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How to Write a Novelby Stewart Ferris

Lesson 05 of 08

Theme, voice and style — the book only you can write

Let theme grow from choices. Find a voice a reader could pick out of a line-up. Keep the prose clear enough to disappear.

In this lesson

  • Theme as an argument the characters act out, never a lecture
  • Voice as the one USP that cannot be stolen
  • Clarity, economy, rhythm — read the page aloud
  • The first line as a promise the rest of the book must keep

Theme is what the book believes. You do not stamp it on the last page; you let people choose, and the pattern of those choices is the theme. If you can delete a speech and the story still means the same, the speech was never doing the work.

Plots travel. Premises get recycled. What a reader will follow from book to book is the particular way you notice the world — the jokes you cannot help, the details you over-value, the sentences that could only have come from your head. That is voice. It is also the only unique selling point that cannot be copied overnight.

Style is manners on the page. Prefer the specific verb. Cut the adverb that is apologising for a weak one. Vary the length of sentences so the ear does not glaze. British or American spelling is a house style; confusion is not.

The first line is not a greeting. It is a decision. Take it to The First Line and make it keep a promise the rest of the chapter can afford.

Open a companion studio

Tools by Stewart Ferris, on grok.me — for the part of the job this lesson names.

OpeningsThe First LineHow to write a first sentence that keeps a promise. Principles, tests, and a private reading of the line you are about to send into the world.CharactersDossierA literary character workshop. Build round characters with nine sections of lists — class, accent, desire, trauma, politics, and the lie they live by.

Exercises

  1. 01

    Theme in one sentence

    Write the argument of the book in one sentence, then write a scene that dramatises it without using any of those words.

  2. 02

    Same scene, your voice

    Take a bland action — boiling a kettle, missing a bus — and write it so a reader could tell it was yours with the byline removed.

  3. 03

    The opening promise

    Write five candidate first lines. Keep the one that would be dishonest if the rest of the book were ordinary.

Common pitfall

Characters who stop the action to explain the moral. Trust the reader. They came for a story, not a pamphlet.

Milestone

A theme you could deny in an interview, and a voice you could not.