Sometimes it can be tough getting started on your new novel. I’m not talking about writer’s block—we all know about that. What I’m talking about is getting through the writing you need to get through to get to the writing that’s going to build itself up into something you’ll want to spend time with for months or, more likely, years. I don’t care for prompts—for me, they take me away from whatever it is that interests me and that makes me want to journey into they new world I'm creating. I’d rather just jump into the book I want to write and find my way from there. But I understand a lot of us find writing prompts helpful, and there’s clearly worth in prompts.
My “prompts,” however, come from something the author John Dufresne taught me, which is to take a character (any character, though likely one you create on the spot), thrust them into a setting/scene/conflict, and begin formulating the innumerable possibilities you can so as to get that character’s story moving forward. This is my process for how to kickstart the building blocks of your novel, andI figure the best way to show my process is by simply doing it. So, here’s an example—and this is an example that I’m going to start writing right now, without any previous prompt, setup, or even subject matter I have already written about or, for that matter, even thought about:
There’s a storm coming from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not quite a hurricane—yet. It’s just something that the de los Ríos family is keeping an eye on, you know, just in case the thing becomes a hurricane. They have the requisite storm shutters, the twenty gallons of water in the garage, the generator in case the power goes out. Enough canned food—veggies, potted meat, potatoes, tropical fruit salad, sliced peaches and, since they’re Hispanic, plenty of beans and rice (I’m Puerto Rican, so those things are staples in my house and so they’ll be staples in the de los Ríos’s house as well)—to last a couple weeks. Of course, everyone’s hoping nothing happens.
Now that I have a setting, I need some characters. Novels need a protagonist, a fully fleshed-out hero, and they need characters, unless it’s a solo journey, which isn’t what my story is about. My story is about a family in, say, Apalachicola, Florida, which is in the Florida Panhandle. I think that’s part of the “Redneck Riviera,” which is the nickname for the Emerald Coast. I’ll look that up later just to make sure—right now my focus is on writing; I’ll get the details of everything right once I have something down and I switch from writing over to editing.
Anyway, at home we have Carmen de los Ríos, the matriarch of the family. She’s eighty-two, spunky, can take a young person’s dirty joke (and has plenty of her own). She cooks every night for her daughter Kamila, whose name means “helper to the priest.” Maybe we’ll use that later somehow, but for now it’s just a name without significance. Kamila is fifty. She has three children, a girl and two boys, from two different men—Bonifacio, whose name means “one who does good deeds,” and who is Cuban, and two boys from her first love, Ahiram, an Israeli who moved with his parents to Apalachicola when he was sixteen so that he wouldn’t have to join the army (Ahiram’s brother was killed at age nineteen and Ahiram’s desire to avenge his brother’s death by joining up was a little more than his family could handle). Of course, we have the three children in the house as well. We’ll come up with their names later. For now, we know the boys are older—twenty and twenty-three. The girl came later because Bonifacio, contrary to his name, and who seems to do the exact opposite of good deeds, wanted a child when he and Kamila were together. She’s ten and only sees her father on Liberation Day, or Día de la Liberación, the day of the victory of the revolution led by Fidel Castro. Why that day? Maybe it’s meant to be a dig at Kamila for dumping him; maybe there’s some other reason. No biggie—that’s something else we’ll figure out later as well. We can play with names, with holidays, with whatever we want—the world is our oyster because we’re creating that world as we pull it from our imaginations and put it down on paper. The object here is to write. To discover our world. Our characters. The things they want. The things in their way. We aren’t looking for perfection.
“You know that every story is a failure. But you also know the writer is the one who has not stopped or is even fazed by failure—and that makes you fearless.”
--John Dufresne
From his 1.1 M viewed TEDx Talk “How to Write a Story”
Besides Carmen, Kamila, and the kids, we have Kamila’s brother José, who works part time at Home Depot in Panama City, an hour and a few minutes away from Apalachicola. José’s never been married. He has a couple ex-girlfriends in town, but none in the past five years. José’s been in and out of drug programs since he was a kid. He’s a former alcoholic, 267 days sober. His friend Roly got him the job, but made it clear he’d be gone the first time he didn’t show or showed up high or drunk. José knows he means it. He’s going to do his best—Kamila wants him to be a good role model to her kids, and José’s ready to make a change in his life.
Inside the house, Kamila’s boys are playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare on their PS4. They’re hoping Kamily buys them the PS5, but they’re okay right now with what they have. The boys are sitting on their black Garden Treasures camping chairs, the ones they put their Malta and Jaritos bottles in, and that their father, Ahiram, brought over one day when he came to drop off some money for the kids’ summer. Ahiram is a successful guy, owns a falafel place he runs with his Venezuelan girlfriend. He drives a newer Tesla, lives on the water, and is generous with the boys, though Kamila wishes he was more generous with her, given how things ended.
We look around the house. Carmen is a religious woman. She’s a widow; Aurelio, her only love, died from a heart attack nearly fifteen years ago, two days after paying off the house. Carmen has never thought of anyone else and isn’t about to start now. José, Kamila, and Kamila’s children are her world, and she’s content with what she has; she knows life is now, and you should cherish the now before it’s gone. She’s had so much loss in her life that she’s almost numb to it, which makes her the strongest person in the house, even at her age. So—the walls. Carmen has pictures of Jesus everywhere—over the TV, the dining room, in the hallways. More crucifixes than you can count. Sacred Heart of Jesus Devotional Candles in every room—in white, red, and gold, and made out of soy, beeswax, and palm. The television the boys are playing COD on is a year old and has a crack on the bottom left of the screen, where José, 268 days ago, stumbled into on his way in after a bender that ended up at Half Shell Dockside a couple hours after it closed. There’s a mirror next to the TV, and reflected in it is Kamila’s daughter, whose face is buried in her first mobile phone, a Gabb Phone it’s called, which Kamila bought her because there’s no social media or internet on it, and because she couldn’t take any more of her daughter’s whining about how she was the only one at school who didn't have one. We travel to the kitchen. Carmen is cooking arroz con gandules in a caldero, which is a large metal pot with a large lid. She’s had it going on twenty years, and it shows, because we see all of the burn marks on it and because the handle is loose. Kamila is sitting at the kitchen table, watching the storm updates. The house smells like oil and burning candles. One of the overhead lightbulbs is out, and we can hear the refrigerator humming.
Carmen stirs the rice. She looks back at Kamila. Kamila tells her it isn’t looking good, that the storm is probably going to hit within the hour. It’s now a Category 3 hurricane and getting stronger. Kamila looks at the window. They should have put the shutters up, but José, who’s on his way home from work, convinced them that it would be a waste of time, the last three storms died right after he’d spent an hour each time putting the shutters up and then another hour taking them down. Now they just want him to get home; they can tell him they told him so after he’s home safe.
But just as Kamila gets up to check on the kids, to make sure they’re away from the windows, her phone rings. It’s Bonifacio. He’s three blocks away for some reason, his car has broken down, and he can’t get any tow trucks to come bail him out, can he come over to weather the storm at their place. I’ll be out of there the second the storm moves on. Oh, and by the way, I’m with my girlfriend and our two-month-old baby girl, is that cool? We’re desperate and the baby is freaking out. Kamila closes her eyes. She wants to say no, but there’s just no way she’s going to let a baby stay out in a hurricane. And anyway, if her mother ever found out that she did that, she’d never hear the end of it. It seems Liberation Day has come early, and it certainly is not the type of liberty she was thinking. We’ll be there in five minutes, says Bonifacio, thanks a million. Kamila tells her mother who it was, and what’s happening, and Carmen, in her floral print house dress, lowers the heat on the rice, wipes her hands with a Puerto Rican flag dish towel, and starts pulling plates down from the cabinet, enough for not only them but for Bonifacio and his lady friend as well. It’s then that José’s friend Roly calls, apologizing and asking if everything is okay, he assumed something might be up since José never showed up for work and his calls have been going straight to voicemail since six-thirty in the morning.
And so, our story begins . . .
Yes, we’ll have curveballs come our way. Is Bonifacio’s baby going to be okay? How will Kamila’s daughter react to her new sibling and her father’s girlfriend? To seeing her father on a day other than Liberation Day? What about the boys? And Kamila herself? We’ll find out. The lawn chairs outside are already flying around. The trees are bending backwards on themselves. The street signs are twirling like pinwheels. The streets are already looking like rivers, the rain’s coming down hard and heavy as it is. We have enough to work with now. We have trouble. We have characters. We have Kamila, who, for now, appears to be our protagonist, our hero. And just as it looks like we’re heading into a storm, both literally and metaphorically, a set of lights shines into the window, nearly blinding Kamila. At first, Kamila can barely make out the car, but she knows exactly who it is: it’s Ahiram’s Tesla, and there’s a giant crack in the window that’s spread across the windshield like a spider’s web. What the hell is Ahiram doing here, and with Bonifacio on the way over? And where is José? Well, we’ll find out. We have everything we need—characters, trouble (and lots of it), and a story we’re now interested in learning more about. So, we keep on typing. We want to know what’s going to happen to everyone. Is everyone going to be cool? Is José going to show up? And if he does, is he going to have relapsed? And the hurricane? Only Jesus knows. And once that house fills up, it’ll be Carmen running the show, lighting up the candles, praying to the crosses around her house, and wondering how, in a million years, did all these worlds collide on the same day.
Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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