Faintly Despising

Authors have all sorts of reasons to start a book. The most common one is that a topic piques their interest. A fascination with Irish mythology, to cite one example, can lead a writer to study the myths of the Ulster Cycle. A parallel interest in writing something that will sell, like his kids’ favorite, Harry Potter, can give birth to a YA fantasy set in the Emerald Isle. Off he plunges into the great unknown that is a novel.

Many moons can pass before a draft of a manuscript is finalized. The author decides she wants to get it published—and then runs into the gauntlet known as “agents.” She is mystified that everyone sends back a form-letter rejection. At some point she may consult a professional like myself and ask what went wrong.

I read it and it’s instantly apparent that the book doesn’t meet the requirements of the genre. The author often doesn’t know what genre he’s writing in. As I talk to such authors, I frequently discover that he has an inner critic that dislikes the genre in general. “Oh, kids books” or  “What’s the big deal about Harry Potter, besides those amazing sales?”

A telling example of this bizarre attitude occurred at a book reading I attended. The author had become captivated with a futuristic gadget and wrote a slim dystopian novel based around it. In his prefatory remarks he said dismissively, “I didn’t even known what dystopian was until my agent told me.” Right away I was on guard. And sure enough, when he read aloud his excerpt, the material was dialogue-dominated gibberish. I know dystopian novels very well, and his sounded like “worst in class.”

I won’t bother advising here that an author study her genre before starting a book. That goes without saying. I do want to raise a question, though. Why, if you’re not willing to fully commit to providing what genre readers expect, bother writing the novel at all? No one is forcing you. Why spend all those hours on an enterprise that is doomed from the start by your own disinterest?

Life is short. The creative process is intoxicating, yes. But you also need to husband your time. Write a book that you can’t stop pouring your heart into. That’s the only way anyone reading it will respond.

Exercise: How do you pick out outstanding examples of a type of novel? It’s as simple as typing into an Amazon window “the best [children’s fantasies].” If Harry Potter is not to your taste, check out the alternate authors on the list. One of those may write in a style that you feel chimes with your own. So see how he does it.

“Criticism is prejudice made plausible.” —H.L. Mencken

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Shifting Gears Too Fast

Most authors know that a novel should contain a series of obstacles the protagonist must overcome. These obstacles gain greater meaning if they are placed in context, including the relationships of the affected characters and their backgrounds. A major factor that affects the balance between plot and context is chronology. When should the story forge into the future, and when should it delve into the past?

A novel has a starting and ending point, yet an author may choose to begin somewhere in the middle. Let’s use the dissolution of a marriage as an example. While you can open the book when the couple first met, that starts the story off on the wrong foot. That’s when they’re happy together. To show the dissolution, a novel would better open at the point one partner first suspects the other is having an affair. That could be one year, five years, twenty years into the marriage. The bloom is off the rose.

If that point in time is chosen, the question then becomes: how long should you stick with the immediate crisis before providing the context? After all, couples break up all the time, so you have to define why the reader should care about your couple. That requires background. If you jump back in time too fast, though, you may not have added up enough present-time issues to make the present crisis gripping.

Several methods of flipping back and forth in time can be used. The more standard one sets up a present issue, then goes back in time to record the couple’s history in an extended run from start to the present. The more difficult feat is jumping back and forth more frequently, creating juxtaposition. No matter which is chosen, however, you still have to give the reader enough reason to care about the crisis that opened the book. The sole exception is a murder—the end point of a novel that dwells in the past.  

In most cases, length of coverage determines reader interest in an obstacle. If you spend five pages narrating the present problem, then jump back in time for 20 pages to cover the course of the marriage, think of how that affects the reader. You’re trading a brief spurt of immediacy for four times that amount in stuff that already happened. Is your reader going to wait that long?

Exercise: You’re better off setting a target at the beginning: I’ll go 30 pages, maybe 50. That length forces you to plunge into the opening crisis to a depth that will truly draw the reader into the book. We can meet a few key players, get a sense of how they rub each other the wrong way. Once you establish the promise of plenty of friction to come, now let’s find out how they arrived at this unfortunate state of affairs.

“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” —Willa Cather

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Weight of Novelty

Many novels focus on a chosen field in which the author has developed expertise. This allows readers to explore an unfamiliar realm, expanding their knowledge of the world at large. The areas in which such fresh discoveries can occur encompass a wide range. The world of technology is frequently probed, as is the sphere of medical advances. An author is cautioned, however, not to rely too much on the gee-whiz factor. 

The compulsions that drive the human species, even the cell phone–bearing version, have not changed much since we descended from trees. That is the continuing paradox of civilization. How can we still be ruled so completely by our base instincts? Those same urges govern the reading experience as well. Love, death, and their spinoffs such as titillation and fear of physical harm bring out the animal in us. That’s what we crave.

In a world populated by barely hairless creatures, an author who strays too far into intellectual abstraction runs the risk of being arid. A degree of drama can be achieved by performing a risky operation, such as one that will bring hearing to the deaf. The afflicted patient can be made sympathetic, the procedure can be described masterfully, and the suspense of waiting for the results provides tension. Yet the outcome does not provide that much of a bang. After all, what if the operation failed? The character was already used to being deaf. She’s not going to die because an impossible dream wasn’t realized.

In other words, you cannot let your own fascination in a subject rule your plotting. It may be cheap, but the fact is, if you put that deaf character in an isolated house where a madman outside will use his knowledge of her deafness to torment her, you’ll achieve greater suspense. A reader understands being vulnerable. We all fear the unknown assailant, especially in a world where young men can so readily stray beyond social bonds.

You can explore how great it would be to achieve an uber ability. You can really make us understand that patient. But you have to harness the opposing sides of our nature. That’s a tough feat to pull off, achieved by literary, not scientific, acumen.

Exercise: You have to be chary about explanations of difficult scientific procedures. Even readers of Michael Crichton have only so much patience. If I start feeling like a baffled student in high school chemistry lab, I’ll skip the rest. Readers aren’t necessarily stupid, but if you think of holding them by the hand as you walk them through dense material, you’re on the right path.

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” —Gertrude Stein

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine 

Invitation to Participate

As an editor, I have to search for ways to motivate authors to bring their characters fully to life. In the early stages of an edit I will try different tactics. On a large scale, I might suggest composing character sketches. On a granular level, I might edit one scene with a dozen prompts that say: What is the character feeling now? Authors have varying abilities to respond with anything that truly reveals character. So sometimes the editorial prism itself has to be altered in order to produce results. Here is one method that works.

Most authors understand that a unified point of view in the narration can produce greater personal depth. Simply being with a character more allows a reader to get to know them better. An author can use that principle in different ways. If a lead character does not control the point of view of a scene he is in, the scene can be rewritten to use his POV. If you do that for even a half dozen scenes, the reader is going to see things his way more often.  

A narrative that contains indirect quotations most likely indicates that the author is standing outside her own story. Unless your protagonist clearly has a distinctive voice, indirect quotes should be changed to dialogue. The immediacy can draw a reader to a character. The words are not cloaked any longer by the author reporting on the scene. They are given directly, the way words emerge from within all of us. As a plus, a reader can often imagine that she would say the same thing in that situation. I cannot tell you how many times a scene that seemed dead became sparked with personality after making this basic change.

Another technique is derived from the direct-dialogue principle. Words do not need to be spoken aloud to evince character. If a character has a thought that is almost exactly what he would say—“I wish that guy would go to hell”—you have penetrated inside the character’s mind. Many authors like to put these “quoted” thoughts in italic type, to set them off from the omniscient narration. The reader grasps the meaning, with the added benefit that he feels he is an insider as the action is occurring. Once an author becomes comfortable with this technique, the story can become filled with thoughts. Even better, the author can start to devise unspoken worries prior to a plot event that drive anticipation of what will happen. 

Exercise: Review the text with a single goal in mind: I am going to invite the reader into the story. When you see a sentence that strikes you as bland, or too neutral, your first thought should be the lead character in the scene. Could I convey the idea through her point of view? The plot point is supposed to matter to her, not you.

“People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Back and Forth

Balance is a keyword when alternating between background work and a plot. The line between past and present is always fluid in a novel, because an author frequently needs to reveal the characters' past in order to better inform why they are acting the way they are. This logic extends to larger dimensions as well, such as underlying premises for the plot. So how do you know when you’re visiting the past too much?

To answer that question, I’ll first make a remark about the different types of momentum generated by past and present. A past story already happened. By and large, it does not make the reader look forward in anticipation. The present, on the contrary, is driving toward what will happen. It generates more momentum because the reader does not know how things will play out.

Judged in those terms, the calculation becomes easier. What takes place in the background stories, and what takes place in the present? What I often find is that the back stories, filled with lore, of whatever degree you like, are more exciting. Only in the past can the equivalent of Excalibur be ripped from the stone. The forward-pushing plot, by contrast, can seem dull by comparison. Oh, the river’s too wide? Come on, let’s look for a ford. 

Part of the problem is due to how compressed the two types of narrative are. A background story is told in summary fashion, delivered in a tight package that highlights only the good parts. The present is looser, filled with such structural elements as dialogue, in order that the writing is not too tight, keeping the reader at a distance. But let’s flip the coin and consider the narrative summary’s drawback. To achieve its compression, it has to be told from more of a distance. The intimacy of following a character closely is surrendered so that the past is not competing directly with the present.

The reason balance is so vital is because you don’t want a novel too filled with inert, compacted material. Inert because it already happened and compact by the nature of the telling. You need the plot to carry such loads forward. Moreover, you need lots of plot, because each time the reader stops for a back story, the forward momentum has to be geared up all over again.

Exercise: Review the manuscript chapter by chapter. Draw up two lists, side by side: past and present. Summarize in a sentence or two what happens in each chapter, all the way through. When you’re done, look to see where the juicy stuff is. If there are too many on the past side, you should consider transforming some of them into events that occur in the present.

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” —Virginia Woolf

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Inside the Kinetic Robot

A major character is, in many novels, an engine driving a plot forward. The reader goes along for the ride. A major character is also a repository of the reader’s emotions. What happens to her concerns us, and that concern grows greater the more often she appears. A major character thus has a dual purpose.

Many fledgling writers seize upon the first and ignore the second at their peril. As a novel emerges, what a character has to do next is clearer than what he is feeling. Yet regarding characters solely in terms of their utility in moving the plot forward creates a problem. The reader doesn’t think in terms of plot function. She wants to participate in the plot’s events. The only way she can do that is by investing her emotions in the character. 

This is why successful novels have a strong central point of view. We’re not only along for the ride, the lead character is telling us how we should feel about the events along the way. If he evinces dismay, we become dismayed. This principle works even when a reader doesn’t like how the character reacts. If he gloats after stiffing an obnoxious cab driver, we may think, “Well, I don’t think I’d go that far,” but we still admire him for being outrageous. In either case, the principle is the same. The writer has put the emotion down on the page. We are invited to participate. 

Don’t assume we know what a character is like because of what she does. I do advocate showing, not telling, but not one in exclusion of the other. A person can react in a variety of ways to an action performed, and that reaction tells us what the character is like. A woman who saunters away after denting another car while parking is different from a woman who obsesses that the other driver will somehow know she caused the dent. We’ll be able to understand the emotions of either one. The difference is, we’re that much further inside your fictional world. 

Exercise: Take a scene, any scene, from your novel. Look solely for plot events. Who is causing the plot to move forward? If it’s a major character, what does he feel about what he’s done? Try to write a full sentence of reaction. Then try to write an entire paragraph, if the action isn’t too tense. What have you—and therefore the reader—learned about your character?

“Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.”  —Donald Hall

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Inscribing a Character Arc

As the most important aspect of your novel, the lead character must be compelling enough to make readers care what happens to them. That means you must create compelling personal issues. Without obstacles, a character is bland or, worse, Superman. These issues can be tied up in the book’s plot, but you may find they are more moving if they’re a private concern. After all, any soldier returning from a war knows how to fire a rifle.

The two keys to making a personal issue matter to the reader are: it should keep occupying the hero’s attention as the novel proceeds; and it should be tied up by the time the novel is over. That means essentially that the personal issue is a subplot of its own, reaching its own climax. 

As an editor, I enter the picture usually after an author completes a draft. If I see the lead character is not distinctive enough, I will suggest basic issues that will round them out. Let’s say I suggest: give the soldier a mother who badgers them to write about their military experiences. A double whammy, right? The reader gets to see how they interact with their mother, and we learn how war affected them personally. 

Yet what I often get back after making these suggestions is a few scattered scenes. The mother shows up early—and the issue is dropped for a few hundred  pages, until she lamely shows up for a few paragraphs. Just sticking in a few inserts is actually worse than not doing it at all. You raise the reader’s curiosity but then leave her hanging. 

You need to be strategic about personal issues. The mother should appear at regular intervals, like any subplot character. The hero’s struggle with her badgering has to escalate over time, like any plot thread. If the soldier develops an interest in a partner, the mother will weigh in on that, too. You see what’s happening: I’m learning a lot about the hero through how they act with their mother. (By the way, for “mother” you can substitute “spouse,” “lover,” “friend,” etc.)

As for the book the soldier is writing? That also needs to ramp up as time goes on. Perhaps writing it causes lurid memories to return, causing them to become more unbalanced. Maybe a terrible secret that they’ve blocked out comes to the surface. As a reader, I don’t want diary entries. I want a kick-ass story that has a great ending. Just like any story element, the personal issue must be strategic.

Exercise: Planning really helps keep an issue vital as the novel goes on. Write down a list of things that could happen on that personal issue. Put the more crucial ones later, building up to them. Plug the scenes into the novel at defined intervals. Now see if it’s doing its job: making the hero stand out from the crowd.

“I don't want to be a genius—I have enough problems just trying to be a man.” ―Albert Camus

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Blows of Pride

One of the first lessons a novelist learns is that the protagonist should face a series of obstacles. It is telling that so many react to that dictum by creating a series of external obstacles, resembling warriors in a video game to a greater or lesser degree. Even authors with a more literary bent will utilize characters embodying a social theme that oppresses from without. Less common are explorations of what drives a person to fail. Perhaps failure feels too tragic, and people write to feel good about themselves.

Failure comes in all sorts of varieties—because humans are so good at it—so I’ll focus here on it as a facet of divorce. A breakup is painful in direct proportion to its former promise. While a lucky half of all couples sail through life without it, I think most people have experienced the pain, either directly or as children. The pain of separation is sharp and bitter, and the bitterness never goes away, even if it dulls over time. 

Pride comes before a fall, and that is where failure can play a dynamic role in fiction. Pride can be built up through a series of scenes that show the keyed-on partners as proud to be married, whether that relates to their partner’s status or as parent of praised children. It can also be cultivated through the arguments of the spouses. Marriage is a series of compromises, and when one or both members in a couple refuses to bend, pride of belonging in one’s parental family is frequently the cause. So the parents can be brought into the novel to show what sparks such loyalty. Inherent in all of these interactions, of course, is the failure of the character to realize how blind their loyalty is.

The differences between a couple may be truly irreconcilable, but adding a tragic flaw is more dramatic. That doesn’t include such tawdry factors as workaholism. A tragic flaw stems from a more titanic goodness than that. Identifying what that is and then building the marriage scenes around it shows the poisonous root of the dissolution.

Equally as gripping are the waves of explanations a character makes, in private and to others, after the marriage falls apart. How does an author modulate the complaints to lay bare their shrillness? Does the character learn from the experience, or do they go on in life placing all the blame on the partner? A person can be consumed by bitterness just as easily as by joy. Where does that leave them at the end of the story, on the lonely rock they claim?

Exercise: You can use supporting characters to great effect. A mother’s dislike for her daughter-in-law is an obvious choice, but what about the friend that encourages the character’s growing dissatisfaction? When the divorce is final, what can the friend do to remedy the pain? Or, if the partner left for a new love, how does the newbie stack up against who was lost?

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” —Truman Capote

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Breaking the Law

One of the major goals in plotting a novel is righting a wrong. The nature of the wrong comes in many guises, and the steps toward remediating it may be as complicated as an author can concoct. Underneath all of the machinations, though, lies the principle of fairness. The meek shall inherit the earth writ large. 

Aiding the author’s efforts is the moral code that readers bring to a book. One salient truth that has emerged amid the decline of religious belief is that social norms and peer pressure exert a powerful ethical force. You need look no further than the acceptance of mask wearing during the epidemic: a lot of it was driven by what the people around us were doing.

That is why a character committing a crime has different levels of impact. If the person is a known villain, each new murder may not juice up the tension more. The exact opposite could happen, because the crimes become numbing. An act of evil committed by a good person, by contrast, can inject a tidal wave of uneasiness into the proceedings. 

At its base is the worry of getting caught, which we have all felt when committing a petty larceny of some sort. Never mind the shame. A life can be ruined by exposure, depending on the severity of the crime, and if we have come to identify with the character, it feels like our life that may be ruined. Or at the very least, our enjoyment of following that character.

The good character that commits a crime becomes charged with danger. That makes them more alluring, because we read books in part in order to dare to do things vicariously that we would not attempt in our real, boring life. The attraction to what has turned wild is combined with the character’s other qualities, the good side that assures us that the criminal behavior can be rectified.

Attention also needs to be paid to when is the crime committed. If it occurs early on, the book’s calculus is changed for the remaining hundreds of pages. First off, without enough circumstances forcing characters to commit a crime, the reader wonders how good they really are. Can I trust this person can, or wants to, turn things around? If the crime is committed later, it may be that the character has to fight back against the evil that has sprung up around them. Second, the character is on the run, so to speak, from that moment on, and is the book ready to free them from the familiar bounds of their loved ones or friends? Being a fugitive has plenty of tension, but how many near escapes can they undergo before the plot gambit becomes tiresome?

Exercise: When choosing a crime, try to pick one that suits the character. A likable person who tends to be devious may even earn laughs if they embezzle company funds. Or you can use contrast. A mild-mannered person who commits a horrific murder truly shocks us. You’re not writing for automatons; use their moral boundaries to your storytelling advantage.

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine 

Studying Details

When you read a well-written novel, you frequently encounter descriptions that arrest your attention by their penetration. The word picture makes you “see” the object so clearly. You wonder how they do that. When you look at your own writing, you find a belabored description you have written and sigh. It takes so long to get through all the words you have larded on that the picture feels turgid rather than vivid.

You may not be observing enough. Let’s consider where you are when you feel the need to describe something. You’re sitting at your desk, most likely. Can you observe the item in question from your desk? You struggle for long minutes, even an entire writing session, searching for what feels just beyond your mental grasp.

Those writers you admire are more focused on observing than you are. Writing for them is all-consuming: everything they experience could fit in their book. Sure, they’re brilliant. But they are also observing all the time. Whereas you—you’re missing the description of the sunlight because you’re complaining it’s too bright. You’re doing what people do: experience their lives interactively. But writers are weird. They’re the guys staring at you from a cubicle in the library.

I’m not advocating that you cultivate your weirdness. Yet you can be on the lookout. Let’s take the kitchen as one locale that every reader will recognize. A kitchen isn’t a place for writing. It’s for cooking or eating or gassing about the day you just had. But what if you took the time to look at common items more closely? Instead of nearly breaking your wrist to open that tomato jar so you can dump it in the sauce pan to get dinner done, just hold the jar in your hand first. Is it heavy? Have you ever considered that tomato sauce jars are heavy? As opposed to what other items you cook with?

The first thoughts you have will not be profound. You see “Ragu” on the label, and you know that’s too banal to fit your book. Stop focusing so hard. Stop trying to wrest meaning from the thing. Just hold it, let your mind drift, the same way you do when you’re at your desk writing. What associations do you have with tomato sauce? Did your mother cook spaghetti, and what are your stray memories of what she said while cooking? Or your kids, sitting at the kitchen table, irritable because they’re hungry? The more you dwell in your thoughts, the more your subconscious is bent from its habitual frenzy to revolve, in loops, around those associations. Now you can write something down.

Exercise: This post has been in large part an exercise, so I’ll add one more thought. You can be a little weird too. You can ask your spouse to watch the pot while you write down what you’re thinking. Do it right on the spot. Be an observer and then race to put it on the page.

“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.” —Marcus Aurelius

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Checking It Twice

The prospect of editing your manuscript is unwelcome, and the process is arduous. Nonetheless, you do it because either you or someone you respect has identified aspects of the book that are less compelling. You may have too much interior monologue, for example, on the part of your point-of-view character(s). You may have nonfiction-based content, such as a current social debate, that seems repetitious. Whatever you settle on, you have guidelines that tell you what to look for as you are editing the work.

The process that most authors follow is one of trimming. You keep shaving, shaving, shaving—sentence by sentence, sometimes throwing out whole paragraphs or a few pages, depending on how deep the rabbit hole is. You find a ton of stuff that is pretty good, and you don’t really want to cut it. You may remember how great you felt about it when it first burst forth from the pen. So that stays.

This process of accretion—little bit here, little bit there—is undoubtedly helpful in terms of how well the book reads when you finish. If you cut 10 percent of any story, the good stuff will stand out more when the dross is removed. The larger objectives, however, tend to be obscured by this approach. What did the person in the writing group really say? What was the literary agent’s real objection?

You can forget that the real objective is to produce a book on a higher plane. While you’re cutting a lot of interior monologue, you also have to consider what might be better interior monologue. You have a grasp of your characters by now. If you look at each plot turn, could you catalogue, step by step, more deeply how they’re feeling? That is, maybe the objection to too much thinking may be because it was too slight or too event-oriented to allow us to know the character better. Skating on the surface can become tiring for a reader—who wants to be the character, inside.

The same is true of that current debate you lectured about. Maybe the problem isn’t cutting down all the dialogue about, say, the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Maybe it’s the talk itself. Talk is cheap. What would happen if you cut it all? Instead you introduce a new character, a friend who infiltrated security and hoisted a brewski inside the hallowed halls? They brag about it to your protagonist. You follow a series of subplot scenes in which the FBI comes knocking. In each scene, you keep telling us: how does the protagonist feel about the friend?

Exercise: When you draw any conclusions yourself, or receive any comments, ask yourself: what is the objection? Is it too much junk, or is the way I’m going about it? You may be discursing when you should make your characters act. Consider completely different alternatives. Sketch them out. Write a few scenes in that new direction. Now what do you think?

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” —Ansel Adams

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

 

 

The Wrong Cap

With the growth of the young adult market, more and more adult novelists are trying their hand at the game. The logic behind the decision is straightforward. The YA market holds the promise of sales, while the adult market seems to have a foreclosed sign hung on it these days. Plus, anyone who has completed the arduous journey of writing an adult novel can surely write one for kids, right? Aren’t they, like, half as long?

I could write a post about first studying your market, but here I’ll focus on a common problem I encounter within the texts I edit. It stems from the natural impulse of an adult to instruct those of more tender years. This desire is combined with the freedom that writing gives its practitioner. Hey, why not me? I’ll show them instruction can be fun.

The writer sets off on the self-appointed mission. The standard relationships between characters are built, only a teenager (in YA) is the protagonist. A theme is chosen to guide the realationship toward a turning point. We start at Point A and end at Point Z. Let’s take the example of a historical novel set during the Revolutionary War. Uncle Bertram will show nephew Elias why fighting representatives of the colonies’ government was a good idea.

A step-by-step process takes place, the way any plot line is developed. In this case, Uncle Bertram is at Elias’s elbow, pointing out at one step perhaps why British soldiers alienated farmers by stealing all their animals. How the Hessians were both fearsome and light-fingered toward all possessions in sight. Elias is a teenager, though, and he won’t be convinced easily—because we all know teenagers don’t listen to adults. The result can be dialogue passages dropped in every 20 pages that turn the huge ship slowly around. 

Just from this telescoped overview you can see why the young reader’s eyes are slowly closing. Any teacher could tell you that kids like novels filled with action—lots of it. That is why so many successful YA writers have teaching experience. 

Another good reason for avoiding instructive passages stems from a principle that governs all novels: show, don’t tell. Let’s position the teenager in the novel as the son of a farmer, and one of the animals slaughtered is Bessie, the teen’s favorite horse. In this case you need only tell us how they feel. We can figure out for ourselves that British soldiers were bastards. You are asking the reader to  participate, and that process starts at a very early age. 

Exercise: Review the manuscript for discussions on the same topic that are progressive. Highlight them and then read them in isolation from the rest of the book. Do they start to seem numbing? Then look at the incident that precipitated the discussion. Could you add in the teenager’s thoughts at the time the stuff is going down? Afterward, you can probably cut the discussion.

“The wages of pedantry is pain.” —Carroll O'Connor

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

  

  

Left Hand, Right Hand

An author has a desire to finish a book. This compulsion—to produce a story that others will want to read—underlies each step of the way. One morning a new scene is started and, depending on how fast the author writes, the goal is set: finish this scene tomorrow, or by the end of the week. That’s done. Let’s move on to the next. And so on and thenceforth.

While progress is made, the task of telling the story in a memorable way is left for later. Once the first draft is done, I’ll go back and edit. Otherwise, I’ll never finish this thing. 

That begs the question: what makes storytelling memorable? The narrator’s voice. Are you really going to leave the immense task of retelling the entire story to the end of a draft? More to the point, do you really think you will alter that much of what you’ve already written to fit that new conception? 

You might be better off trying a technique similar to that you, or your child, used while learning to play the piano. It is called “hands apart.” For the next week until your next lesson, you play the notes assigned to the right hand all the way through a piece. You practice only that hand. Then you play the notes for the left hand. Only after you have learned the separate lines do you try to combine hands and play the piece as written.

Every scene can be considered a song. The plot moves from Point A to Point B. Your right hand carries the melody, or the plot line. Your left hand carries the point-of-view character, or what underpins the tune. If you write out a first draft of a scene, you’re mainly focused on plot—getting out of your head what happens that moves the book closer to its finish. The characters are like stage actors performing their duties. That is what you will find feels flat when you read it over later.

Rather than wait till the end of a draft, you can write a second draft of the scene right after the first. Your left hand, in this analogy. You pick out your point of view. You go through the scene with a single question in mind: how does the character perceive what’s happening? You add in notes that reframe each one of those points. Then you rewrite the scene , adding in all of the opinions or wry asides or manic thoughts you know that character possesses. Voila, the two hands come together, and now you have a distinctive scene.

Even better, when you start using that practice, you will find, as the draft goes on, that you are writing scenes more from that point of view from the very start. When you write that second draft, you have less to do. And by the time you reach the climax sequence, it will be heavily charged—first time around.

“You write to become immortal, or because the piano happens to be open, or you’ve looked into a pair of beautiful eyes.” —Robert Schumann

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Xenophobia

Political discourse these days is filled with charges of tribalism, as though our citizens have degenerated from a golden era of inclusion. But of course, as any publishing professional could tell you, Americans have always been xenophobic. That’s why the overwhelming majority of novels feature American characters engaged in strife right here in the U.S.A.

This favoritism leads many authors to think that in order to claim new ground in their books, they must venture overseas and bring back knowledge gleaned from other lands. Most of these forays end up in Europe, and the novels that are successful tend to take place in lands using Romance languages—or, places with values common to the U.S. Try to set it in Poland, though, or Romania, and you run into a common buzzsaw: interesting, but not like us. Russia is the exception in this realm, but only because their foreign ways align with our perception of evil ways.

This desire to feature the exotic goes much further in foreign-based historical novels. The pedagogic impulse in this genre is doubled by having to explain the archaic mores of people who don’t share our traditions. This is why, I think, the genre of fantasy has such appeal. If you convert foreigners into elves and dwarves, that helps explain why they do such queer things as slurp loudly and chop wooden blocks.

The exception to our prejudice is a novel set in Britain, with British characters. That’s because we share a common heritage with our fierce-faced overseas brethren. Plus, they speak the right language, even if wrongly. It’s close enough that the reader can feel caught up in the events and root for the right folks.

Writers hoping for commercial success can venture wherever they like, but they are advised to include at least one American among the top three players, preferably the protagonist. Allied with that character had better be another American, or a foreign analogue. That is, a wisecracking, hard-bitten companion who offsets the enthusiasm that most heroes possess in order to drive a plot forward.

That core cast then become a filter for information the author wishes to impart to readers. Interesting oddities, yes, but viewed as an American bumbling through the jungle would judge them. Through the lens of a perpetual teenager seeking a place to belong in our land.

Exercise: If you have already written a partial or full draft of a novel featuring solely foreigners, look at the core cast to see if any of your major characters could be converted into either a citizen of the U.S. or U.K. The choice is usually the character toward which you feel the most warmth. During the run-through of the next draft, tailor their mannerisms and speech to create a familiar spearhead into the alien world you wish to show the reader.

“One of the most difficult things for any artist to do is create a world that looks both completely alien yet real and possible.” —Jim Lee

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Comparing Drafts

As an editor, I frequently review the evolving stages of an author’s manuscript. Yet I don’t need to read every word of the manuscript multiple times. I already have notes taken during a previous draft about scenes that haven’t changed. For that reason I use a Microsoft Word function called Compare Documents. It asks which two files I’d like to compare, and once they are selected, it produces a third file that shows only the changes made from one draft to the next. I should note that other word-processing programs may have similar functions.

Since many authors are unaware of this tool, I’d like to point out how useful it can be for you as you are working through successive drafts. After all, the process of revision usually takes place over a long period of time, and you can forget what you did a while ago. If you are making a key change for a character on page 300, say, and you know you already made a change in an earlier scene, you can spend fruitless minutes looking for that change, in order to make the two align. With Compare Docs, though, you can skim through the text, looking only for the highlighted (track-changed) material.

Using the function also helps clarify what types of changes you have made in the draft. You can be under the impression that you changed a ton of stuff in a scene, but it still doesn’t seem to work the way you had planned. That may be because the changes you made were picayune, or they didn’t address the basic problem you wanted to address. By using Compare Docs, you can review what in fact you did—and see if the changes hit the intended target.

One other aspect that may prove very helpful is: do you like the changes you made? I don’t want to return to the days of writing out drafts longhand, but I do miss being able to see exactly what I changed. The line was crossed out, and I wrote in words above the line. I would say that half the time, I decide to keep the original. With Compare Docs, all of the changes are highlighted. You can compare the two, and maybe decide that the first stroke was the right one.

“I can't write five words but that I can change seven.” —Dorothy Parker

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Merely Strange

A good author knows that the outer limits, both of personality and of society, must be probed in order to make a novel original. Some writers come to this voyage of discovery more naturally, because that is where their own lives are spent. They may live in the world of the arts, where the unusual is expected, or conversely, on the midnight shift, where the losers in ordinary life can be found.

Accounts about freaks make for good storytelling, and such an author may grin as they write down an outlandish feat. Because a novel is a roomy abode, it can accommodate a panoply of misfit delights. The page count rises to the size of an actual book, and the writer can be forgiven for thinking that the end is in sight. Rollicking good yarns, all of them. Mix them up, making sure each major  character appears in a regular rotation, and the only question left is: who wants to publish this?

The problem with a collection of anecdotes, even exotic ones, is that the reading experience remains flat. That may accord with certain modern literary theories, but it can also be an excuse for a writer who has not yet learned how to write with true depth. In a hodgepodge, the only thread a reader follows is often chronology. Yet twenty years narrated at a distance may be less satisfying than a single day narrated intensely.  

Depth in writing requires winners and losers in the ranking of characters. Certain players appear more often, have a more complete life change. We’ll posit that the novel depicts a collection of roadies for a rock band. If Clarisse the sound mixer is a favorite of the author’s, she cannot be treated the same—i.e., given the same number of pages of coverage—as Chris the personal guitar tuner. Are Clarisse’s problems with her boyfriend, then husband, then estranged partner, more important than Chris’s heroin dabbling or not?

The odd and kooky tales become differentiated according to how important they are to the main characters. You don’t have to leave them out, but they cannot all be narrated with equal dramatic weight. If I don’t care about the character at the heart of the tale, his behavior will be merely bizarre. Maybe funny too, but the point is, his impact on the reader is less if he is only one among a collection of weirdos.

Exercise: When you are sorting through your war stories, divorce the real life models from the content. A story may have really happened to Elle, but if you want to feature Sarah more, it should be given to her. Life, in other words, is used in the employment of art. You may find, as a result, that Sarah’s reactions to what happens in that anecdote add texture to her character.

“One must be a little crazy to write a good novel.” —John Gardner

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Endless Explanations

One of the advantages of the 1st-person narrative voice is the ability for a character to spill out thoughts and comments. The personal touches that this interior work adds can change pedestrian prose into a highly nuanced style. Since the narrator’s view of an event determines how the reader experiences it, you can make the most banal daily undertakings fresh and engaging. 

I am an advocate of the open-spigot approach when you are getting ideas out of your head onto the paper. When they remain whirling upstairs in your brain, their usefulness is compromised by the myriad other ideas you are planning to get into the story somewhere. They also can glow with a promise that often dims when set in the concrete of black type. So, get it down first in order to focus on what you actually have.

When you go back to edit, what you may find is a melange of striking thoughts—the keepers—and what I’ll call notes to yourself. Let’s take an extended example to illustrate. Say you want to capture the prickly interactions between a male teenager and his mother.  The barbs contained in the dialogue may have some sting, but you don’t want the exchange to sound like another show on Nickelodeon. So smart, and aren’t they from L.A.? You add commentary in between the lines of dialogue to define what makes this relationship different. In this case, maybe the boy’s father died a few years back.

During the editing, a primary objective should be to transform as much of the commentary into the dialogue as possible. That is, once you know the relationship, you can craft the lines of dialogue to make the ramifications of the father’s death implicit—both in what they say and how they react to statements. If the boy gave up sports to mind his younger siblings after school, that resentment frames what he says about his siblings when he talks to his mother. It frames how he reacts when she complains about never having a spare moment to herself. As you go through the manuscript, you can look at each sentence of narrative commentary on an issue and ask: “Can what he is saying assume they’re both aware of the issue?” Then you can delete the commentary.

When you winnow out such notes to yourself, what will remain are the more acute thoughts. He may make a sweeping remark to the reader that he knows he dares not say to his mother. He may vow to do something in the future. In this way the thoughts become just another dazzling means of attack.

Exercise: As you’re reviewing, separate out what happened in the past from the present. You can trim remarks about the past, for sure, but most of the notes to cut concern the present. That stuff is dynamic, which you should change it to become active.

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” —Anton Chekhov

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Framing the Issue

In our private thoughts we can dream up provocative ideas about our own lives that, later on, seem ideally suited for inserting in a novel. I’ll use one as a running example throughout this post. “Upon meeting new people, I seem to engender a common response. The person reacts like: I may be a loser, but I’m not so low that I need you as a friend.” 

On the face of it, that thought seems powerful. Oy, what a terrible thing to think about yourself. When inserted in a novel, put down in black and white, however, the thought may start to feel silly, especially after a few rounds of review. It’s so serious, so stark. You poor little worm, you. Rather than throwing it out, though, you may want to consider the context in which it appears.

The first option is to have the character make a joke out of it. He tells someone, “Sometimes, you know what I think? Upon meeting . . .” Now you’ve taken off the ponderous weight. The reader isn’t forced to feel solemn. Yet you’re still putting the character’s opinion out there. People can read between the lines. If you think that framing is too light, have the other character take it seriously. “Oh, Hal, you’re not that bad . . .”

A second possibility is attaching the notion to a character other than the one narrating the scene. That way the onus isn’t placed on the character that the reader is following—i.e., emotionally involved with. It’s some other poor sap. You can even reveal something about your main character by the way she reacts to the pronouncement. “You know, Hallie, I’m really getting sick of  . . .” 

If you feel you have the writing chops, a third option is to double-down. You surround that statement with a number of other self-deprecating thoughts the character has. When a stark idea is couched within fictional “facts,” such as the character narrating the events that led to being dumped by the love of his life, you’ve greased the skids in that direction. Now the thought is a final thump! That guy has got it bad. The sentiment rings true because you took the care to support it.

Exercise: As with so many other facets of writing, you should experiment with your approach. Try all three of the options and see which one strikes you as the most genuine. By way of analogy, think of the statement as a topic sentence in a paragraph (although you may run longer than that). How are you going to build the supplemental sentences around the nugget you really want? 

“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.” —Ernest Hemingway

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Pushing for Stupid

Aspiring authors come to a writing session with the goal of greatness. Some wish to pen eloquent strands of prose. Others wish to emulate bestselling writers they enjoy. Whether the aim is high- or low-brow, the dream shining in their mind is the same. If I write well enough, readers will love me.

After finishing a chapter, or a first draft, that writer may become distressed if the words written don’t ring true. A high-flown description of a beloved beach doesn’t seem to work with the dead body found in the dunes. Or, the narrative prose doesn’t seem to match with the more pedestrian dialogue passages. You decide that the tone needs to be made more consistent. You work harder during the revision so that everything sparkles. Yet the revised draft may feel like merely a gilded version of the same uneven enterprise.

The question to ask yourself is: where are these strenuous efforts taking place? Presumably in the silence of a lonely room. Even if you prefer showing off at Starbucks, you need to block out what others are saying. And that turn inward may be precisely the problem.

The inattention to the way real people stumble through their lives was brought home to me while reading George Saunders’ Pastoralia. The characters that fill these short stories are nearly incoherent. Their dialogue is inexpressive, and their thinking runs in ruts that show the most limited of horizons. That is the human race: Cro-Magnon at heart, and the smartest try to advance civilization. 

Don’t leave out the messy parts. Unless you’re creating a utopia, you’re better off listening to what is said in Starbucks. Actually, that’s highfalutin itself. Eavesdrop in the supermarket aisle or hardware store. Read the responses to online articles. People are not shy about spouting off their versions of the truth. You just are not capturing what they say. You’re holed up in your figurative cabin in the woods, trying to imitate what real life is like.

Oddly, common parlance has a cadence that can propel your writing. The characters that you want to fill out themes can be more varied when you consider real-life models. When you’re not melding toward unity, variety can be the spice that fills your novel.

Exercise: Because dialogue tends to be opaque, not saying what the person is feeling, trying to sketch a type can easily lead to a stereotype. To counteract that, try to flip the coin and find the person’s possible sorrows. They don’t have to be deep. Being ugly as a teenager can leave scars that affect someone’s behavior for the rest of their life. Put the type on that balancing point.

“People are much deeper than stereotypes. That's the first place our minds go. Then you get to know them and you hear their stories, and you say, ‘I'd have never guessed.’” —Carson Kressley

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

 

The Mythical Reader

The reading public has been dragged into all sorts of discussions about how to make a book better. An author can claim to know their readers better than an agent, or editor, or publisher—who all then watch the book sink like a stone once released to such readers. More commonly, the process works the other way around: an author is advised by said publishing professionals what will sell a book to readers—and often the book still sinks like a stone. 

By contrast, in my editing practice I have found that “the reader” is a very useful tool in enjoining an author to push themselves to greater efforts. That’s because an author is encased in a cocoon during the writing process. The made-up world gains definition in the author’s mind; characters start to develop beyond names on a page. That’s all fine, but the size of the cocoon is determined by both the writer’s ability and experience. When the author emerges from the gauzy sac, they often find that the reading public doesn’t care much for their butterfly. 

I use the paradigm of “the reader” to inculcate better efforts. That’s because so many authors in my earlier years would respond to my suggestions as though I was speaking only for myself. I have had more than one author respond to my suggestions (balloons in the right-hand margin) with their own balloons—and not a single changed word on the page. They seem to think I inhabit my own cocoon, barking out my personal opinions as I poke my head out of my little hole to communicate with them. 

That’s because criticism hurts. Writing is deeply personal. When I talk to an author for the first time, I hear so often: “You can say anything about the book you like. I want you to be honest with me.” Being the wily psychologist than any adviser must be in order to survive, I thereby take away the opposite meaning: this writer must be handled delicately.

“The reader” has become the megaphone I use to shatter the illusion. Rather than “I don’t understand why,” I write, “The reader may not understand why . . .” a character performs or reacts to a plot event. Same point, but without the threat of a personal attack. Better yet, it helps to break through the writer’s self-absorption. They may think they don’t want to please anyone, that they’re just writing for themselves. But as the merest child sitting on their parent’s lap could tell you, writing is the art of touching someone.

Exercise: As you review the draft, keep asking yourself one question: would the reader I imagine would like my book understand why this is happening? If you’re not sure, you probably need to make the point clearer. Don’t worry about pellucid prose. Make sure, even if the reader has to work harder, that the point can be grasped.

“What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.” —William Blake

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.