Social media, SEO, marketing and writingThe 5 Key Elements of a Novel
A good novel has five essentials, and without them the chances are less that your book will find a home. These five musts are conflict, character, dialogue, setting, and action. Be sure your novel has the five, and you may have a chance. Let’s take a look at each:
1. Conflict
What is a story, a novel, without conflict? The answer is dull. Real life is saturated with conflict, and fiction needs it too. Think of the conflict in Wuthering Heights, Gone With the Wind, and other books. When Scarlett vowed she would ‘‘never be hungry again,’’ she was rising victoriously over the struggle of bouncing back from the ravages of the Civil War and all it had done to her, her family, and her beloved Tara.
2. Character
Readers of novels enter the lives of fictional characters in a sense, and this is all the more reason to have an intriguing lead (major character) in a book. When you write fiction you are speaking with character and action, not about character and action.
What would Jane Eyre do next? That is what holds the reader’s attention and keeps them turning the pages. Think of the female lawyer in John Grisham’s The Client, the retired country scholar turned knight-errant in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha, the copy boy turned studio mogul in Budd Shulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, the coal miner turned labor activist in Ken Follett’s A Place Called Freedom, the condemned adulteress in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, the lowly rebel against society in George Orwell’s 1984, the young hard-boiled detective in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and other unforgettable characters. In every case, particularly the classic novels, there is a very strong character smack in the middle of conflict.
3. Dialogue
The words a character speaks is dialogue, and it reveals the on-going story. Any novel without enough dialogue simply dies on the vine because there is not enough going on between the characters. Can you imagine little or no dialogue in Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities?
4. Setting
Some authors believe the setting of a novel makes little difference. Others think it has an important bearing on the total result and keeping the author interested. Hemingway set one of his short stories, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in a favorite cafe he frequented. John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil would not be the same book if the setting were anywhere else but Savannah. In fact, the book’s popularity is due, in part, to the author’s ability to breathe life into the setting itself.
5. Action
What happens, the pace of events in the unfolding story is the action. If nothing much happens, there would be little action. Take the popular male hero action stories like the James Bond series and you have a good example of action in a novel. Daniel Silva’s razor-sharp suspense novel, The Mark of the Assassin, takes the reader on an action-packed journey around the world. In Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, readers are plunged into a brutal, 12th Century struggle for the succession of the English throne.
