The Book Tree

[Merlini]

Writing a book has no special formula or checklist for you to follow. Writing a book is something that you, the author, do all yourself. If you’ve ever tried looking for advice on writing a book, you’ll come across some useful information for the first several weeks, but then it will start repeating itself, the reason being that no one has figured out how to write a book. The advice you will find is the little that people do know about writing a book. The rest is for you to discover.

I would like to offer some advice if you should like to listen, advice that you can either heed or ignore, whichever you so choose. I do not know if this advice is helpful or not, for up until now, no one has heard it, save for myself, and thus you take my advice at your own risk.

I suggest to you to take a good, long look at the tree digram below before you continue, for everything past this point rests on what lies within the tree.

*Book
┌───────┴───────┐
Writing Story
┌─────┼─────┐ ┌─────┼─────┐
Pace Language Voice Plot Characters Setting
└─────┼─────┘ └─────┼─────┘
Style Premise

*The diagram didn't paste well into the forums and I can't figure out how to get it right. Use your imagination and imaginaringly move the words over so that they all fit under a line, the leftmost word under the leftmost line, and so forth.

As you can see, the words within the tree are writing terminology. These are perhaps some of the most important aspects of the flash fiction, the short story, the novella, and eventually, the book. Learn the words. Learn what they mean. Learn to identify them in books. Don’t, on any account, forget them. These words are key to writing successfully.

Let me clear up some confusion here by explaining this tree. This tree shows the path to successful book writing. As you will notice, Book is at the top, showing that it is the finished product. Below it, you have two sections, Writing and Story. These are the two main elements of the Book, thus why they are just below book in the tree. In the Writing section, you have three subsections, Pace, Language, and Voice, which relate to Writing in the same way that Writing and Story relate to Book. The Story section has a similar setup, with Plot, Characters, and Setting. Below the subsections, you have one more level, where all three subsections stem from. The Writing section of the tree stems from Style, and Story stems from Premise.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the tree, I will continue with my advice, which is an understanding of what each words represents in a book and how it contributes to the whole of the book.

I will start with the simpler section of the tree, Story, starting at the base, Premise. Premise. Just what is it anyhow? Is it the hook on which you hang your story? No, that’s the twist. Premise is the very basic idea of the story in one sentence. It is the very beginning of a story, the cornerstone of the building. Without premise, no story can survive. Essentially, premise is the fiction variant of the thesis. Premise is what your entire story builds on, much in the same way that a nonfiction persuasive paper builds upon its thesis.

Let me give you a premise and see if you could guess the story from the sentence shall we? A young boy survives a normally fatal attack on him as a baby and is famous for surving the attack. That is a premise, and only twenty words. This is the premise of the Harry Potter series. Each book does have its own premise, yes, but it is this premise that ties all the books together other than recurring characters. Premise is the starting point of every story, no matter how large or small, and thus is on the bottom of the tree. Without Premise, the tree would topple over to the right, and the book should cease to exist.

From Premise the three subsections emerge, Plot, Characters, and Setting. Going from left to right on the tree, I’ll begin with Plot. Plot is one of the simplest and most well known parts of a story, taught early in elementary. Yet, plot is much more than just that diagram they showed you in third grade that was basically a straight line with a bump in the middle. Plot is far more involved. Plot is the events of your story, the chain reaction of one domino hitting the next until the final domino falls in the climax.

In the simplest terms, plot can be described as a deviation of chess. In chess, each person moves a piece, and then the games moves to the next person. The variancy in this particular game of chess is that there are third person actions, that neither party controls. This is plot. Both the protagonist and the antagonist parties make moves to try to ultimately achieve their own goals, but their struggle with one another is made more difficult by the circumstances of the world outside their fight. Plot is not something that can be forgotten in a story. Without plot, the story is simply several actions performed by either party, no one’s action affecting the other’s.

Moving on, let’s now explore Characters. These are the people of your story who advance the plot for their own purposes and reasons. I cannot say how much characters matter. Many novice authors will merely use characters as pawns to tell the story, when in reality, they are much more.

To illustrate my point, I will use a short dialogue sequence between two characters, both protagonists.

“Come on George! We must get to the mountain before Dr. Kevin reaches it!”

“Go on without me! I’m too weak Mark!”

“No! I won’t leave you! I’ll carry you on my back if I have too!”

“By then it will be too late Mark!”

“I won’t leave my friends behind George, no matter the cost!”

Obviously, this is something off the top of my head, but if it were in a story with context, you could tell that George is hurt, and that they are racing the antagonist Dr. Kevin to the mountain before he presumably does something evil. What’s wrong with these characters is that they have plenty of emotion, but what’s their motive? The author is simply using them to advance the plot, not taking into account how the characters’ personalities and goals will affect the outcome of the story. This is not something to be seen in a published book.

I gave you a bad example of characters, but now I have rewritten that sequence so that it works. Pay close attention to what has changed and what hasn’t.

“Come on George! We must get to the mountain before Dr. Kevin reaches it!”

“Go on without me! I’ll only slow you down, you must stop Dr. Kevin before it’s too late Mark!”

“No, George! I lost my entire family to Dr. Kevin, and I’m not going to lose anyone else to him! I’ll carry you on my back up the moutain if I have too!”

“By then it will be too late Mark!”

“I won’t leave my friends behind George, no matter the cost! You’re the only family I have left, and I won’t let you go!”

Alright, so that’s better isn’t it? Now we know George’s motivation to stay behind is to stop Dr. Kevin, and that Mark’s motivation to save himself from the pain of losing someone to Dr. Kevin. This version of the dialogue also made the characters more realistic, adding the quality of loyalty to Mark and showing George values others lives above his own.

I think I’ve spent enough time on Characters, so let’s move on to the last subsection of Story: Setting. Setting is where the story takes place, or more accurately, the places the story takes place. Setting does not just involve the physical surroundings, though that will play a big part of it, particularly in battle and spy scenes. Setting is also the time period ,the world that the story takes place in, and the characters’ places in the world. For example, had Harry Potter been raised in the wizarding world, the series would have differed greatly. He would have been no stranger to magic, the Dursleys would be completely eliminated, and he would grow up living in fame. All of these would have changed the setting of the story, as Harry’s environment would have been much different.

Some authors create completely new worlds for their settings, particularly in fantasy. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is a great example of this, as Tolkien spent his entire life working on developing Middle-Earth and its history. Middle-Earth is a rich setting, full of stories of all the natural races, set in a time period that is forever the equivalent of medieval times. A simple setting, but a great one that was greatened by the diversity of the peoples of Middle-Earth.

Combining the three subsections of the tree, Plot, Characters, and Setting, we will get Story. There are other things that you can throw in, but these are the three most important things in Story.

When it comes to Writing, it’s a little bit more difficult. At this stage, you may or may not be thinking “Writing? Why do I need to know how to write for a book? I can simply say what I want to say and it’ll work.” Sadly, that is not so. You could have the greatest story in the history of great stories but if you don’t write well, it won’t sell well. However, you could have the most suckish story ever written, but if you write eloquently, then it will sell, though not very well because of the story. Writing is important. Writing is how you tell your story. The better you tell it, the more that people will want to read it. I will tell you a short scene in two versions, both written differently, and then I will explain the differences and how writing will make a difference in your book.

Version 1: Marvin looked around. He saw a volcano. The volcano exploded. Marvin ran.

Version 2: Marvin looked around at the peaceful landscape. The trees were swaying gently in the breeze, back and forth, back and forth, much like a cradle. The birds weren’t singing, lying silently in their nests. All at the foot of a volcano, Marvin could not imagine anything being more peaceful than this tranquility.
Marvin heard a deep rumble all around him. Marvin couldn’t pinpoint the noise. Then he realized with a start that the volcano was erupting. Adrenaline coursing through his system, Marvin sprinted away from the volcano, hoping illogically that he could outrun the explosion.

Which version is better? I think the unanimous answer is Version 2, which has much better description and details, telling how Marvin felt during the eruption, along with before and during the eruption. Clearly, writing matters.

Style is how you tell your book. A story can be told a million and one different ways, many of which work, many of which don’t. Your style of writing is how you tell your story and how you write. It is largely subconscious, driving itself, and eventually, you will develop style. It’s like speaking a foreign language: at first you speak very formally, but as you get comfortable with speaking it, you start to speak it differently, to use a specific style when you speak it. From style, the important factors of the writing of a book arise.

Pacing is very important in a book, not so much in shorter stories. Pacing is how fast you tell your story and how much time you spend on each item in the book. Some authors, like Tolkien, have a really slow pacing, taking time to describe in detail, where as others, like Dan Brown, have a really fast pacing, describing as the story moves along. In the above short story of the volcano eruption, Version 1 is faster paced, telling the same things in less than half the time. However, Version 1 is also the less interesting of the two. You also do not want to have a very slow pacing, taking time out of the story to describe. You want a nice middle-ground when writing, and depending on your audience you may want to adjust your pacing to their comfort.

Language is referencing what words you use to tell the story. You don’t want to use words that no one knows, but you also don’t want overly simple writing, as that is no fun to read. Again, you want a nice middle-ground, a place where you have a good, expressive use of words that can be clearly understood. Much of the time, words will come to you as your writing, though it has always been a good idea to have a thesaurus close at hand just in case you need a better word.

Voice is the trickiest part of writing. It is something that can simply be taught. It is developed by writing and writing and writing and more writing. The more you write, the more you develop a certain voice, a way that readers can recognize your writing by the way you speak through words to them. Very similar to style, voice is easily accomplished. The only way to put voice into a story is to write it.

If you’ve read this far, then you will recall that at the beginning, I would give you some advice. My advice is to follow the book tree, understand it and comprehend it. It shows the delicate balance of the book; if any word is missing, then there is too much weight on one side and the tree as a whole cannot stand. The two stems evolve into six subsections, which all make up the two sections, and the two sections become a book, the ultimate project for the writer. I can think of no simpler way to say how to write a book. This article is my advice to you aspiring authors out there, and even to you published authors out there as well, because no matter how good we are, there is always someone better. Now it’s your turn to be that someone better.