David Gay-Perret

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10 Tips to Write a Novel (last page)

6/ Master the “willing suspension of disbelief”

For those who know what this means you can skip this paragraph and the next! For the others, here’s a short reminder: imagine a review of the book “The Lord of the Rings” that would look like “grade: 02/20 Tolkien offers here an utterly ridiculous story blending creatures that simply cannot exist with a ring that can control its bearer… Total nonsense”. Or a review of Harry Potter such as: “Grade: 05/20 No Miss Rowling, 11 years old children do not wave around a piece of wood to make things appear!”. That would be totally ridiculous and the author of such reviews would be accused of not “diving” into the world proposed and to keep referring to the real world. In other words that person would not have “suspended his/her disbelief”.
The willing suspension of disbelief thus designates the almost automatic mechanism (so the word “willing” is debatable) that leads the audience to forget about the real world in order to dive into the fictional universe and embrace its rules. It’s thanks to this that we can live otherwise perfectly unrealistic stories with such intensity. Read more »

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10 Tips to Write a Novel (continued)

2/ Live what you write

In order to be able to hold on for several months or years, one must be passionate about the adventure (one more reason to write the story you want to tell rather than the one the readers want) and live it not only during the writing process, but also outside.

It’s not about being constantly daydreaming but rather keeping in mind the protagonists and the adventure even during “real life”. Sometimes we find inspiration in a discussion or an event from the day-to-day life, we can use the behavior from real people to give more credibility to the characters, use a landscape as a model… It may even happen, arguably more seldom, that we learn things during the writing process that we can then apply in our life. Read more »

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Introduction

To celebrate the release in English of the first volume of my novel “Chroniques de Galadria” (under the name “Chronicles of Galadria I – The Other World”), I have decided to write a couple of articles talking about the adventure it is to write a novel, and sharing a couple of tips taken from my own experience as an author. I hope this will help those wishing to start writing, that other authors will use this opportunity to share their experience and opinion, and maybe that readers interested in knowing more about the “backstage” will find some answers as well.

What should you think about before starting? Traps to avoid? Methods and techniques to make things easier? If these questions caught your interest, read on…

Writing a book: an adventure in its own right

1. The relationship between the author and his book

The majority of authors are also readers, but only a minority of readers are authors. Let’s have a look at the relationship these two categories of people have with a book: Read more »