Architecture Of the Novel: A Writer's Handbook [Paperback]

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Reviewed by C J Singh (Berkeley, California,USA)

Basically, there are two different approaches to generating the preliminary draft of a novel: Top Down and Bottom Up.

The top-down approach begins with a one-sentence statement of what the novel is about; expanding the sentence to a paragraph that describes the major events and the end; sketching each of the major characters; listing the scenes; and synopsizing in a 1000-word or longer essay. All of these steps must be completed before beginning to write the first draft. This is the approach urged in numerous fiction-craft books by authors who themselves write novels in genres such as mystery and thriller: The Weekend Novelist by Robert J Ray; and How to Write a Damn Good Thriller: A Step-by-Step Guide for Novelists and Screenwriters by James N Frey. (See my amazon reviews of these two books.)

Craft books by novelists who write in the literary genre are far fewer. The defining emphasis of this genre is character-and-language driven story, for which the bottom-up approach often works better. It calls for beginning with characters in a scene fragment; developing the fragment into a full scene; and then growing the scene into a sequence of scenes. In ARCHITECTURE OF THE NOVEL: A WRITER'S HANDBOOK, Jane Vandenburgh warns: "All of the other how-to books will programmatically fail you [she does not use the terms top-down or bottom-up]: The rules regarding the construction of our books are, of necessity, wrong for you because your book is individual.. . . A narrative design emerges in one way only, and this is in tandem with its use. We call this architecture, in which structure is shaped to fit its purpose and its use. To the degree this architecture is successful, we find the shape and its narrative beautiful" (pages 11-12). Strident tone, but she's right. Many literary writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Anne Lamott loathe synopsizing in advance and look forward to being surprised by the twists and turns that emerge in the process of drafting.

In the foreword, Anne Lamott extols: "'Architecture of the Novel' is a book after my own heart, rich in paradoxes and yet wonderfully plain, with an insistence on structure and discipline. It is also a call to freedom. . . . On how to listen as the story and its characters reveal themselves to us, how to soar as a novelist while keeping simple and real, almost make me want to write another novel." Vandenburgh cites Lamott'sBird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life -- in particular her widely anthologized essay on writing the first draft. The explicit adjective Lamott uses to characterize a typical first draft was censored in this review by Amazon as a profanity. Vandenburgh merrily uses the allegedly profane phrase and bestows on it the initialism SFD. To support her approach, she cites from other novel-craft books such as E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel and James Wood's How Fiction Works.

The second half of the book comprises a glossary of "evolving definitions of the tools and concepts I've found useful and necessary in thinking about the longer narrative" (p 165). For example: "Fractal Nature of the Narrative: A story resembles a mountain in its regular irregularity. A story grows by its own similarly shaped increments: These are its episodes. This is to say it will have the feeling of evolving rather than of being manufactured -- that of the conch shell or leaf rather than of the car being mass-produced on the assembly line" (p 243).

In the capacious glossary, Vandenburgh includes examples from recent films like "Slumdog Millionaire" (p 176) and James Cameron's "Avatar" (p 250). Drawing on the latter film, Vandenburgh presents an update on the "show, don't tell" mantra: "We strive always, as novelists, to write in a manner that allows our readers to enter the scene. We want the narrator equivalent of the IMAX 3D experience, an enhanced sense of depth that the technology provides by what the film director James Cameron calls depth cues....What is successfully rendered in good 3-D film is the sense that -- as viewer -- we haptically occupy the time and place, as a physical space, in which the narrative is occurring" (p 214).

How about combining elements of top-down and bottom-up approaches? Two recent novel-craft books that do so: The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass and Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months by John Dufresne. (See my reviews of these two books on amazon.com)

ARCHITECTURE OF THE NOVEL: A WRITER'S HANDBOOK presents a bottom-up paradigm for generating, organically, the first draft of a literary novel. Highly recommended -- especially for MFA programs.
-- C. J. Singh

There are some good observations about writing here, but the presentation is rather disjointed--Vandenburgh admits to having trouble organizing her thoughts in the acknowledgements, and it shows. She goes about drafting novels in a very free-form, unstructured way (nothing wrong with that!), but I think this approach works against her in a non-fiction book about writing. My biggest barrier to gleaning information from this book is the fact that nearly half of it is an extended encyclopedia of writing terms. There are some standards here, like "conflict", "empathy", and "evil", but also invented terms and phrases I wouldn't have known to look up, such as "the way we name a river" (under W) and "your story's needs" (under Y). This forces you to read the encyclopedia chronologically--I noticed terms are re-referenced only in later sections, which seems to confirm my decision to read this way--and yet, reading an encyclopedia like this can be downright dull. There are some great little gems hidden in here (I liked "revelation" and "fairy tale"), but I found it hard to retain the disjointed, alphabetical list. Some definitions are lengthy, spreading over multiple paragraphs or pages, while others are overly vague and much too short. I think it would be more beneficial to read the books referenced here instead: Wood's "How Fiction Works", Lamott's "Bird by Bird", King's "On Writing", Forrester's "Aspects of the Novel".

I started this book three times...and each time I couldn't plough my way through more than 40% of it. A free-form writing style may work for a novel, but it was too disorganised for a teaching text. Others may find it useful, as there were some interesting points made but this is a book that just doesn't "talk" to me, despite my best efforts to glean what I could from the author's experience.

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