervening form, the novella.
And then there is another form, the book length collection of linked stories and/or novellas that can be
(and often is) called "a novel in stories."
You are welcome to work in any of these forms of fiction.
But this isn't all we need to consider in pondering the structure of a novel.
When I compare the novel to a mural, and note that a mural is painted on a wall, that wall equates to
the total space of all the pages on which the novel is printed. But think about this: the muralist arranges
all of his or her visual elements on that wall for best effect -- the novelist also arranges the narrative that
makes the novel on the pages of the book.
By which I mean -- chapters or no chapters? Sections or no sections? Some deliberate pattern of short
and long chapters, or chapters all of similar length, or chapter length determined by the content and
purpose of the individual chapter?
Is the division of chapters and/or sections determined by changes in narrator and/or Point of View? By
characters' stories unfolding along different timelines? By different stories unfolding along the same
timeline?
If there are different timelines or storylines, will they overlap at some point along the way, or converge
only in the end, or remain separate throughout?
Don't worry, you don't have to decide this at the outset. But these are some of the options available to
you in structuring your novel -- and at some point you'll either realize that you're instinctively building
your novel according to an architectural plan that suits it, or you'll sense some weakness in the structure
and need to consider options for a rebuild. Most novels, it must be said, are perfectly fine built along
single-timeline, single-narrator, single-Point of View lines, with chapters of similar length and the
divisions between determined by the individual chapters' own beginning-middle-end structure. (Yes,
chapters typically have a narrative arc, each existing to advance the novel's story by way of something
necessary to the story happening within it.)
Books I will likely refer to throughout the semester as we discuss structural and other options available
to you as a novelist include the following, which I recommend reading not only because you'll have a
better idea what I'm talking about, but because they are fine novels on their own merits (I present these
in no particular order, and these are surely not the only novels I'll mention during the semester):
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines
Blindness, by Jose Saramago
As stated above, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list. I'll also probably refer to the Harry Potter
series, Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, The Martian Chronicles, and who knows what all as we move
along... you never know what will come up as we explore writing novels together, what we'll discover
and share and need to talk about from one week to the next. A course like this is less the flight of an
arrow than an open-minded drive through a vast and fascinating landscape; the unexpected detours and
stops to stretch our legs will, I'll guess, end up teaching us all as much about how to get the work done
as anything I've planned ahead of time.
Always feel free to bring your own observations, insights and questions derived from novels you've read
to our discussions; it's impossible to know what might prove invaluable to someone (perhaps everyone)
in the room, and I've found that while Joan Didion is correct in saying that we write to discover just what
it is that we're thinking, I'd add that we talk about writing to do that, too; to discover what it is we think
about writing.
Below are links to some things I'd like you to read as soon as possible; they delve into some of the many
varieties of long-form fiction that you are welcome to practice and present as works in progress this
semester; whether your work is a novel, novella, novel in stories... dig in and work at it and we'll be glad
to give it an attentive and appreciative read.