How does a novel actually work?
The technical stuff
Today’s post is too long for email so do switch over to the app or your browser to read it in full. I have also recorded this post for you to listen to if you’re short on time (or concentration!) Again, you might like to absorb it this way and then come back and note down anything you found particularly useful.
This post is the third instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. For full introductory details, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.
We’re now approaching the final stages of the preparatory element of this course before we get stuck into some actual books! Today I wanted to cover some of the technical aspects of a novel. Some of this may be self-evident to you already, but I think it’ll be helpful to go over the basics so we all have a common foundation to work from moving forward. I’m also hoping there will be a few things in here that maybe you hadn’t explicitly thought about before, too, which will help you in your analysis.
Thinking about this stuff is always useful, whatever mode of analysis you’re doing, but I wanted to highlight that it is particularly useful for the evaluative mode that isn’t necessarily part of an academic reading. As I talked about in this previous post, I assume you want to learn to analyse a novel not just to identify and elucidate its themes and ideas, but also to better understand what separates a good novel from a bad novel, or a good novel from a great novel, or what you like in a novel versus what you don’t like. Today we’ll do a whistle-stop tour through some of the aspects of a novel and some of the questions you could pose to the novel or to yourselves as you read, and what might differentiate between the more or less successful approaches to the form.1
As with anything else, I am still learning about this stuff myself!2 So please do add any further thoughts down below about anything you see here. I’m also hoping to explore the concept of the ‘novel form’ more in my Novel Thoughts series, which I will be resurrecting soon (I just started some of the reading for the next post today). But as a little tip, one thing I quite like to do at the moment is to read articles here on Substack by novelists discussing their craft and how they go about writing a book. As a reader, these can offer such fascinating insights into these more technical aspects, and are as useful to us as they are to other writers. I will leave a few as links throughout today’s post, and also list them in the Resources section below.
Our main question today is how does a novel work? How does a good novel create the effect it does? Why might some be more effective than others? I admit I’ve struggled at keeping my own opinion at bay here; some of the below does amount to me explaining what I think makes for a ‘good’ novel. Whilst there is some subjectivity at work with this, of course, I’ve drawn on my experience and tried to provide evidence, so I hope that there won’t be anything too controversial in my definitions. But if there are things you find you don’t agree with, I hope that simply by prompting you to think about some of these things, it might help you anyway
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