Love Just Ain’t Enough, Part I
The Aspects You Need for a Novel
Everybody is writing a novel, or has written one, or is thinking about writing one. This is a truth universally acknowledged. If you work in publishing you know this, because the automatic response to speaking aloud “I work in publishing” is that the person you are speaking with will tell you they are writing a novel. Even if you work in publishing medical journals, or textbooks, or magazines, and not novels. That doesn’t matter. Presumably, you know where the printing press is and that’s what matters.
Usually the printing press is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Now you know the secret, too.
It is warming up outside, which means it’s the time of year when work is crazy and the Shelf Lifes will be as short and sweet and concise as I can make them because I am low on sleep and I have 12,000 scientific abstracts to look at before May 31. Which, if that sounds like a lot of scientific abstracts, it is. I hope you like short and snarky writing because it’s the only kind we have.
Today’s Shelf Life and Thursday’s companion are on the seven aspects of the novel according to EM Forster’s aptly named book, The Aspects of the Novel. You can find The Aspects of the Novel free to read at Project Gutenberg, as it joined the public domain a few years ago. If you care to read it but you don’t like stuff that’s free, you can also get yourself a nice annotated version. Anyway, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to write a novel.
Or a memoir.
A word to the memoir-writers: A memoir is not the same thing as an autobiography. A memoir is a dramatic, literary retelling of an event or series of events from your life—not a litany of all the events of your life. A good memoir will follow all the same principles outlined in this article as a novel does. The main difference is that it’s based in true events, as you recollect them, from your life. Memoir is not exempt from the rules of good storytelling.
The Aspects of the Novel is a book by EM Forster, published in 1927, and developed from the Clark Lectures he delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, that year on the universal elements of the novel in English. Forster felt that the extant definition of novel at the time—a work of prose too long to be poetry and too short to be a history—was not sufficient to capture what makes a novel a novel and so endeavored to define universal aspects that exist in all English novels. “The aspects selected for discussion are seven in number,” Forster writes. “The Story; People; The Plot; Fantasy; Prophecy; Pattern; and Rhythm.”
Everyone who wants to write a novel really ought to read The Aspects of the Novel—in fact, I probably should read it again—and I say this though I do not lightly recommend books by old dead white men. This one genuinely is worth reading. But for those who don’t have time for EM Forster but do have time for Shelf Life, I’ll go over the seven aspects this week as a kind of knockoff Cliff’s Notes version, with a particular eye toward how to make sure your novel handles these aspects.
Why are they important to consider when writing a novel? Because love is not enough, What I mean is: Just having an idea that you love is not enough to sustain a novel that people will want to read. You can’t build a worthwhile novel out of just one aspect—just a character you’ve developed thoroughly and love dearly; or just a series of connected events that tell the story (a plot).
Do you need these particular seven aspects to have a good novel, in the end? Not necessarily. Nobody put EM Forster in charge of judging what is a novel and what is not. There may be other formulae out there for a solid novel in English that you can follow—or intuitively weave into a story—to come up with a good novel. However: If you were to review Forster’s seven aspects and ensure your novel attends to all of them—allowing that you have the skill to interweave these aspects—you are pretty much guaranteed to wind up with a novel that hangs together and pleases readers.
We’ll tackle the easy three today: The story, the people, and the plot. I suspect everyone knows you can’t write a novel without these three things.
Story
“We shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling aspect.” Thus begins the first essay. Forster didn’t start with story for no reason—nor because it’s easiest, like I have—but because the story is that most fundamental aspect of the novel that story and novel are sometimes used interchangeably. Everyone knows you can’t have a novel without a story.
Forster spends a lot of time likening story to a tapeworm that wriggles throughout the novel, with the other pieces attached to it or attaching itself to the other pieces such that it’s hard to tell what is actually story and what is built upon story.
This is super gross, but on purpose: Because when you isolate the story from the other aspects of the novel, it’s actually—in Forster’s words—“unlovely and dull.” I’m not sure I’d call a tapeworm dull. A tapeworm is one of the most horrific creatures to slither the earth but whatever. Unlovely and dull, like a tapeworm. That’s the story.
Per Forster, story is defined as “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence—dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on.” A litany of this happened, and then that happened, and then the next thing happened, until the end.
For a lot of writers, I suspect story comes first. Here is a true . . . tale . . . from my writing group. We were comparing word counts after a writing session and they asked me how I was able to write so much so quickly and I said “Oh I’m not really writing anything good, I’m basically just writing down fictional things in the order they happen; like first we go here, then we do this, and so on. Then I go back and put everything else in on a later pass.”
What I am doing, with a fresh draft, is just writing down the story—and only the story—as quickly as I can. A litany of all the things that happen, without the finer elements of plot (the reasons that link events together) or characterization or any of that other stuff. If you want to write really fast, I recommend trying it. You won’t end up with a novel when you’re done. But you will end up with the gross and squirmy tapeworm center of a novel, the story. Which is something to celebrate (and also loathe).
People
“Having discussed the story—that simple and fundamental aspect of the novel—we can turn to a more interesting topic: the actors.”
You’re a person, I’m a person. Novelists are all people and readers are all people. It stands to reason, then, that novels should be filled with people since that’s how we can all relate to the novel. Sometimes a novel will be filled with characters who are not people: For instance, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which is populated with rats and mice, or Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, which stars a robot scavenging a post-human wasteland. But even when the actors in a novel are not strictly people, they are still imbued with the characteristics of people, because people are going to be their readers.
A lot of writers begin with a character or characters, and then go looking for something for those characters to do. I’m the opposite, as I said, I begin with story and then I usually figure out which characters I will need for that story. Many, many writers already have a very clear vision in mind of their main character before they start, with some inkling what that main character will do (save the world, find love, maybe both, et cetera).
Forster talks about the people in a story in terms of the five basic aspects of the human experience, which he catalogs as birth, food, sleep, love, and death. You are probably beginning to get the idea that Forster really liked distilling big experiences down into a small list of things. It’s telling that he distilled all of human life down into a shorter list of aspects than he distilled the novel.
Birth and death bookend every human’s experience, and Forster suggests understanding all characters as moving from birth, “an experience they forget” and toward death, an experience “they anticipate but cannot understand.” All characters are on that spectrum somewhere and all are moving in the same direction, with rare exceptions like TH White’s Merlin or Benjamin Button.
Within that human experience, Forster sees the three main drivers as
Food—metaphorically, “the keeping alive of an individual flame”
Sleep—metaphorically, “a world of which little is known and which seems to us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of this world, and partly a revelation.”
Love—not really metaphorical at all, love is the driver of many actions in many novels and requires no further explanation.
In other words, all characters, as they move along their trajectory from birth to death, are dramatically driven by the need to stay alive (fed, safe, sheltered, healthy); to see and learn the unknowable; and to find love.
If you’re stuck on a character who you need but whose motivations you don’t yet understand, try looking to those three things. You’ll almost certainly find their motivation.
Plot
Per Forster, “a plot is also a narrative of events”—like story, but the difference is—“the emphasis falling on causality.” The plot is the sequence of events when you have added causality to them. Where do you get this causality? From the characters.
As the characters move through the story, their humanness rubs off on the events and creates plot. The characters drive the story forward and react to its events. If a boat hits the Key Bridge and then the Key Bridge collapses, that’s a story. If a boat hits the Key Bridge in spite of its pilot’s heroic efforts to divert, and then the Key Bridge collapses and messes up everyone’s commute, that’s a plot.
Plot relies on two qualities in the reader: Intelligence and memory. Plot first requires the reader to notice and understand the things that are happening on the page (intelligence) and then requires the reader to remember those things (memory) so that they may link future events to earlier ones and draw corollaries (intelligence again).
The famous example used by Forster goes like this: “The king died and then the queen died”—this is a story, a sequence of events. “The king died and then the queen died from grief”—this is a plot, a sequence of events with causality added and the humanness of the characters infusing it. The queen died from grief over the king’s death. In order for a reader to follow this plot, they have to (1) notice that the king died; (2) remember that the king died; (3) notice that the queen died and why; and (4) draw that direct line from item (1) to item (3).
“The plot, then, is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect.” In a novel, events may be told to the reader out of sequence; or the reader may not, at first, be privy to all the causes and reasons for the events they see unfold on the page. (Watch Jackie Brown [1997] for a masterclass in hidden causality.) However, the novelist can reasonably rely on the reader to take note of facts as they read and store those for use later in the novel, as more of the story is revealed.
In other words, mash your story and characters together to get plot. Thanks, EM Forster.
The remaining four aspects of the novel are the less concrete, more ephemeral ones—Fantasy; Prophecy; Pattern; and Rhythm. I will get to those for Thursday, for anyone who hasn’t gone and read Aspects of the Novel by then.
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