Closing

I'm shutting down My Heart's Porch. Moving on to In the Land of the Lotus Eaters. I'll be cleansing most of the posts on here, I think. Keeping some classics. I won't delete the blog, obviously. So it can point the way to the new one. Content to come.

Carry Me, Ohio

I settle the debate with myself when I see the light glittering off my shoulder. She's been crying quietly upon it. I feel the neat symmetry of the moment. We've had a goodbye like this before. I tell her she should get going, because it's getting dark and she's got to drive. We lay together on the rug for a while longer, right where, perpendicular, we were hours ago. We rise minutes later and I walk her to her car and there we stare at the Cottage, the whole of it, for a little while. Then we kiss again, and embrace, and she goes. I stay outside until she leaves the drive and I lean against my car and cry briefly. I should be dry of tears.

The debate that I've settled is the weight and ramifications of my actions. I have been cold in my dealings. In my head I have been. I have used this relationship as grounds for moral debate, for testing myself. And in that sense I have not been true to her. Emotions have grown for her and I think that I've only become more detached. Certainly I've become more distant in other ways. But this isn't about that, and that's part of the debate. With other women I have ended the story abruptly, and wrongly, perhaps. But with her, this end is right. I think of things as narrative, you see. Eric contra woman, Eric contra Ohio, contra Cottage. I have a story that is only beginning, that is in prologue. And maybe I have gotten ahead of myself in acting as though that weren't the case. This isn't about that, though. And that's my justification. These narratives are deserving of their own attention and their own end, not one cut and pasted from the beginning of another.

There is a way that people absolve themselves of guilt for their personalities. And it is something I've done, and am doing now. I am honest about my faults. People sometimes think honesty erases these things, and I've learned they do not. Nevertheless I take comfort in knowing that I have done right by this story. We were true. There were reflections in every moment of those that came before, lovemaking remembering past nights, food and rest and sleep and all these in their proper positions, lain straight, parallel. I crave that order in my life lately though I have found that these lines like an arrow make and point toward death. There is no deviation. There is no derivation. Time will lead you inexorably toward the bed and arms in which you will die.

My uncle died drowning on the fluid in his lungs. I saw his last breath, and many, many breaths before. Part of me wanted so badly to take him to the hospital, to drain the fluid, as futile an action as that would be. He would die surely, only hours later. And they would be hours filled with nothing. With the rising of his shoulders as he gasped, with the slight flexing of his hands and feet. With his family hanging onto every breath. With my count of the seconds between, shuddering at every prolonged moment, at the ones that stretched. There is nothing gained from those hours, should more have been there. But the loss, the irrevocable loss at seeing his chest quit. Give us those moments of nothing, those few more hours. Let us make Death tire of his wait. Let him shift from foot to foot.

I don't know that I believe that. I don't think I do. And certainly it would be against my uncle's wishes. But that's how I felt at the time. Here is a clear and heavy point at which our lives will change, around which they will swing. And it would have been altered slightly had we acted otherwise. Of course it would. How could it be the same?

I could leave later. By days or hours. My rent is paid for the month of August and that money is gone whether I'm there or not. But the final moments of my story in Ohio, this two year "to be continued," will not change by that. I can predict it for you now with accuracy. I will cry for miles. It is an inevitable moment and all that will change is what comes between. It's decided, though. And while I won't be making it any easier or harder I will be echoing, in a way, what my uncle did in passing. I'll plant that axis and be done with it, let these new directions and new stories begin.

How to Write a Novel Pt. 6

You've written your novel. You've edited it so many times that you can quote parts at random. You've woken up in the middle of the night because you had a breakthrough about a line, or a character. You've polished that mother until it shines. Now comes the hard part.

Queries: Or, Querying; or, Looking for Agents/Publishers, etc., etc.

From what I've learned about publishing, it's an entirely unfair business. You slave to create a work of art, forsaking friends and family, losing hair and sleep, and then you have to sell it--something largely out of a writer's depth. The writing that you do for your novel is nothing like the writing it takes to sell your novel. You'll slave over 300-500 words just as much as you did for your novel, all the while whipping yourself because you feel so fake for doing so. It's necessary. If this world were golden agents and publishers would be hunting for us. They'd have special hounds that could smell literature. But instead they're gold miners, panning for books through murky water. They've got an imperfect system, but it's all they've got, and it's your only avenue to success.

To answer a few of the common questions: Yes, you want an agent. Yes, you. Even you, in the back, with the face. The brunt of publishers won't even accept a query, for one, and for two, the ones that do are small and just as likely to reject you. Cormac McCarthy was able to sell his books without an agent, but now, after he's established, he's got one. An agent frees up some of your time that you'd otherwise spend selling yourself.

When I started sending queries I went with publishers first; a bad move twice over. I wasted opportunity with mediocre queries, and I may have burnt those bridges. If you want to start out sending to publishers, fine, but whet your teeth with an agent or two. There's more of them than publishers, and you may be able to get feedback from the decent ones.

For the uneducated, this is a query:

Dear Mr. Agentman,

At seventeen David Parrish and his best friend Red Parker drop out of high school to join the Army. America has been fighting a major war at home and abroad and the two want to do their part. Sent to a nearby unit, it’s not long before they are split: Red is sent overseas while David is picked for combat medic training. When David rejoins their unit months later he finds Red has become an unparalleled fighter, but at the cost of his humanity. A rift already between them, the two are split again when David is seriously wounded and shipped home, leaving Red to fight alone.

Complete at 93,000 words, Long Way Home follows David through his first moments in combat to his life as a ranch hand, husband, and father: reminiscent in style and content to A Farewell to Arms and All the Pretty Horses. It tackles the same trials that our veterans face in coming home, as well as portraying an America reeling from an overextended economy and army. Through their experiences David and Red are forced to ask themselves what good two people can do in the world, and whether the answer changes their responsibility to try.

I will be attending the University of California at Riverside’s MFA program this fall. I have had work published by Wittenberg University and have publications forthcoming through Circumlocution Literary.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Eric Shonkwiler

Open with your story immediately. Summarize the best bits, end the first paragraph with your hook. Mine isn't quite a hook, as you see. Sort've half a hook. Title and wordcount in second paragraph, overview of what market the book fits into, what its themes are. Super brief bio, and scene. Be polite, be quick. Don't be snarky, but if you can color your query just a little bit, you might try. You need to be memorable.

You really need to make your query flawless. Think of this whole horrendous process as you being a knight, or noble dude, or something, and you need to rescue the princess/gender appropriate model. Between you and Miss Hotness are several barriers, and these barriers are set up to make sure you're worthy of her bustliness. This is how publishers have set up the business. Your writing has to pass the query-to-agent test, then the manuscript-to-agent test. Then the manuscript-to-editor test. Then the will-this-make-some-old-white-guy-a-lot-of-money test. Yes, you are jumping through hoops. Yes, you've got to be perfect from the beginning. Them's the breaks.

So, you kind've know what a query is. With that general idea in mind, start looking for an agent that's right for you. Pick up a Literary Marketplace or Writer's Market or any of those infinite variations and start going through it. It's worth the money, by the way.

Once you've got a list of compatible agents, look them up online. Look at who they're working with, and look at what they want. Most everyone will have the specifics of their submission guidelines on the website, and you need to follow these guidelines to the letter. Every agent is different. Some do email, some don't. Some want chapters included, some synopses. Do exactly as they say. It sucks, it's hard work, but, again, it's the only way.


Here's a list of absolute musts on your way to writing a good query:
Query Shark: Posts critiques of generally painful queries and dissects them for our pleasure and education.
Miss Snark: The alpha and omega of resources on queries. The site is dead, but all of the information remains.
Nathan Bransford: The nicest agent with an internet presence that I've come across. Quite a lot of information to be had, and should be your first stop when it comes to sending out a query. He says so himself. Sorta.
Janet Reid
Editorial Ass

There is really a ton of information to be sifted through on those sites, and you must take your time to go through it all. You don't want to send out a dozen shoddy queries only to wait six weeks and find you've wasted that time for a dozen form rejections. Keep in mind that you've temporarily burned that bridge once you send the query.

That's it from me. Once you've fired off some queries you're pretty much as far as I've gotten. Good luck.

How to Write a Novel Pt. 5

Nearing the end of this series. You've nearly learned all a hastily-written bunch of lists and smartassed comments can teach you. And, theoretically, you've finished your novel. Be proud.

Today's is a short one.

Editing

Let me start off by saying that there is no way to overemphasize the importance of editing. Through all of my experience as a student and as an aspiring writer I have come across only one anecdote on one writer that ever suggested editing wasn't a big deal. It is thus: supposedly Ray Bradbury would finish a manuscript, literally tear it out of the typewriter, and mail it off to his agent. Like that. No editing, no second glance. Whether that's true or not, not only is Bradbury exceptional, he is, I guarantee, the exception, the rule being that you must edit.

My first novel has gone through something like six drafts. I wrote it in about a year and a half, and I spent three months on the first four drafts immediately after. My second novel took a year to finish, back in January, I think, and I'm still working on the fourth draft. That's just the time you should expect to spend, if not more. It's a long process if you do it right, and especially should be for your first novel, as your voice will grow and stretch as you go along.

Don't edit before you finish your book. I mean it. You'll just waste time. You're not distanced enough from the text to start looking at it critically until you've finished it, and once you have, you can go to town. Apply the same principles that I showed you in the writing section with a fervor, cut the hell out of the thing.

There are things to pay attention to that you won't have given too much thought to while writing. You'll want to look at character and plot arcs; inconsistencies in plot, character, and voice. Ask yourself questions of a scene. What is this accomplishing as far as character development? Is it pushing the plot forward? Is it doing so logically? It's really mechanical, simple stuff to say it, but to be eyeball deep in your text, working with the nuance of word and character is a different matter. I know I've said it often enough that it's annoying, but it's an organic experience. You need to feel things out naturally.

The way that I edit gives me two chances to look over the text for a single draft. I print the beast and line edit with a pen, oftentimes cursing at my own stupidity. When I finish line editing, I sit down at a computer with the scribbles and put the corrections in the document. You'll find that some of the time even your editing needs editing, that the voice you thought was too choppy when you wrote is okay now because you thought it was choppy when you were editing in a bad mood. It happens.

Rather than just repeating myself a lot and telling you to do things that ought to come instinctively, I'll link you to Nathan Bransford, a pretty genial agent who has recently compiled a list of his writer's resources, one of which is a checklist for revising your novel.

A tip for knowing when you're done editing: When you put back words you took out in the previous draft, you're pretty well finished. Either that or you need to take a break. Which needs to be done sometimes, too. Editing isn't as intuitive as writing, but you're still working with the text, tweaking things, and oftentimes you're working on a much smaller level, so it requires more concentration. It's something that, to be done well, you have to be in the mood for. Otherwise you're just going through the motions.

The next installment is the last, and it deals with queries, agents, and publishers. It'll primarily be a bunch of other resources mixed with a bit of advice.

How to Write a Novel Pt. 4

We've discussed plot, characters, inspiration, and themes. Now, assuming you've got all those things squared away...

Write

Put your music on, get yourself a bite to eat, point your head out a window, crack your knuckles. This is the part that I obviously can't help you too much on. I can give you a little bit of prose advice, which I will, but I am an extremely picky reader, highly pretentious, and would likely lead your writing in directions you don't want it to go.

But, this wouldn't be much of a post without some advice. So, I give it to you:

-A lot of people think a story ought to start in medias res, that is, in the middle, in the midst of the action. Homer does this, along with a lot of other greats. I disagree with this technique simply on the basis that saying "start in the middle," will lead people to think it's okay to throw us into the action directly and explain yourself through a lot of shitty pseudo-literary techniques. Hack Writer X thinks it's okay to start where the main character is tied up by the eco-terrorist, who is also his brother, partly because it's gripping and partly because he has a dynamite line to open the book with.

This is not a good reason to start in medias res. It's a hack technique and I want to slap anyone who considers it. It takes more finesse than Palahniuking the end of your book to the beginning and coyly saying you want to start over.

What you also don't want to do is start at some literal beginning--the Wiki article linked above says that's called ab avo, from the egg, meaning you shouldn't start from the birth of your character. You wouldn't tell a friend about how you came to eat cold chow mein with Tom Waits by starting with, "back when I was born." It's something we all have an instinct for, compartmentalizing life into a story, but there can be a fine line between pulling for drama and for necessity.

-Physics applies to writing. When you halve the surface area of an impacting object, you double the force applied by the remaining area. What I mean is, cut. Whenever you have an extra word, a phrase that can be shortened, a sentence, a paragraph, do. I wrote about this at the beginning of the blog. Your main character is about to shoot someone. "He fired the gun" has half the impact of "He fired". "The gun" is completely extraneous. We know from context that he has a gun, and that's what he'll be firing.

Paring your prose back is particularly useful in certain action situations, but it applies everywhere. The fewer words you have, the more you convey with what remains, and the less there is to trip up on. The only allowance you should make for something superfluous is when it has its own value, whether it lends itself to the cadence of surrounding sentences or sounds better as it is. Obviously.

Broadening the physics application, here's a list borrowed from my old creative writing prof of what merits a line must have in order to survive:

1. Character development.
2. Plot development.
3. Spectacle. (Formerly humor, but I've altered it to the Aristotlean tenant of tragedy. Which I was first introduced to by Dan Stroeh, a writer who graduated from my university some years ago.)

The line in question should fulfill at least one if not more or all of these requirements, if not, cut it.

-Dialogue: Above all, keep it natural. Not everyone is gonna use as much informal language as I do, but largely your characters will say, for instance, "gonna." And ain't. Prose is your playground, but without natural dialogue you will quickly find me and like-minded readers throwing your book across the room. Tim O'Brien is considered to be a great writer, yes? Yes. I liked The Things They Carried quite a lot. But In The Lake of the Woods was an atrocious book, and it was so almost solely because the dialogue was completely unrealistic. Seriously. Pick it up sometime, read just a little. It's terrible. And it's not natural. It's overly comedic, forced, weird. Write it like people talk, man. That's all you need to do.

Tags are something peculiar to me. I don't like:

"'Get the hell away from me, you bastard!" Emily screamed.' For two reasons. 1. We know she screamed, there's an exclamation point*, and two, you can glean just from that line that she's probably alone with the bastard or the only protagonist in a position to say something. Context will fill your reader in on a lot, making many dialogue tags useless. Related to the first reason, if you don't know how a line of dialogue is being delivered by the content of the line alone, you're doing it wrong. Okay? Okay.


-Things to Avoid:


1. Flashbacks. Hack literary technique, don't care who you are. Hemingway, Faulkner, McCarthy, Morrison, Robinson, Poe, fucking Moses, don't care. Flashbacks are for hacks. If you can't find a way to include the details of a flashback in your mainstream narrative, you need to...I dunno. Cut yourself.

There are two alternatives, in all seriousness. One is starting your story at a point that would include the time of your flashback. If you need it for tension then you're not writing the sort of story I'm trying to advise, and you can ignore some of what I say anyway. Warn me so I never pick up your book. The other alternative is the natural one: include it as dialogue, as a memory. I have no trouble with wrapping a flashback organically in a narrative, whether by relation from a character directly or in someone's head. Just, don't clear a chapter away for it, or something. The exception to this is when you already have a clearly established format that allows for this. No Country for Old Men does this by giving entire chapters to Sheriff Bell, who reminisces about the old times, his soldiering, and generally just rambles. This is a fine way to do it. To use McCarthy as a bad example, I don't particularly like how he does it in The Orchard Keeper, in which he uses italics spliced directly into a current scene to say there's a flashback occurring. Not so keen on that.

Another, extreme way around this sort of linear demand is the epistolary, longform of Sheriff Bell's chapters, in a way. Robinson's Gilead is flashback after flashback after flashback, and only later in the book is there any sort of narrative thrust. But Gilead is unquestionable. It is flawless. Above all remember that all rules of writing are suspended if you can pull off a miracle. Seriously. Faulkner's Light in August is full of character switches and flashbacks, and it's still not a bad story because Faulkner is that good. So, if you're good, you'll get away with things.

2. POV swaps. Switching from character to character to tell the story. This is my taste more than anything, but it is something to call attention to, if nothing else. Be wary of it because it gets complex, harder for the reader to follow, and to an extent it also sucks from the narrative bubble, makes the reader more aware that they're reading a story rather than just living it.

3. Tricky narration. Taking the POV of a small child, or someone who's disabled. It doesn't take skill to write convincingly as a second grader. You're not impressing anyone by dumbing yourself down. You're masking bad writing as nuance. A good puzzle does not a good book make.

4. Asides. Unless you're writing in first-person, and even then, asides are bad. Asides pop the bubble of dramatic tension as well as going a ways toward popping the bubble of suspension of disbelief. Anything that you can boil down to a "by the way" is something that you need to work toward incorporating in a more organic manner. Asides aren't necessarily brief things, either. Beware a narrative drift, a tangent, that you may find yourself going down if you get lost in your own world. That's the one flaw of Robinson's Housekeeping, another excellent novel.

5. Adverbs. Adverbs rob you of your own writing. Whenever you use an adverb you're cutting out the chance for a metaphor. Just remember that. For expediency's sake you're going to use them sometimes, but don't get too fond of them. They're weak.

6. Ornamental words. Qualifiers like "only," and "just."

Things to Do:

-Trust your reader.

-Be subtle. Use the Iceberg Principle.

And we're done! That's by no means an exhaustive list, but it's not bad ground to stand on. If you're catering to me, at least. Next up we'll talk the importance of editing.

* I don't like exclamation points much, either.

How to Write a Novel Pt. 3

Put Down Your Pen

You've got your soul? Got your laptop fired up? Pen at the ready, notes beside you?* Okay. Now walk away.

I've written two novels. Not a lot. But two more than the majority of the world. That's not saying they're particularly good, but it does say I know more about starting them than most people, and while writing is a deeply personal experience, you're reading, aren't you? So you're in it for what I've learned. And what I've learned is that you don't want to start your novel when you're ready-- start it when you're fit to burst. Having an idea, having the plot outlined, having characters mapped** isn't enough. Inspiration is a tough subject to broach, but here's as good a place as any. You want to be inspired when you start. All of those ideas, all of that percolation, everything that's collected in your head and made you half-crazy while you were figuring out what to do after your last short story needs to be held together until you can't take any more of it.

When I settle in to write I liken it to the shishi odoshi, a Japanese water fountain. A partly-hollowed bamboo pole is fitted onto rotating supports and filled with water. When the pole is full, it tips, dumping the water out. This is precisely the feeling I get when I know I'm ready to write. People who are around me long enough will see me stare off into space at random intervals, and this is my fountain filling, essentially. I'm not really thinking, but something is happening in my subconscious--some would say it's already writing my book-- and when it's done, it smacks the metaphorical rock, and I start writing. That's what you want, as well. You'll feel more than ready. You'll be invigorated, and stumbling blocks of a sentence or two, if you have them, will be leapt over. You want that running start.

To help with this percolation, I recommend three things:
1. Music. I favor instrumentals when writing, but that will not be the case for all. Paper Cuts has a weekly-or-so feature on writers and their playlists. It's a great place to discover new music and find other writer's habits.

2. Great literature. And I mean great. The classics. Moby-Dick, The Iliad, Blood Meridian. Pick something that will be educational content and style-wise. Don't go reading Wuthering Heights if you plan on writing that sci-fi novel in which everyone dies by space crab. I wouldn't recommend writing that book at all, but I'm not gonna stop you. Others would say you should read poetry, cut out the fiction altogether. This isn't a bad idea. I take my reading lightly when writing, but I generally can't keep myself away from some book or another.

3. Roadtrips! Even for a day, half a day. Break out of your normal routine and you'll find your mind working new ideas almost immediately. Congrats if you're American: you've got 160,000 miles of highway to choose from, and I've never found a better inspiration than countryside passing by.

I have to stress, after saying how important inspiration is, that you can't use a lack of it as an excuse to not write. The greats wrote all the time. Many of them kept relatively regular hours. Many slept about four hours a night to get writing in before going off to work. Another good source of inspiration is the act of writing itself. You'll get struck with an idea faster if you're at the craft than if you're playing Call of Duty. So do write. But do get inspired.

*I don't do this.
**I don't do this, either.

How to Write a Novel Pt. 2

Stay with me while I decide on a format for this. Why do bullets if I'm gonna have one point per post? Or the block text, or whatever. You know what I mean.


With the first installment of this series, I told you, young writer, to have something to say. I should add that this something ought to be something you feel strongly about. I hope that goes without saying, but to be sure. You don't want to start a novel about animal cruelty if you aren't a vegan or a member of PETA, or something. Remember that this is the soul of your book, it's what should drive you when the pure joy of writing itself is temporarily exhausted. You want to get up in the morning, and think, "Right now, people all over the world are massacring innocent carrots. I must save them."

Or something like that. Moving on.

Knowing Your Story

This is equal parts personal and universal. Sequentially, this should occur almost concurrently with the next post in the series (which will talk about inspiration).

I've never been one to plan my story. Except when writing a screenplay, I've never mapped events out, only kept a loose list of things I wanted to happen. Between these nodes of concrete events was the rest of the story, and that I made up as I went along. I follow this mode of operation in all aspects of my writing. The characters develop subconsciously, as does the theme and plot. This may not work for all of you. And it doesn't always work for me. Sometimes I get stymied. So it's important to know what you want conveyed, and whether in a concrete fashion or not, what you want to happen.

The method of your conveyance is character. All themes and I'd say half of the actions in most any novel need to be brought across by your characters. This means you can't break in with a deus ex thema to explain your morals, nor act like some weak-kneed Evelina and let outside forces speed the plot. So, briefly.

Characters- I'll be the first to admit that I can't handle a great number of characters at once. I don't deal with mobs well, and my writing style doesn't allow for multiple voices to be heard at once. But it's equally hard to say anything but "pretty scenery" without some exchange. Hence, two main characters in my first novel. Keep this in mind when coming up with your characters-- you probably don't want a Power Ranger cast worth of main characters, unless you plan on relegating them to the depth of ROYGBIV.

Once you know at least the quantity and type of main characters you want, a good exercise (that I've never tried) is to write, whether in brainstorm format or no, their backstory. From birth to present. Age 3, fell off trike and skinned knee--formative event, first sight of blood. Age 7, showed his to see hers. Age 8, father left. Age 9, met best friend.

That sort of thing. Maybe even write a short story or two with them. Or scenes from the book that you'll never put in. (You'll do this anyway, via editing. End up cutting scenes from the book that the reader will never know about but happen in your head, nevertheless, and end up impacting the course of character development.) Remember that, at the most basic level, the relationship the reader has to have with your characters is love. Love the protagonist. Whether it's love or love to hate, that's inconsequential. But you can't have an unlikeable character. If you do, you have to be ready to give them their just desserts.

Once you have a solid conception of your characters, you let them roam free in your...

Plot- Which, if you're noticing my theme, will happen organically. You'll find your characters bouncing around in this world you created and acting nearly independently of you. That's how it often happens, anyway.

The plot is the least subconscious thing you'll be working with in your book. It's something that requires harder thought and it's the framework that you want to have most in place by the time you start writing. However, you'll find, like everything in writing, that you'll be surprised in the middle of the night by some twist that your characters bring you to, and you'll have to break things apart and reorganize them. Oftentimes your prof or teacher will tell you it's a good idea to put all of your plot-nodes onto notecards, or organize them in any other such way. Not a bad idea. Again, something I've never done.

When I started writing my first novel I had a good basis for my work in both temporal directions--that is, I knew what the past was, and I knew what the far future was. What was in between, I'd fill in. Don't fight it if you get lightningstruck and your last scene comes to you before you write the first. You'll be amazed at what you'll make span the gap. But, for the breakdown, it's really, truly important to have guideposts set up along the way. Know your beginning, middle, and end. And if not that, know what's near the end. Have little scenes planned out, those little inspirations you get throughout the day, set up like signposts. It seems forceful, maybe counterproductive to the creative process, but you'll be surprised, again, at what your own skill will produce. A scene here and there keeps your plot linear.

Aristotlean writers will tell you that plot comes first in a book. It is prime. I don't agree, but. A strong plot is never a bad thing. A way to get a strong plot is to craft a Major Dramatic Question. This is what drives a reader to turn the page if love of character and prose fail or don't register immediately. What's going to happen next? In thrillers, mysteries, etc., the MDQ is easy to pin down. Will Dan Brown's stock professor character stop the pope from crushing the Sphinx with his giant hat? Will Nicolas Cage's hair terrify the bad guy into submission before he crashes the plane into Alcatraz, with the Constitution in hand?

In more literary fiction, the MDQ becomes harder to suss out. In The Sun Also Rises, what's the MDQ? Seriously, I defy you to give me a good one. What you'll end up with is something like, "What will happen to Jake, to Jake and Brett, etc.,?" But that's not the whole of the book. The play between Jake and Brett, while crucial in providing tension in some places, is half the book, tops. So what of the other half? In All the Pretty Horses, the same problem arises. "Will John Grady woo Alejandra?" Maybe, yeah, not bad. But he meets her nearly a hundred pages into the novel. So don't be afraid to be at a loss for an MDQ. If you can break your book up into several, so much the better.

Before I sign off I want to stress two things. One: I put plot secondary for a reason. In literary fiction, I think today's readers want to get to know characters more than they want to discern plot. So put your focus on lifelike, endlessly deep protagonists and antagonists. If you do well enough here, the reader will follow them to the dentist and back.

Two: Take everything I say with a grain of salt. Writing is not something that can be taught without flaw. It takes a certain amount of talent that I don't think can be given by anything after birth, along with a lunatic dedication. Remember too that I'm writing this guide for the semi-literary to literary fiction crowd. If you're not in that corner, play fast and loose with these guidelines.

Here's a good link to Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy. Very valuable stuff, there. Smarter than me, surely.

Next installment is Inspiration. After that, lessons on the actual craft, the prose.

Literary miscellany:

1Q84 has been revealed. Sort've. It's a reverse 1984, I guess?

A nice interview with Marilynne Robinson, in which she describes some of her thoughts on writing.