Breaking Ground: On Building New Homes and Novels

I wrote in an earlier post that my husband and I are building a new home, after thirty-four years in our current house. The builder broke ground on the new house at the end of November! Now there will be something to see after months of planning.

Building a house seems to me to be a good metaphor for writing a novel. Both work best after a lot of planning. Some writers who call themselves “pantsers” write a first draft without prior planning—they just see where their characters take them, then go back to shape the story around the plot that developed in the first draft. Other writers plot out every scene before they start writing. As I’ve said before, I’m somewhere in the middle.

But thus far, the easiest book for me to write was Forever Mine, which was the novel I plotted out the most completely before I began. There were still surprises as I wrote, but far fewer than in my other books. And I had far fewer times during the process when I felt I was muddling and I didn’t know where I was headed.

In the novel I’m working on now, one major subplot was a total surprise to me. It started as a throw-away scene or two—a way to add some tension to the story—and then it developed into a major conflict involving several of the characters and leading directly to the climax and ultimate showdown. I wish I’d been smart enough to think of this subplot before I started!

I’ve learned the hard way that, as with house-building, a set of specs helps with writing a novel.

After the planning of a house comes the construction—the foundation, the walls, the roof, and all the interior features and furbelows. Though the basic bones of the house are established in the plans, some aspects are developed once those bones are in place.

The major turning points in a novel are akin to the walls and doors. It’s helpful to know where they will be in the plans. But the editing and revisions, the shaping of the novel into its final form, are more akin to the paint and the lighting fixtures and the furnishings placed in the house after it’s built. They can be changed until the last minute.

And, in fact, sometimes it’s not possible to know what will work best in the house until it’s built. Similarly, the nuances of the exact right descriptive phrase, the gestures the characters use, and the words they say (or don’t say) to each other sometimes can’t be crafted until the novel is in its final draft.

I’m not the first writer to use this house metaphor for writing a novel. See, for example, The 12 Key Pillars of Novel Construction: Your Blueprint for Building a Strong Story, by C.S. Lakin. And, in fact, the house metaphor is a new one for me. Until recently, I’ve likened writing a novel more to sculpting than to building. I’ve seen writing as akin to pulling a lump of clay (words) into raw form, then adding and taking away from the clay until the work is complete.

But as I watch our new home under construction, the “building a house is like building a novel” analogy has become very real to me. I may write about it again in the months ahead.

I hope to have my current work in progress finished—including all the editing—about the time we move. I’ll need a break from writing while I organize our new home.

Writers, what metaphors do you use in describing how you write?