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HomeArts/LeisureMeredith Sue Willis: Ten Strategies to Write a Novel

Meredith Sue Willis: Ten Strategies to Write a Novel

Author Meredith Sue Willis
Author Meredith Sue Willis

Meredith Sue Willis is an adjunct professor of creative writing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Born in West Virginia, she now commutes to New York from her home in New Jersey where she is also a writer-in-the-schools in both locations.

Meredith Sue Willis has won many prizes for her writing, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has participated in the Circuit Writers program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. Her writing about the Appalachian Region was the subject of the Fourteenth Annual Emory & Henry Literary Festival in Emory, Virginia, in 1995. She was also the featured writer in the Fall, 2006 issue of Appalachian Heritage.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIS9b5a9X9Q[/youtube]

Out of the Mountains, her book of Appalachian stories, has been nominated for a Weatherford Award, sponsored by the Appalachian Studies Association and Berea College.

The subject of her speech at Clarksville Writers’ Conference 2011 was from her book, Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel. Willis said, “My hope is that anything I say can be applied to the novel you have in your mind.”

She first listed the strategies, but admitted that in the short time allotted, she would be able to speak about only a few of them.

The strategies are as follows:

  1. Process and Product
  2. Start with the Senses
  3. Point of View
  4. Character Building
  5. Dialog and Scene
  6. Structure
  7. Ideas from Film
  8. Focusing on what novels do best
  9. Logistics
  10. Revise your world

Meredith Sue began teaching by saying that it is extremely different, the writing compared to the final product. “It’s hard times for getting publish. Fame, glory and fortune are not what you need as reasons for writing a novel. The process has to do something for you even if it is read by only a few friends. The reading public is very different now. Chaucer had only a few thousand readers at the most during his lifetime. Now J. K. Rowling had multimillions.”

Writing is not just spelling and grammar, she said. They are important but looking at these aspects is a different mindset from finding a story.

“People can make mistakes when they are writing,” Willis reminded her audience. “A well-known novelist found that she had a character with an 18-month pregnancy. Editing is important but it is not where you begin.”

“The process must be closer to play than work,” she admonished. “Drafting has to be a free thing calling on your unconscious with playfulness and experimentation. Play is the work of a child. It is important to their creating the world they live in. It is equally important to the novelist. Writing is serious but it must be creative and fun for the writer.”

One of the most important things to remember, she insisted, is not to criticize yourself initially. You must be a child at play when you are writing. Meredith Sue said that she knew of an instance where a relative died and left a person enough money to buy a year in which to write. The desk was set up but every time she started to type, the editor in her criticized her to the point she could not write.”

Willis said that you need to keep a record of interesting tidbits you hear from time to time so that some day they may come in handy when you are writing. For instance, she said that Scott County, Tennessee declared war on Germany before World War II and they have not settled this dispute. They also seceded from Tennessee and joined the Union. When her aunt, a resident there, was asked how she wanted to register to vote, she said, “Democrat.” She was told, “We don’t register Democrats.”

Meredith Sue visited her aunt in Scott County and was introduced to very prim and proper lady. Later she was told that the woman had shot her husband, “but she told him not to come through the door.”

Not everyone will welcome you as a novelist if you don’t present the correct credentials according to their standards, Willis recalled. She was working as a school teacher when she finally had her first novel accepted for publication. She was so excited that she would go up to strangers and tell them about her accomplishment. When she told two third-grade students from Dominican Republic, their response was, “That’s great? What is the name of it?” When Meredith Sue said it did not have a title yet, they said, “Then you really didn’t write a book!” because their idea of writing was to start with the title and move on!

Describing what she meant by “process and product” in Strategy One, Willis said that you first write five big scenes in your novel. This is called the Archipelago method of writing. She said to imagine five tips of a mountain range that were mostly out of the water of the ocean. These would be used by the Polynesian people to travel far out into the Pacific. They are like these five big scenes in your novel—and by writing them, you could have your first 100 pages. Then you could write the canoe trips to the archipelagos and complete your book.”

She reminded all writers that you must have excitement in your novel; if you think it’s boring, your readers will think it’s boring too!

In describing her second strategy, “start with the senses,” Willis said that you use something concrete, an object, a smell, a sight.

She then gave her audience the following exercise to write, “Describe an object that could be in the novel. It should be something you can pick up in your hands. Hold it. Feel the weight of it. Use touch and feel. Is it smooth? Does it have sharp edges? Explore it. What does it smell like? What sound would it make if you were to drop it or hit it with a bat? If it’s food, taste it.”

Meredith asked a couple of us to read aloud what we had written.

Sue Culverhouse reading what she wrote to the class

Here is the example I wrote and read to the class: “She held the gold-edged ecru rose bowl in her hand and marveled at its beauty. It was made of the finest porcelain and had a hand-painted “Limoges” on the bottom, indicating the region of France where the finest examples of china and porcelain were created. She knew that her grandmother had meant for her to own it even though she had had to murder her own sister in order to conceal it in her pink boudoir. No one else would ever know that this rose bowl had been burning in her soul since the day her sister Olivia had uttered the fateful words that led to her demise. When Iris realized that Olivia was planning to leave everything she owned to the Catholic Church instead of to her own flesh and blood, Iris had decided that Olivia would be foiled in her intent. Iris knew that she could not keep the house from being deeded to the church but she could remove every single antique that Olivia had stolen from her when their grandmother had died thirty years ago. Olivia, in Iris’s opinion, was nothing but a common, everyday thief, in spite of her reputation as being at the height of Christian charity.”

Meredith Sue said, “When you write about love-making, the scent of the other person must be part of the description. You need intimacy in the writing if you are not interested in writing pornography. The difference is pornography is that it focuses on the sex act by looking at it from a distance.”

In order to accomplish strategy four, character building, she advised, “Any time you’re having trouble with a character, pretend you are the person. Write in first person what the world looks like to that person.”

Dialogue and scene, strategy five, evolve into the novel itself. “The heart of the novel is not the chapter,” she insisted. “Novels are built of scenes.”

Novelists can be categorized into two groups, according to Willis’ thinking. “One group comes at the writing through characters; the other comes to the table with plot.”

In closing, she reminded the writers in her hearing that what novels do best it to present internal monologues with people’s thoughts, intimate senses, smells and textures. “Car scenes are best in the movies!”

 

Sue Freeman Culverhouse
Sue Freeman Culverhousehttp://culverhouseart.com/
Author of Tennessee Literary Luminaries: From Cormac McCarthy to Robert Penn Warren (The History Press, 2013) Sue Freeman Culverhouse has been a freelance writer for the past 36 years. Beginning in 1976, she published magazines articles in Americana, Historic Preservation, American Horticulturist, Flower and Garden, The Albemarle Magazine, and many others. Sue is the winner of two Virginia Press Awards in writing. She moved to Springfield, Tennessee in 2003 with her sculptor husband, Bill a retired attorney. Sue has one daughter,  Susan Leigh Miller who teaches poetry and creative writing at Rutgers University. Sue teaches music and writing at Watauga Elementary School in Ridgetop, Tennessee to approximately 500 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. She also publishes a literary magazine each year; all work in the magazine is written and illustrated by the students. Sue writes "Uncommon Sense," a column in the Robertson County Times, which also appears on Clarksville Online. She is the author of "Seven keys to a sucessful life", which is  available on amazon.com and pubishamerica.com; this is a self-help book for all ages.
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