How NOT to Write a Novel
A guide for Visionary Writers...
The Last Witch of Scotland by Philip Paris
I want to start by saying that I’m not intending to single out Paris as a particularly bad novelist, here. I’ve read plenty of published novels that are similar, and this novel has its own stack of praise from readers.
But – once you’ve read Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story and seen how story is supposed to work, you can’t really unsee that. And this novel happened to be the first that I started reading after Cron. So I’m particularly sensitive to what a good novel needs to do now, in ways that I wasn’t necessarily before. And I found so many examples of how not to do it in this book, that I felt I wanted to share a few of them with you here.
1) I deliberated about this book in the bookshop. I’m wary about reading books about women’s lives and experiences written by men. But I didn’t want that prejudice to become a bias, so I wanted to give this a chance. I read the first page, and it is compelling. Compelling enough to have made me want to continue to the second page, so I took that as my barometer and bought the book. The opening chapter takes us into the world of Aila Horne, her tender relationship with her father, the unusual intellect of the women in her family, and her sense of righteousness coupled with a fearlessness to speak her truth. I liked her, and I enjoyed where this might be going.
2) As an aside, I’m not a big fan of the recent swathe of feminist-seeming novels about historical witch trials in Britain that deny our magic by pulling on purely demographic strings to account for the violence and misogyny towards women (and others) who continued the Old Ways in the face of such persecution and genocide from the church. This novel does that.
Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash
3) Plot spoilers. Everywhere in this novel that Paris could work to create intrigue and suspense – pulling me further into the story through curiosity, he manages to give pointless reveals at just the worst moment – pushing me out of it altogether through the clunky storytelling. Therefore, immediately before the first ‘unexpected’ bare knuckle fight scene occurs, we’re told this: “He set off towards the source, entering a gloomy alleyway. In that instant Sim was transformed into the person he used to be – the one he tried so hard to run from, a highly trained killer whose name had once instilled respect in even the most feared Glasgow gangs.” This character backstory comes out of NOWHERE, specifically to clue us in for the big fight that’s about to ensue. Which we now can see coming from a mile. And which might have been so much more subtly revealed if we’d already had to see Sim using his skills, or having flashbacks, at an earlier part of the novel (where it would still have to make sense), which would set us wondering and then give somewhere meaningful for this character trait to land. Without that, it’s just a waving flag for what’s about to unfold. And this happens too many times to count throughout the third-person chapters of this book.
4) Intertwined narratives that lead nowhere and mean nothing. The novel shifts perspectives between Aila’s first-person account of her story, and the third-person narrative that follows the wandering performance troupe to which Sim belongs. Sometimes it shifts perspectives within a single chapter. And where it does, the confusingly wrenched-in plotline doesn’t add anything except what we were already about to see revealed in Aila’s story itself. This makes for another dead-end plot spoiler that’s completely unnecessary and out of place in the middle of Aila’s own chapter.
5) Lack of a compelling character transformation, drive, desire, or goal. A story – whether fiction or nonfiction – exists to explore the internal transformation of its main character, as they face their deepest fears and cross the threshold to achieve (or not) their goal. Without a defined and compelling goal, or a sense of what is driving them, there is NO transformation. Without the transformation, the reader cannot experience the alchemy of the story. This is what we read for. Without it, this novel is just a well-researched, but ultimately made-up, history book (yes, all of the historical items, objects and details are present and accounted for – even when they have no apparent specific relevance). There’s nothing that truly drives it. Because there’s nothing that truly drives Aila. So there’s nothing that truly drives this reader to keep reading.
I know there will be people who love this book. And that’s ok, you go ahead and enjoy it.
But, as Visionary Writers and Creatives, we can learn to do so much more.
Keep reading, keep writing.
Sally-Shakti
