How to Draw a Novel

October 1, 2023
The (graphic) art of fiction. In a variation on diagramming sentences, Mexican novelist Solares, author of Don't Send Flowers and The Black Minutes, encourages aspiring novelists to draw their stories. "Of all the ghosts that inhabit the novel, structure is one of the most elusive," he writes. "It is also the most exquisite." In the author's estimation, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a looped line rising to a heart and descending to an arrow; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an upward sloping line with stitches along its length. These drawings--more like squiggles--are meant to represent the story's basic turning points, plot lines, atmosphere, and characters. The promise is that they will help authors to identify their novel's core sensibility. As Solares writes, we must "ask ourselves where the truth lies." When in doubt, simplify and do it visually, pen to paper. The author illustrates his advice with examples from North American, English, European, and Latin American authors. He also addresses themes common in how-to books on creative writing: character, beginnings, endings, titles, time, structure, and creating excitement and tension. A drawing of this book would be a jagged, discontinuous, wandering line. Solares strays from advice-giving to defend the novel against insults, consider the possibility of the perfect novel (candidates include Roberto Bola�o's The Savage Detectives and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace), relate a dream about being devoured by lions, compare the initial sketch to the draft to the final version of Juan Rulfo's Pedro P�ramo, and provide timelines for the novel's evolution, each novel with its own drawing. Like all such books, the value and the pleasure come as much from spending time with the author's likes and dislikes as the practical guidance being offered. A quirky, playful addition to the well-populated subgenre of fiction writers writing about writing fiction.

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Starred review from October 9, 2023
Novelist Solares (Don’t Send Flowers) shares in these inventive and rewardingly off-kilter essays his idiosyncratic perspective on writing fiction. In “Doubles Cast in Shades of Night,” Solares meditates on how authors create characters, calling them “red playdough in our hands” and suggesting they sometimes constitute “freer, more courageous” versions of the writer. The collection’s most creative entry, “Structure’s Ghost,” expounds on classic novels by interpreting line drawing representations of their plots. For instance, Solares contends that the characters in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter “are registered with such precision that it seems like their downfall is being witnessed by a sniper” and illustrates the book’s plot as a wavy downward-sloping arrow with a sniper’s crosshairs over the arrow’s origin point. The author’s mercurial focus flows in unexpected directions, mixing literary analysis, biographical tidbits (“Flaubert claimed to read passages of civil law every morning to steep himself in the concise and neutral style he needed to record his stories”), and punchy aphorisms (“If the first phrase of a novel is like riling up a bull, then the last must be like the end of a bullfight”) in kaleidoscopic fashion, and the line drawings amuse (James Joyce’s Ulysses is a series of loops inside a loop, the tail of which reads “yes”). It adds up to an audacious and unique consideration of the art of the novel.

November 10, 2023

Award-winning Mexican novelist, editor, and critic Solares's (Don't Send Flowers) inspired yet curious work is presented as a craft book for writers and would-be writers, and it should be of great value to anyone concerned about the art of writing. It is also a book for readers. Solares serves up insights so lucid and original they feel startling, covering characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Tom Sawyer, and Captain Nemo, and authors including Kipling, Proust, Melville, and even Stanislavski. In particular, Solares's analysis of the supposedly haphazard structure of Moby Dick will leave readers breathless. There are drawings, charming doodles that depict the structure and shape of the novels Solares discusses and form their own kind of visual digression. For readers looking to diversify their collections, he introduces a library's worth of Latin and South American writers. This book does not always seem as intent on accuracy as it is on passion and memory, but Solares's passion is his genius, and his encyclopedic memory is his palette. VERDICT Most reminiscent of William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain or Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael, Solares's book feels fresh and vital, unencumbered by rectitude or solemnity, proposing and digressing with abandon, because, as he reminds readers, in the end, the digressions are the point.--Herman Sutter

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