“The Most Important Moment of Writing Your Novel"
--"Miss this and Writing Your Novel Becomes Instant Disaster”
The Essential Event in Writing Your Novel!
by Steve Manning
There is a moment in every novel that is the turning point, the one element that sets the whole book into motion. The reason for everything there is to follow. The reason for the plot the reason for the action, the reason for the obstacles you’ll find throughout the pages. It is usually the moment the mild mannered main character starts down the 400-page route to being a hero or heroine.
And every novel has to have one.
Let me give you a few examples.
In the great book (or series, depending on how you look at it) of Harry Potter, we find at the beginning that Harry is a pretty average boy of 11 years of age. True, he has a bit of a mysterious back ground and a rotten existence (his bedroom is the cupboard underneath the stairs) and he lives with a family that isn’t his own and, really, he wouldn’t want them to be.
But one day he gets a letter of admission from Hogwort’s, a school of wizardry. And from that moment on, nothing is the same.
Robinson Crusoe is a typical sailor until a storm comes up, wrecks his ship and he finds himself in the middle of a deserted island. Tom Hanks’ character did the same thing in the movie Castaway and James Clavell’s book, Shogun, uses the same event.
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Dan Brown’s character Robert Langdon, in The DaVinci Code, leads a typical professor’s life talking about symbols until an acquaintance dies in the Louvre and the police suspect Langdon of doing it.
In every novel an event occurs that causes an otherwise boring story to take a right turn of 90 degrees and head off for a wild and wooly ride.
But that event must take place and you’ve got to have a precise idea of what it is before you start writing your book. That event is the reason for everything else that follows. If you don’t have it, you simply don’t have a very exciting book. You’ve got a collection of boring diary entries from a collection of boring people.
Most writers put the event into the book. It usually makes for a great scene and you’ll often see it right up front so the reader is off and running on the first page. However, it could be several pages into the book.
But don’t put it too far back. Have you ever watched a movie and concluded in the first few minutes it was boring? That’s because the writer (or whoever was responsible) waited too long to put in the event. Remember, if you wait too long, you lose the agent or the publisher. You’ll never get to the reader.
The event, can, however, take place before the book even begins. In Melville’s Moby Dick Ahab had the obsession for the White Whale even before page one. In Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets are fighting before the first leotard appears on the stage.
Frankly, I think the authors missed out on a good scene, but who am I to second guess these masters. As long as the readers know what’s going on and why as quiclkly as possible.
The event can be anything. Someone kidnaps the protagonist’s sister (Romancing the Stone) or kills the protagonist’s wife (Death Wish) or just about anything you’d find on the front page of the newspaper, or the lead two stories on a nightly newscast. Anything. But it’s got to happen and the reader has to know why that event is setting everything off in the direction of that adventure.
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