Cutting Out the Clamor when Writing Your Novel

 Too many roads in a novel
can lead to chaos.

When you’re writing a novel, there are many ways that you’ve simply got to cut out the clamor in your life and focus on what’s important. You’ve got to turn off the radio, close your email program, close the door to pets, kids, and spouses, and even turn down invitations to parties once in a while. All of these are important ways to reduce the cacophony in the world and focus on your novel.

But what about the clamor in your novel?

Being in the thick of writing a novel is a very exciting time. In many ways, it feels like all the worthy thoughts you’ve had thus far in life, all the astute observations you’ve made or odd characters you’ve encountered, can now finally find the perfect outlet in your large, ambitious work. In the draft and note-taking stages of novel, it’s easy to use your novel as a kind of “drop box” or catchall for everything writerly you’ve been saving up.

The result is chaos and clamor.

If you throw everything but the kitchen sink at your novel, you’ll end up with a snarl of wires, a bird’s nest, an orchestra with everyone playing different songs at once. It won’t be pretty. But the urge to add simply everything — a murder plot, a complicated family, many flashbacks, multiple converging storylines, a political scandal — remains tempting.

After the jump: why we can’t resist the clamor — and how to cut it out.

I find myself in this situation these days; as I’m riding the T to and from work, for example, I’ll think idly about a half-dozen ideas or observations. Maybe one (if I’m lucky) will actually be relevant enough to go into the novel, but the urge to toss it all in is there. It stems, I believe, from two different problems, so I want to make sure to tackle them both. The problems are insecurity and egotism.

Insecurity

It seems odd to say that the same problem stems from two opposite causes, doesn’t it? But swinging too wildly to the left or right on the spectrum of ego can result in a chaotic, unfocused novel. On the one hand, insecurity makes us think no one would want to read our writing, particularly because it’s boring. We don’t trust the worth of the story we’ve created, so we throw in other stories, other amusements, other entertainments. The result is a kind of fawning, desperate bid for attention: look, I’ve got incestuous twins! And circus elephants! Please read me! To fight this problem, remember to take a breath, relax, and have a little more faith in yourself. Your story is valid; to make it shine, focus more on the main story, and less on throwing in entertainment. Your audience knows how to read; they will not get bored and forget.

Egotism

Oddly enough, many novels today suffer from the problem of clamor for a very different reason: the author’s egotism. Many fat tomes that have come out recently assume that we as readers will naturally hang on every word that comes out of a writer’s pen. This allows writers to include long post-modern digressions, yawn-inducing family histories, furious rants, or otherwise self-indulgent material that doesn’t serve the story. As an old-fashioned novel reader, I want story first, and the author’s identity and philosophical hang-ups second. I don’t really care for those novels that are more like author rants disguised as some form of performance art. At the same time, I know not just the heavy hitters of the writing world succumb to this; I, humble fledgling writer, still often write a scene knowing it’s a little dull or beside the point, but that I still want it in there for the heck of it.

To cut this kind of clamor out of the novel, I try to tell myself to take a healthy dose of humility and remember, once again, that readers read for story. They don’t read to be impressed by how smart I am or to wonder how many books I’ve read, based on all the other books I’m cleverly alluding to. They don’t want to be lectured to about my subject matter. They want to read, for goodness’ sakes, and my job as a writer is to deliver that immersive, delightful, surprising reading experience to them.