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238 Part IV: Developing Your Plot and Structure
Write a short piece about your character’s life, her mother’s and father’s lives,
and her grandmother’s or grandfather’s life. Think about how different life is
for each generation.
You may not want to write a novel that spans three generations, but understanding
the lives of the parents and grandparents of your character can give
you a good insight into her upbringing and motivation. (I discuss the importance
of the latter in Chapter 18.)
Living life in one hectic day
If you really want to condense your book, you can make the whole action take
place over a mere 24 hours – or less. Most books with such a tight timeframe
use flashbacks and memories in order to flesh the book out. Here are some
famous examples to check out:
✓ James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s 1925 Mrs Dalloway use
extensive flashbacks to give a sense of the main character’s whole life.
✓ The Apartment by Greg Baxter (2012) describes a man’s search for an
apartment in an unnamed European city. Much of the tension comes
from his reflections on his unusual past.
✓ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962)
describes one grim day in the character’s life in a Soviet gulag. The fact
that the story is set on one day among many almost identical days creates
a feeling of timelessness.
✓ 24 Hours by Greg Iles (2000) gives the characters 24 hours to rescue
their kidnapped daughter, and Saturday by Ian McEwan (2005) is set
on the day of the anti-Iraq war demonstration in London. These writers
use the 24-hour device to increase dramatic tension.
Try writing your own ‘story in a day’. You can expand it by adding in other
characters’ stories, flashbacks and memories, and thoughts about the future:
1. Write a story that takes place on one day.
2. Think of ways to expand it into a longer piece of fiction, and then
write some more scenes.