Does Your Novel Have a Heartbeat?

by Holly Lisle Part One of the "Bringing Your Novel to Life" series You've read through what you've written---your first few scenes, your first chapter, your completed novel--and you've discovered that your words don't move you. They don't make you want to keep reading. They don't make you laugh or cry. If writing is bleeding on the page, well, you might have scratched yourself, but you don't need a transfusion. And you don't know what went wrong. When you started writing, did you know what story you were telling? This is trickier than it sounds. You might have known your characters, you might have known your world, and you might have known your plot...but even with this much planning done, it's entirely possible that you had not yet located your deep layer, the heart of your story, the engine that drove you to write it in the first place. Odds are very good you did not know your theme. Your theme is nothing more and nothing less than the heart of a novel. It is not a grade-school exercise in tedium, that single droning sentence you wrote that told your reader what you were going to tell him. In a novel, your theme is a living, vibrant, critical thing. It is your particular passion in this particular novel summed up in a handful of words. It is what you need to say. Need. That's the critical thing in a theme. If you're writing novels, if you are doing something this complex and challenging, you're doing it because something in you needs to write. You have something to express, some particular point of view, some set of life experiences, some driven hunger that you must put down on paper. You NEED. And you need to say what you need. Maybe it is: In spite of having survived heartbreak, I believe in true love. Or: I believe good can triumph over greater evil. Or: If I were King of Everything, this is the way the world would be. Your plot is the map of your story. Your theme is the map of your soul, and it is where your characters will find their direction, their flaws, their hungers, and their own passions. They only breathe with your breath, and they only bleed with your blood. Your plot may be Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, but your theme---your take on the world based on your life, your own hopes and aspirations, your own beliefs---might be Chubby Bald Guy Deserves the Love of a Wonderful Woman. You have themes in you. You've built them from love and courage, but you've built them from anger and fear, too. You live with them every day, when you're muttering that argument you had with your spouse or colleague, designing better comebacks; when you're watching the boss cheat someone and you're getting furious about it; when you're watching a disaster and telling yourself, Someone could have prevented that; when you're hearing the latest political garbage and thinking, This is not the way the world should be. I could do this better. I WOULD do this better. And so you write. You have rich, powerful, compelling, passionate themes boiling inside you. You have something worth saying. Now you just need to know how to figure out what it is, and how to get it on the page.

In Part II: How To Find Your Novel's Pulse, you'll learn how to identify your themes, and figure out which are worth pursuing.

Bring Your Novel To Life: Burying Your Novel's Message

by Holly Lisle Part III of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series In the first two articles, we've explored how essential it is to have a theme to give your novel direction, and how to find those themes that will resonate with you. You'd think that once you have a theme, you could just sit down and write your book about that, and you'd bring powerful emotions and passionate storytelling and compelling, page-turning action to your tale---but it just ain't so. If you just write your theme, what you'll have is a harangue. A message book. Something that will have the readers who agree with your precise point of view nodding along---whether it be "Global warming is going to destroy the planet" or "Global warming is a pile of cow-flops"---and readers who hold any other point of view bouncing your book of the nearest wall and never buying anything else by you, ever. Bad. So now you bury your theme. You write about something utterly unlike the theme you fought so hard to come up with in the first place. One of you just went, "Waaaaaait a minute! If I write about something besides my theme, how are people going to get my message? How are they going to know that global warming is evil/ irrelevant/ actually the dawning of a new ice age? How will I convince them that I'm right?" They won't know, and you won't convince them. It's as simple as that. The theme is there for YOU. Your job as a novelist is to tell a story that entertains your reader, that makes him think, that haunts him long after he finishes the last page---maybe even that STILL haunts him long after he's read the whole thing for the fourth or tenth or twentieth time. I get letters and emails from readers who have done that, and it's great. They frequently tell me what they got out of the book, too, what hidden meanings they found, what they took away from the story. Funny thing is, they never find what I put in there. That's okay. They found something that mattered to THEM, that changed the world for THEM. So I did my job. If you want to send a message, buy an ad. If you want to create resonance, you work your theme in. If you want to have people love your book and treasure it for what it meant to them, you bury that theme so deeply only you will ever know what it was. Here's how. 1) Figure out the key elements of your theme. I wrote one book the theme of which was "if the Democrats and Republicans don't recognize each other isn't the enemy and start working together toward a common cause, real enemies are going to destroy the country while those morons are bickering over pork and entitlements." The key elements of that theme were: * People who had more in common than they knew fighting over trivialities * Enemies disguised as friends bearing gifts

2) Plan your hiding place. That book was not set in this time, in the US, or even in this world. It was a high fantasy novel set in another world, on an island nation about the size of England and about the location of Australia with the climate of Alaska through the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the US. The cultures were Iron Age plus highly developed magic, with levels of sophistication ranging from 18th-Century France to the nomadic hunter-gatherer-herdsmen of the Mongol Horde. So figure out YOUR disguise. Your most meaningful themes are always going to be drawn from the here and now, from the events in your life that trouble you and frighten you and elate you---but those themes go into Westerns and SF and fantasy and mysteries and romances and hard-boiled detective tales and mainstream novels set in every possible time and place. 3) Create your metaphors. In that novel, the Democrats became one nation, the Republicans the other. I made a point of locating the good and the bad in both parties, and giving the two nations those good and bad characteristics. I created the real villains from current events, too, (though not from obvious current events), and worked out a complex metaphor for them, too, creating their culture from elements of a handful of different cultures. My two protagonists were from warring nations, magic was the physics of the world, and the villain was disguised as a good guy for the first half of the novel. 4) Never even hint at what you're talking about underneath it all. I didn't then write a story about how the politics of the warring nations and the outside world clashed. I didn't give a little nudge, nudge, wink, wink and call my nations Demos and Republis. I spent time developing deep cultures built not around my particular axe to grind, but around the needs of the story. And then I built three characters, one from each of the three cultures. And the story I wrote was a love story set against the backdrop of war and peace. I wrote about the characters, I didn't confine them to my metaphors, I didn't try to push any points or convince anyone of anything. I let my folks become who they were, good points and bad, and I told the story of their lives in that world, that place, and that time---and because I knew what underlay it, it meant a lot to me. And because SOMETHING underlay it, it meant a lot to a whole lot of readers. With the possible exception of its sequel, it was the best book I've ever written. That story remains a favorite for my readers, too---even though what they take from it is sometimes the exact opposite of what I put into it. They have found their own meaning in it, have felt the resonance of it being about something bigger than the story on the surface, and have taken it to heart. And if you're a novelist, that is what you want them to do. (If you're still hung up on requiring that they get YOUR meaning from your book, you're in the wrong line of work.)

In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part IV, Playing Chicken With Your Story, you'll learn how to take the personal risks in writing that will keep your readers glued to their seats turning pages.

About the Author Full-time novelist Holly Lisle has published more than thirty novels with major publishers. Her next novel,

THE RUBY KEY, (Orchard Books) will be on shelves May 1st. You can receive her free writing newsletter, Holly Lisle's Writing Updates at http://hollylisle.com/newsletter.html

Playing Chicken With Your Story

By Holly Lisle

Part IV of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series And now we come to the hard bit. You've got your theme, and you've figured out how to bury it so that it's there for you, and SOMETHING meaningful is there for your reader. You've let go of the temptation to write a message book---always difficult---and have embraced telling your story for the sake of the story. So you start to write. And you find yourself pulling back every time you get close to putting something on the page that might be controversial, that might offend someone, that might tick off a reader. You're trying to write for everyone, and in doing this, you're going to end up writing for no one. You're killing the passion you feel for the story, the life it might have, the resonance you could bring to it, out of your fear. You are systematically ripping out the soul of your book. Here are three things I've learned and that you'll need to make a part of your writing if you're going to keep your story alive. 1) You cannot write for everyone, and you must not try to. It is impossible to have the whole world as your audience, and it is impossible to have everyone love you. In fact, on about a one-to-one ratio, the more people you have who passionately love your work, the more people there will be who passionately hate it. Some of these readers---on both ends of the spectrum---will then go on to transfer their feelings about your work to you. This is part of the gig. You can, therefore, either strive to write the books that will stir the passions of readers, and give some of them stories that will move them and change them and bring wonder and joy and hope to their lives...or you can gut your work of all feeling, all life, all rage and fury and glory, in the hopes that the pitiful rag you're left with will gain the admiration of the PC people, who live to have their feelings hurt. Of the two, I'd rather have my audience among the people who are not offended by strong opinions and who are not afraid to have their own. So I'll shoot for writing books people can love, accepting that this means I'll have plenty of detractors, too. 2) If you do not have an opinion, you do not have a story. Here's one for you. "All men are potential rapists." Have you ever heard anyone say that? Here's a secret. Every person who has ever said that is an idiot. A small percentage of men, and a small percentage of women, are potential rapists, and a smaller percentage of each are actual rapists, and the rest are people who have morals and ethics and who would not, under any circumstances, rape anyone. That's an opinion, and you could write a good, powerful story by burying that opinion as a theme or a subtheme in your novel. It will give you heroes and villains, forward momentum, great conflict, struggles to prove innocence or guilt, moments of defeat and moments of triumph. It will give you something to care about, a reason to keep writing, and a reason for your reader to keep reading. The outcome will matter, because one side is right, and one side is wrong.

If you do not have an opinion, though, you do not have a story. The 'no opinion' stance means your hero will be no better (and no worse) than your villain---in fact, you'll have to slide to the weaker position of having a protagonist and an antagonist, and even then, neither you nor your reader can really like one better than the other. Nobody is good, nobody is evil, everyone is just misunderstood. 'No opinion' means that it doesn't matter whether someone wins in your story, or someone loses, because neither option is right, and neither option is wrong. You're stuck with the ultimately boring, helpless stance of having Fate decree one outcome over another, and having the reader not really care anyway. If you do not have an opinion that can carry the story forward, all you'll have is a long, tedious vignette in which nothing that matters happens, simply because nothing matters. 3) Every once in a while, people need to be offended. Yes. I said it. Being offended can be good for the mind and the soul. It forces you to think. People who are easily offended are people who do not want to think, who do not have the courage of their convictions, who want to be fed pablum and sheltered from the hot spices of real life and real opinion and outcomes that matter. 'Don't offend me' is the whine of the coward who does not want to have to judge issues on their merits (what, you want me to pick sides? Why can't everybody be right?) and does not want anyone else to, either. Well, everybody can't be right. Some people, some issues, some positions, are just flat-out wrong. Pretending otherwise does not change that truth. This is life. Issues have real merits. Thought is necessary for survival. If you fight your way through to opinions that you have earned by judging issues on their merits, you will be able to write stories with real kick. And even though you're going to be burying those opinions in metaphor, the strength of your passion and the richness of your story's stakes will be able to wake up a few sleepers who have been following along through life, not challenging themselves, because no one ever challenged them first. Dare to have the courage of your convictions. Dare to think hard, to earn your opinions, and then to write them into your work. Dare to write stories worth telling. Dare to pick sides, dare to write your truth. Dare to be meaningful. The book you save will be your own. In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part V, Dig Deeper With Your Novel's Subthemes, you'll find out three ways to bring in more of your passions and fears, and use them to make your story richer, and add layers of surprise and meaning.

About the Author Full-time novelist Holly Lisle has published more than thirty novels with major publishers. Her next novel, THE RUBY KEY, (Orchard Books) will be on shelves May 1st. You can receive her free writing newsletter, Holly Lisle's Writing Updates at http://hollylisle.com/newsletter.html

Dig Deeper With Your Novel's Subthemes

By Holly Lisle

Part V of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series By now, you have a solid grasp of the importance of having a theme for your story, of keeping it personal and hidden (to avoid writing the dreaded Message Book), and of hanging on to the courage of your convictions in writing it the way you need to, knowing that you cannot ever please everyone, nor should you try. That's a good, solid foundation for writing a book that people will read, and then re-read, and then recommend to friends, and finally buy as presents for people they really like. Which is, after all, the writer's ultimate goal---to write a story readers love so much they'll share it with other people who will love it, too. But you can still go deeper, and make the work richer and more compelling, by layering in subthemes. [Brakes screech, and someone mutters, "Wait a minute. You finally sold me on themes. But SUBthemes? C'mon, already."] Subthemes are one of the best friends novelists have. (They're far less useful for folks who write short stories, simply because subthemes add to the length and complexity of the story.) Subthemes do three massively useful things for the writer crafting a novel---things a single theme alone cannot do. 1) They force the world of the story into three dimensions. If the book is focused on one theme---no matter how fascinating and wonderful that theme---and all the characters are focused on that one issue, and all the action revolves around that one issue, then, no matter how skilled the writer may be, the book will feel thin. Step beyond the borders of the main action, and no character has anything to do, or say, or think, or any reason to exist. Their lives are bordered by the main theme. By adding subthemes, you fill out your characters' lives with needs and events that are important to them outside of and separate from the main story's focus. 2) Subthemes add length and complexity. (I mentioned this above in the negative sense, but that which is the bane of the short story writer is in this case the boon of the novelist.) I receive the following question at least once a week from beginning and intermediate writers---"How do I make my story longer without padding it (and without trying to figure out more plot, because I'm out of ideas)?" Subthemes by their very nature give you something extra to work into your plot---the unexpected pregnancy of the heroine adding complications while she is running for her life; the villain who in the midst of working mayhem discovers the mother he truly loves is dying; the harassment of the main character by the practical joker at work whose stupid jokes later become mixed up in the life or death issues already besieging the hero. 3) Subthemes allow you an extra opportunity to...um, for lack of a better word...vent. And get something good out of the bad things that have happened in your life. This is admittedly a strange side benefit, but just about every writer I know has SOME issue that repeatedly makes its way into his (or her) novels. The trick, always, is to keep YOUR issue out of the book, and make the issue really and truly related to the character, with different events and a different resolution.

So where do you find your subthemes? 1) Pick a subtheme that is distantly related to the issue driving your novel. If your theme is "Why do bad things happen to good people?", and your story is about a father who comes to terms with the lingering death of his oldest kid after the boy contracts some terrible disease, a related theme would be how the father finds ways to bring happiness to the kid's life (and his own) for whatever time they have left. Or how the kid makes a friend in the middle of his personal tragedy, or learns to do something he's always wanted to do. Or how the father makes one thing his son has always wanted come true for him.(Man, this would be a grim book.) 2) Pick an unrelated issue, and give it, in disguised form, to primary or secondary characters. Using the example above, an unrelated issue that could become a theme would be how the father hangs on to a job when he's both the sole provider (say the kid's mother died, or just left) and his kid's sole source of care and support; or how the kid sets out to win the science fair before he dies, and wins the respect of a teacher he previously hated. 3) Pick some train wreck in your personal life, THOROUGHLY disguise it, give it to people totally unlike the people who were involved in YOUR train wreck, change names, locales, and events... And then work though it the way you should have, or wish you could have, the first time. Using this method, the father could be going through your horrible divorce, but HE could find the good ending you didn't get. Or he could give up his fantastic career as a professional poker player to be with his son, and could find something good from that loss, rather than the constant regret you have from a similar situation. In every case, your priorities in using subthemes are to: * give yourself more story than what you'd get if you only focused on your theme, * give your reader something extra, and different, to take away from the book. You and your story will benefit in more ways than you can imagine. In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part VI, Interweaving Your Novel's Themes And Subthemes, you'll learn three of my favorite techniques for balancing themes and subthemes while writing your novel.

Interweave Your Novel's Themes and Subthemes

By Holly Lisle

Part VI of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series When you're writing a book, you want every page to drag the reader to the next one, even if she's late for work, even if it's two o'clock in the morning and he needs to be up at six, even if the plane has landed and your weary traveller really must get bags in hand and get off the plane. You want what you're writing to be compelling. Enthralling. Un-put-down-able. And that's where the themes and subthemes we've been working on come together. First we'll put together an example where our main theme of rage against misused power, by now well disguised, becomes the story of a heroine who has been wrongfully accused of murder and must prove her innocence. We'll have a subtheme of unhappy divorce, wherein the heroine's two children are being told by her ex what a horrible person she is. We could do an enormous number of things with these two storylines, and I know dozens of ways to meld themes and subthemes together and use them to play off of each other, but I'll give you my three favorite techniques here. THE BLENDED SCENE Start with the heroine discovering the body of a stranger in her basement. Since she and her husband split up, there hasn't been anyone down there but her and the two kids, who are five and eight years old. She carries a load of laundry down the stairs, trips over the the body, scatters laundry everywhere, and goes racing up the steps to call the police, just as her ex arrives to pick up the kids for the weekend. She's frantic, her husband first thinks she's joking, then thinks she's hysterical, and finally goes into the basement and comes out as she's calling the cops. He's not sympathetic---he wonders what's going on in that house since he left, what sort of atmosphere she's raising his kids in, and when the cops arrive, he gives a statement, then hustles the kids out of there fast, wondering aloud if she's had men in the place while his children were there. Locate the characters---other than the main character---who are involved in the theme and those involved in the subtheme. In this case, those characters are the police (theme), and the ex-husband and kids (subtheme). Decide how to create ties between theme and subtheme--in this case, the husband ties the police into his vision of his ex-wife as a bad mother by suggesting she's been entertaining strangers in the house with his kids present. The police, meanwhile, will tie the husband into the story as another suspect. Get elements of both theme and subtheme into one scene. THE INTERCUT Now we're going to play with time and space. We'll write alternating four alternating scenes, two from the point of view (POV) of our heroine, and two from the POV of her ex. In each scene, we'll work either the theme or the subtheme, but not both. First, we have the heroine being questioned at the kitchen table, denying any knowledge of the man in the basement or how he got there, honestly describing over and over how she found the body, and then we have a forensics guy telling the cop in the background that the man had a note in his pocket signed by someone with the same name as the woman, and they're going to need pre-existing handwriting samples.

Next, to the father driving the kids home, who's asking his kids who comes over to the house when they're there with mommy, and the kids saying no one, and the father asking if mommy told them to say that. Third, back to the heroine, who is asked to go to the police station, and who is seated in an interrogation room, where, as soon as she's left alone, she gets up and starts pacing, trying to work through where the man could have gotten a note from her, who he might have been, how he ended up in her basement, why he was dead, and who was responsible for his death. And back to the father, who gets the kids to admit that, once they're in bed, they don't know if anyone comes over, and yes, mommy does have music on sometimes, and maybe someone could have been there, and while they're at school, they don't know what she does. Except for laundry. They're very firm that she does lots of laundry. With intercuts, you want to show facets of who each character is, and how they're acting toward their own ends, whether those are good or bad. You have to create change, but you are only creating change toward the specific theme you're working on (at least visibly). The police don't ask the heroine about her ex, they don't visibly pursue interest in the ex. They want to know about her. Meanwhile, the father doesn't mention or worry about the police. His focus is on his kids, and on finding out what's going on over at their mother's house. THE CLIFFHANGER Finally, we're going to bring both of these themes into play again, as we have a scene involving the forensics folks. They've found a picture of both kids and the mother in the dead man's pocket, and the picture is signed on the back, "Love, Lisa" (the heroine's name). The signature matches the one on the note that was in his pocket. It's not proof she was involved with him, but it certainly doesn't look good for her. They call the police out of the interrogation room and let them know what they've found. The police go back into the room and ask her why the dead man had a picture of her and her kids in his pocket, signed by her, and she panics and starts crying, and can't---or won't---answer the question. And that's where you leave that scene. The reader is forced to consider the possibility that the heroine might have been lying, that she might know the dead man, that she might even have killed him. The reader could also suspect the husband, who could have had possession of notes and pictures signed the way these have been. But if the scene closes with the heroine in deep trouble, panicked, and not talking, the reader will have a strong incentive to keep reading to find out what happens next. Use elements of both theme and subtheme in your cliffhanger (the mother and her connection to the dead man, and HIS possible connection to her and her kids) Leave either the most important character of the theme OR the subtheme in desperate straits (in this case, the main character of the theme is in trouble...you can save trouble for the ex in a later part of the story). Pick up the next scene with a character from one of your subthemes, and gradually work your way back to the character who was dangling over the cliff. By carefully using blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers, you can weave your theme and subthemes together in ways so exciting and compelling your reader will stay up late, miss his stop, be late for work. Cruel, yes, but it's the sort of cruelty readers will thank you for. Next time, in BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part VII, Planning A Heart-Stopping Story, you'll learn how to outline the bones of your story using theme and subthemes to keep things moving.