Is It Done Yet - Part 7: What the Reader Needs

This is the seventh and final installment of my series aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. It's based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of 2020, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

 

Part 7 – Stages of Revision

 

Stage 4: What the Reader Needs

 

This final stage — what the reader needs — is often the most neglected phase of the revision process. Writers often talk about keeping an ideal reader in the back of their minds as they write, and can convincingly declare, “my audience is college-educated women, 35-50, with an interest in horticulture, literature, and astrophysics.” While that may be true, most often the reader a writer envisions during the writing process is pretty much a stand-in for themselves, and the interests of the "ideal" reader usually align closely with the subject matter of their novel.

 

This final stage of revision is not about that, though. This final stage is about asking questions of your manuscript to make sure you have allowed space for your reader — whoever your actual, living, breathing reader is — to fully experience your novel in an enjoyable way. I can almost hear some people protesting, “But I do that all the time!” as I write this. From my experience as an editor and also an avid reader and fellow writer, I’m going to say, “No, you don’t.”

 

Respect Your Future Readers

Genre

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this stage, I’m going to make a quick digression to demonstrate one of the major ways in which I see writers not taking the reader into consideration.

 

“I don’t read this genre, but I’m writing a YA/romance/fantasy/MG/science fiction/mystery/literary/thriller/spec fict/(fill-in-the-blank) novel.”

 

I have heard or read this phrase so many times over the years, and my response has always been, “Then why are you writing it?”

 

In the most basic way of taking the reader into consideration, if you do not read the genre in which you are writing, you are doing your readers a disservice. The readers of your genre DO read it. They are familiar with its tropes and stories. They have opinions about what makes a good book. They have expectations. If you fail to meet those expectations, you can expect scathing reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. And, remember, agents are your readers, too. In fact, they are the reader you have to impress first, and they are extremely knowledgeable about whatever genres they represent. They have to be because they have to anticipate what an acquiring editor (the person who actually publishes the books that set reader expectations) will want to read.

 

Reading the genre in which you’re writing, becoming familiar with the pacing, structure, tropes, characters, narrative arcs, etc. is, quintessentially, an act of respect for your reader.

  

Book Length

Book length is another area where I see writers repeatedly dismiss both reader expectations and publishing conventions to justify a book that is far too long or too short. Usually, their justification is couched in terms that “the book needed to be that length.” Sometimes, that’s true, but the vast majority of the time it’s not. Those optimum word counts aren’t arbitrary.

 

The single, biggest expense in publishing a book is the production of the physical object. The more pages, the greater the cost. That’s why certain genres have “sweet spots” for book length. (You can find lots of articles about optimum word count, here’s one from Writer’s Digest. Again, those word counts have created reader expectations. While some books exceed those word counts, they’re generally not debut fiction. Even George RR Martin wouldn’t have been able to sell his 1,500 page tomes if he didn’t have the sales record and fan base to justify the expense of publishing those books.

On the other side of the spectrum, because of the cost of production, book costs don't vary that much even for a short book. So, it's difficult to justify why the reader should pay basically the same amount for a 200-page book as they do for a 350-page one. In addition, small books don't look as impressive on bookstore shelves.  

 

That’s How I Wanted To Write It

This is another thing I’ve heard from writers over the years, both irl and online. All I’m going to say is, this is about what the writer needs, not the reader. If you’re justifying something in your book because that’s how you wanted to write it, you need to stop and ask yourself some basic questions from the reader’s point of view.

 

While it should go without saying, I’m going to say it any way: if you are writing for the purpose of publication — either traditional or self-published — you have to take the reader into consideration if you want your books to sell.

 

Basic Questions for Stage 4: What the Reader Needs

 

The overarching questions at stage four are: what journey do you want the reader to take from the beginning of your novel to the end? What kind of journey do you want it to be? What do you want the reader to experience? And where do you want them to end up? Do you want them to walk away with a deeper understanding of a particular time period and way of life? Do you want them to gain insight or change their perceptions of an issue? Do you want them to have been entertained? Do you want them crying?

 

The Macroscopic Level

On a macroscopic level, are you directing your reader’s attention to the things that are important? Take a look at how you introduce characters, scenes, and significant moments in the plot. Do you give them the space and attention that indicates their importance to the reader and tells the reader to pay attention? This doesn’t necessarily mean big paragraphs or lengthy descriptions or “Dialogue. That. Screams, HEY! This is important!”

 

Instead, it’s a matter of making sure the reader’s attention is where you want it to be. I recently edited a manuscript in which the writer buried the most important moments within scenes that were focused on something else entirely (for example: the important moment was about the MC forgetting to return a library book, but the MC remembers the book just as they get into a minor car accident – the car accident grabs the reader’s attention because it’s dramatic, but it didn’t have any ramifications for the narrative arc, whereas the book did). When they’d refer back to that moment several pages later, I had no idea what they were talking about and had to go back.

 

I like to use the idea of portraiture to explain what I mean about giving important moments their space. In multi-subject portraits, artists use frames — either literal frames like doorways or windows, or figurative frames like the arc of tree branches or the line of a path on the ground — to give each subject their own space. It makes it easier for the eye to concentrate on the individual elements and keeps complex images from becoming a jumbled mess. The artist directs the viewer in how to see the work.

 

Writers have it a little easier because words and sentences are linear. A reader can only be where the writer wants them to be. In a movie, a character walks into a room and the viewer sees the whole room (Oh, look! There’s an elephant statue on the desk. I love elephants!), but in a written work (even if your reader is listening to the audio version), the ONLY thing the reader encounters are those things the writer deems important enough to point out. Those elephants? In the movie, they could be meaningless props. In a book, I better be calling attention to them because they relate to the narrative in some way or else they’re wasting the reader’s time and energy. 

In her book, Wired for Story, Lisa Cron talks about the neuroscience behind the reader's experience. Our brains, Cron says, require lots of energy. When we're asked to remember something, it requires energy that could be directed elsewhere. Asking readers to remember a vast number of details or minor characters without there being a reason for their inclusion in the book means you're asking the reader to expend energy on something that has no value. 

 

In my editing, I end up talking about real estate vs payoff to a significant number of clients. What this means is paying attention to how much time you spend on an element of the book, and how much payoff it has for the reader. If you’re writing a mystery and spend sixty page setting up the first clue (which is usually not a major reveal, just the thing that kicks the investigation off or leads to another, more significant clue), that’s a lot of space given over to something that is of relatively minor importance. Conversely, if you’re writing a romance and gloss over the initial meeting of your main couple without a sentence that shows the reader the attraction between them while there’s something happening between two other characters that takes up ten page, you haven’t directed the reader toward the most important moment.

This is very true of the opening pages of a novel. Those first ten or so pages are the most valuable real estate of your entire book. Don't spend them on ANYTHING that isn't 100% relevant to the forward movement of the novel. This includes pages of backstory, introducing multiple characters the reader will never see again, detailed descriptions of the landscape (unless the reader's detailed understanding of the landscape is necessary in that moment in the book). Basically, the questions you need to ask of any detail or element of your book are: Does the reader need to know this? Does the reader need to know this right now? And does the reader need this much information in order to move forward with the story?

 

It’s a delicate balance. My best advice for figuring out real estate vs payoff is to pay attention when you read books in your genre to how other writers work this balance, when it’s effective and when it isn’t, and analyze what they do — how much space to they give to various elements of the story? How do they indicate something is important to the reader? When something doesn’t work for you, figure out why. Are there too many details that don’t mean anything? Too much space for too little payoff? Is there little to no indication of how important something will be later on in the book?

 

The Microscopic Level

This, finally, is the place to do what most people think of when they think about revision: polish your language.

 

Once you have your story figured out and your narrative arc humming along, the book has a central unifying force and all elements are working in service to it, and you’ve consider what information the reader needs and when they need it, it’s finally time to take a look at the words you’re using to tell your story.

 

If you can do it, line editors are an amazing investment. Not only do you have someone look at your book on the sentence level, but, when you get those edits back, it forces you to go through your manuscript at the sentence level. Even if you don’t have the resources, it’s essential to do this final read-through and edit because it’s where you find your repetitions, overused phrases, and excess words. I highly recommend Smart Edit which is a nifty program that will show you the number of times you use particular words or phrases, find clichés and common errors (for example: homophonic typos such as “there” instead of “they’re”).

 

As you read, ask yourself what words or phrases can you eliminate or condense because they’re not adding to the reader’s sense of the scene. An example from my own novel, currently in final edits before proofreading:

He turned away from the dance floor and headed back to the bar, which was already three-deep with people trying to get the attention of the two bartenders, who were making drinks as fast as they could.

In this sentence, the final clause is unnecessary. Of course, the bartenders are making drinks as fast as they could because the bar is busy. It also isn’t germane to the scene and adds an unnecessary detail. In addition, the “three-deep” and “two bartenders” is jarring. My final take on the sentence:

He turned away from the dance floor and headed back to the bar, which was already three-deep with people trying to get the attention of the bartenders.

Do you miss the words I cut? Does it lessen your sense of how crowded the bar is? Or does the shorter sentence have pretty much the same impact as its longer version?

 

This is the point in the revision process where it finally makes sense to polish your prose, and, once that’s complete, you should be ready to move forward in the querying process.

 

And so, there we have it. The stages of revision from your initial draft to fully-realized novel to polished manuscript. If you’re starting the query process, here’s my blogpost about creating your list of agents to query.

 

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at diane.glaz@gmail.com

 

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs

 

 

 

Is It Done Yet - Part 6: Destabilizing and Inciting Incidents

This is the sixth installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. The series is based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

Is it Done Yet - Part 6: Destabilizing and Inciting Incidents

As I was getting ready to move to the final stage of revision, What the Reader Needs, it occurred to me that I haven’t touched on a very important aspect of What the Story Needs: The destabilizing and inciting incidents. So I’m going to do that now before moving on to the final stage of getting your manuscript ready to query.

These two moments are absolutely crucial for getting your novel moving forward, and, surprisingly, a lot of the manuscripts I edit miss them, minimize them, conflate them, or have them occur too late. If you’ve ever gotten comments that your story starts in the wrong place, chances are good you’ve misplaced either the destabilizing incident or the inciting incident.

So what are they?

The Destabilizing Incident

The destabilizing incident, as the name implies, is the thing that unbalances your main character’s world. It’s Frodo Baggins when Bilbo disappears from his birthday party in Lord of the Rings. It’s the renting of Netherfield Park in Pride and Prejudice. It’s the discovery of the direwolf pups – one for each of the Stark children – in Game of Thrones. It’s Athena telling Telemachus he needs to leave Ithaca and visit his father’s friends in the Odyssey. It’s the moment the main character’s life is interrupted by something that breaks them out of their regular routine or pattern.

Though destabilizing incidents need to be present in the story, not all of them occur onstage. In the famous opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the destabilizing incident has already occurred – the wife’s discovery of Count Oblonsky’s affair with the children’s governess – three days prior to the opening of the novel. The moment in which Dolly discovers the infidelity is given to the reader in retrospect, but the focus is on the upheaval (the destabilization) this discovery creates from the first sentence.

Whether it occurs onstage or off, the destabilizing incident almost always occurs within the first few pages, even better (for contemporary fiction) if it occurs on page one. I’ve referred before to the opening pages of The Hunger Games and urge you to take a look at it.

Collins opens the book with about 300 words of Katniss Everdeen’s regular life – the poverty, Katniss’s cold life-or-death pragmatism, the restrictions of the society in which she lives. There’s also the sense of something unsettling about to occur. In the very first paragraph, which is three sentences long, Collins references the bad dreams Katniss’s sister has been having: “Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.” Collins doesn’t tell you what “the reaping” is until later, but, importantly, she conveys the sense this thing makes this day different even as Katniss goes about her regular routine of meeting Gale in the forest to hunt.

An effective destabilizing incident really has two components – the ordinary world the main character exists in, and the event that upends the ordinary world.

The destabilizing incident is important to both the story and the reader.

For the story, it’s important because it sets the main character up for the inciting incident. The main character’s world is no longer routine, their awareness is heightened, possibly things no longer fit together the way they used to making the main character restless and ready for change.

For the reader, the ordinary world is the baseline that allows the reader to see the changes that occur in the main character over the course of the story. If the reader doesn’t know what’s normal or routine for the main character (not just in their external world, but also their internal one of reactions, emotions, decision making, etc.), then the reader has no understanding of the effect of the events on the main character.

The Inciting Incident

The inciting incident is that event, without which, nothing else in the story can occur.

In the Lord of the Rings, it’s Frodo picking up the One Ring (though you could also argue, it’s Bilbo giving up the Ring before he leaves the Shire). In Pride and Prejudice, it’s Elizabeth Bennett dancing with Mr. Darcy. In Game of Thrones, it’s Robert Baratheon’s arrival at Winterfell and Bran’s fall from the tower. In the Odyssey, it’s Hermes telling Calypso to let Odysseus go home. In Anna Karenina, it’s the titular character’s arrival, having shared her journey from St. Petersburg with Vronsky’s mother. And, in the Hunger Games, it’s when Prim is selected as tribute.

While the destabilizing incident can occur offstage and still be effective, the inciting incident needs to occur onstage where the reader can experience it (notice I say “experience” it – in contemporary fiction, it’s most effective if this moment is portrayed in scene, shown to the reader, rather than the reader being told about it in exposition).

The function of the inciting incident is to generate the energy needed to propel the main character (and the reader) into the story. Think of these two moments in your story as if the destabilizing incident lights the fuse on a stick of dynamite and the inciting incident is when the dynamite explodes.

But, wait, you say, your novel isn’t a thriller with explosive pacing, it’s literary fiction. Even so, even when the pacing of the novel and its focus is on more introspective and quite moments, the inciting incident is still the moment that propels the main character forward into the rest of the story. Austen’s pyrotechnics come from the verbal sparring that occurs between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy while they dance, setting up Elizabeth’s disdain for the recalcitrant Mr. Darcy and their subsequent interactions, including her willingness to believe Wickham’s story about Darcy cheating him of his birthright. The essential aspect of the inciting incident is that, without it, nothing else happens in the book, and that holds true no matter the book’s genre.

Typically, the inciting incident occurs somewhere around the 10-15% mark (in an 85,000 word novel, that would put it between 8,500 and 12,750 words or approximately between pages 25 and 40), though I’ve seen it effectively placed as late as page 50 in longer works. What’s absolutely essential is that the destabilizing incident creates tension for the reader, draws them forward with the awareness that something is about to change, and the inciting incident releases that tension in a way the propels the reader and the story forward. Both events need to be meaningful, organic to the central organizing principle of the story, and relate to the story’s climactic moment and ultimate resolution.

One of the reasons I chose to include this post in a series focused on getting your manuscript ready to query is because these two moments in your novel occur at the very beginning, the pages most likely to be read by an agent. Without them, the reader (whether it's an agent, editor, or someone who bought your book) doesn't have the sense of a story getting ready to be told. They're crucial moments, in the early pages of your novel, that can make the difference between engaging a reader and having the reader say, "No thanks."

And with that, I promise, the next installment of this series will deal with the final stage of revision: What the Reader Needs. See you next time!

If you'd like to hear more about how to use destabilizing and inciting incidents to create a dynamic opening for your novel, I'm speaking on this topic at the Thoughtful Book Festival on Friday, August 28, 2020. Please go HERE to reserve your tickets. 


If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs

Is it Done Yet - Part 5: What the Story (also) Needs

This is the fifth installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. It's based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

Part 5 – Stages of Revision

Stage 3: Telling the Real Story

While Stage 2 dealt with the macroview of the manuscript (what’s working), Stage 3 looks at the microview (how is it working) with one important exception. Stage 3 is guided by your novel’s premise, the thing around which everything else in the novel turns, the thing that drives the action of your novel forward, that guides your characters’ exploration of the novel’s essential questions, and the thing that provides the narrative arc to your story.

Understanding your novel’s premise is absolutely crucial for writing a succinct and compelling query letter. It’s the number one issue I saw with query letters (and submissions) in the two and a half years I read submissions for a literary agent. As much as no writer wants to hear this, the simple truth is if you have a solid understanding of your novel’s premise, the query letter becomes fairly easy to write. I think most writers have problems with query letters because they haven’t pushed far enough into the revision process to get to this stage (let alone the final one that focuses on the reader’s experience of your story).

I’m going to repeat something I said earlier: the revision process isn’t about the number of drafts you’ve done, it’s about how close to query-ready the manuscript gets. There’s no magic number of drafts that will do the trick if you aren’t asking the right questions of the manuscript.

I also want to add that, even though I’ve broken down the revision process into stages, the stages don’t necessarily correspond to the number of revisions it will take to move the manuscript to query-ready. Some writers, especially ones with several novels under their belts, can do most of this work in a single draft, while others need several. The number of revisions may also vary from work to work. For myself, I’ve got one novel that has taken seven complete revisions and more than a decade to get to what might possibly be Stage 3 (I think I know what it’s about now and can move forward with that guiding every scene), but I’ve also just finished a novel that pretty much wrote as a polished manuscript from page one to the end.

Most of my clients seek help when they’re mired somewhere in the second or third stage and frustrated because they can’t quite get the novel to function correctly or come together as a cohesive whole. Remember, the goal is to create a fully-realized novel that’s driven forward by a central focus or organizing principal.

This is why I call Stage 3 “Telling the (Real) Story.”

This stage of revision is driven by what’s at the heart, the core, of the story you’re telling.

Every writer has something that sets them writing. The poet Richard Hugo in his marvelous book on craft The Triggering Town, talks about this moment of inspiration that propels the writer to the page. Whether it’s a line of dialogue, a situation, a character, something sets you off on this journey to write. If you’re writing a novel, that spark is big enough, intriguing enough, important enough to keep you working on it for months, years even. But, as Hugo observes, something happens to that spark and all the ideas that follow. They begin to take on a life of their own, they change and grow. New ideas, better ideas sometimes, come along and present intriguing alternatives. Sometimes, the book you thought you were writing turns out not to be the one you end up with. Sometimes a plot element or character has taken over the book and thrown the whole thing off course. The story may have all the same pieces you started out with – the same characters, the same plot, same setting and story arc – but something’s changed and the pieces don’t fit together the way you thought they would.

Or, nothing’s changed, but that incredible Franksteinian lightning bolt did not strike and, instead of being a vibrant novel brimming with life, you’ve got a collection of words that flop around in kind of an interesting manner. Sort of. If you squint in just the right light…

If you’ve worked on your draft in Stage 2 with an eye towards fully assimilating all the “ghost marks” of its creation into the forward movement of the story, you should have a fairly streamlined manuscript. All the pieces are pretty much in the right place, the pacing is pretty much on target so things happen in the narrative arc when they should, plot elements build on one another to create complexity, major characters have discernable arcs from the start of the book to the end. When I say Stage 2 deals with things on a macrolevel, this is what I mean.

The microlevel of Stage 3 is about making sure that all those elements and details are the right ones for the story you’re telling. In order to do that, you first need to understand what your story is really about.

In many ways, this is where genre writers have it easier than general fiction writers. Genres not only come with a set of conventions, they’re genres because they tell a certain type of story. Mysteries are driven by someone needing to figure out the cause of something that happened. Thrillers are driven by the need to stop something dire from happening. Romance is driven by the relationship between two (sometimes three or more, depending on your subgenre) people (Please note: this is not to say genre novels are formulaic – far from it. Part of the joy of reading genre is watching skilled writers take a well-worn trope and reinvent it or provide readers with the expected ending (the couple ends up together, the bad guys get caught) in an unexpected way. My point is that genre writers don’t have to figure out what drives their novels forward, it’s built into the genre).

Fantasy and historical fiction are a little more complicated because the stories told in these genres can be driven by a multitude of ideas, but what they have in common is the need to create a realistic world in which certain rules govern what characters can and cannot do.

It’s sometimes a bit trickier to define the premise of a general fiction novel no matter if it’s commercial, upmarket or literary because, to paraphrase Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale, the whole of human existence is the writer’s subject. But figuring out what drives YOUR novel forward is crucial for being able to understand if all of your novel’s elements work in service to its basic premise. Sometimes it helps to have outside readers at this point because they can often see things that the writer is too close to recognize.

In any event, whether you’re looking at your own manuscript or asking readers to take a look, you’re looking for those elements that tie the work together, the question that underlies the novel’s narrative arc, the way in which different characters represent different aspects of an issue. This is where the microview reveals the bigger picture. The minute choices you’ve made for language, voice, details, repetition of imagery, balance between exposition and action/narration and scene, choices for point of view, setting reveal the central premise.

Yes, there will be things that don’t work or are slightly off – make note of them as you do your readthrough but don’t try to fix them yet. This is the moment to get brutally honest with yourself and flag those passages or scenes you love but are secretly hoping no one notices that they don’t work or you think “yes, but…” when you read them or you flat out get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Listen to your intuition here and be as honest as you can. You’re not cutting anything yet, you’re just seeking to find those soft places where the novel doesn’t live up to what you envision.

The good news here, by the way, is that most often the problem is one of execution. One of my guiding principles as an editor is: honor the impulse. Nine times out of ten, what I see is that the writer had the correct impulse for a scene or a detail, but the execution was off – the scene happens at the wrong moment, the writer backed off putting pressure on the characters at a crucial moment, a detail doesn’t quite have the impact the writer is looking for to create a multi-layered image, the element only functions on the most surface level rather than resonates with other elements in the story.

In one of my own novels, my main character sees someone he hasn’t seen since they were younger. I wanted there to be a moment of confusion but some way for my MC to recognize this character. Initially, the character had a shortened ring finger on his left hand – the result of an accident when he was young – but I knew that wasn’t the correct detail. It didn’t resonate with anything else in the book, and, this recognition scene was important because it sets up elements that happen at the book’s climax. So, the detail had to be right. When I pushed into, questioned the detail against the central premise of the novel, it opened up an entire subplot that was absolutely perfect, and I realized the detail I needed wasn’t a shortened ring finger (surface level detail that only helps my MC recognize this other character) but a ring (detail that resonates with other themes of the book and has a payoff in the climactic scene). Honoring the impulse that led me to focus on the character’s hands but questioning the execution and making the choice more conscious, led me to the perfect detail.

This is the level of interrogation that needs to happen in Stage 3. You’re looking for the central premise, the question you’re exploring, the element that drives all the action forward. This is the central organizing principal for your novel and the thing that all the other elements work in service to. Stage 3 is about defining it and evaluating all the elements of your story against it.

Another timeline exercise?

Yup. This one is a little different, though. This timeline puts every event that is mentioned in your book (whether it appears on stage or off) in chronological order. There are several reasons for doing this. One, it will help you see where the story might still be bogging down with backstory. Two, it helps you see what backstory is necessary and how those events interrelate (this is especially important if you’re novel is non-linear). Three, when I do this exercise for clients’ books, I often find the very first event in the chronology is important for finding what the book is about and helps guide the writer toward recognizing the essential question.

At the end of Stage 3, you should have a real sense of what your book is about, and every element of the story works to explore, deepen, complicate, understand, and communicate that idea.

In the next post, I cover a necessary and important part of Stage 3: correctly locating and using your novel's destabilizing and inciting incidents to create the dynamic opening contemporary publishing demands. 

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me

email: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email or on Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base who's work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs

Is It Done Yet? Part 4 – What the Story Needs

This is the fourth installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. It's based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

Part 4 – Stages of Revision

What the Story Needs

In Part 3, I talked about the first stage of revision, Telling (Yourself) the Story. Essentially, a Stage 1 manuscript is driven by what the writer needs to know or discovers about their characters, plot, story, etc. There’s often a good-sized chunk of backstory or core dump of research. A Stage 1 manuscript sometimes withholds crucial information until the end of the novel, which leaves the reader guessing about character motivation or being bewildered about the situation a character is in.

In the previous post, I explained that this often happens because the writer has completed that first draft and moved on to editing without taking the time to understand the story they’re telling. They assume that the backstory they needed to write is an essential element of the story or that the withheld information builds suspense. Sometimes it does, but most of the time those elements need to be more fully digested and integrated into the story for the novel to move forward in a dynamic way.

This is why the next steps are an important part of the revision process. Stage 2, Telling the Story, and Stage 3, Telling the Real Story, are driven by the needs of the story. These stages ask you to take a look at what you put on the page at both the macro and micro level and turn all the subconscious choice you made while writing into conscious choices that work in service to the larger story.

In order to do that, there are two things you need to do before you begin revising:

Read your draft – Just read it as quickly as you can without making any changes. No matter how painful this is (and it is sometimes VERY painful), it’s important for you to get a sense of the draft as a whole.

Reading the draft is important because it’s difficult to get a good feel for the rhythm of your novel while you’re writing it because some scenes take forever to write but are very quick to read, while other scenes that go on for pages may only take us a few hours to write.

You also catch things like continuity errors (Did you change the name of a character halfway through the novel? Change a detail in the character’s history? Leave a subplot unresolved because you realized it wasn’t working?) and repetitions of ideas, phrases, imagery, etc. Take notes if it makes you feel more comfortable, but don’t get bogged down in revising just yet.

If it’s distracting to do this on either your computer or hard copy, I recommend emailing your manuscript to your Kindle reader. It will show up, formatted as a book, in your library (you can find the email address for your device on the Amazon homepage – scroll to the bottom and click on “Manage Your Content and Devices”).

Create a timeline – this isn’t just a scene-by-scene outline of your novel (another tool that’s useful if you’re feeling ambitious), but a timeline of your story with indications of scenes that are in the present storytelling moment (á), scenes that are backstory or flashbacks (â), or digressions (à).

This exercise does two things. 1) it helps you see the novel more objectively because you’re not reading it as much as processing the information, and 2) it gives you a visual of how often the forward movement of the novel is suspended, breaking what John Gardner called “the continuous dream of the novel.”

This is why I make such a big deal about backstory. Every time you interrupt the present storytelling moment and break the forward flow of the action, the reader has to do a mental recalibration to locate your characters within the story (How old are they? Where are they living? What was the last thing that happened to them?). And every time the reader leaves the dreamlike state and goes into their head, you give the real world a chance to intrude – What do I have to do today? What time is it? – and risk the reader putting down your book, possibly never to return.

So now you’re armed with some important information about your draft. You’ve got a sense of what is and isn’t working, as well as a sense of what’s essential to the story and what you needed to write in order to tell it. Now it’s time to turn to…

Stage 2: Telling the Story

One of the biggest mistakes I think writers make is believing that everything they wrote during a Stage 1 draft is important to their story. It is very important and necessary to the writer because it’s the way we discover the story we’re really telling. But it’s not necessarily important to the actual story or to the reader.

Stage 2 is about fully assimilating the hallmarks of the story’s creation and making active, conscious choices about how the story is being told. Revision here is focused on the questions of what it is:

·       the novel’s structure (is it linear or modular; chronological or asynchronous)
·       the novel’s market – literary (language driven), upmarket (character driven), or commercial (plot driven)
·       its genre and the genre’s conventions (does it conform to reader expectations or subvert them?)
·       pacing (does the novel hit the right turn or complication at the right time for its market?)
·       POV (single, multiple, 1^st, 3^rd? Does that choice give you the best vantage point from which to tell the story?)
·       descriptions/details/setting (do they work in harmony or do they feel “off”)
·       what questions does your novel explore and do the choices you’ve made work in service to them?
·       information flow (what gets revealed when)

Of these, the last one is where the timeline comes in. If you see a lot of breaks from the present storytelling moment, take a look at the backstory or flashback moments and decide what the most relevant pieces of information are. Is there a way to convey this information in the present moment of the story through character action or reaction? In the details of a scene or the setting?

In my work as an editor, I most often see writers using backstory within the first fifty pages as a way to give the reader information about their character or the situation the writer thinks they need to know. In real life, this isn’t how we get to know people or understand the world. There isn’t a narrator to sit us down and give us someone’s entire history, so we’ve become very good at discovering patterns of behavior and learning in the moment. The same is true when we want readers to get to know our characters and the world in which they live. Finding ways to integrate the important information is more natural to the way people learn and discover.

Another thing to pay attention to as you revise is what I call “real estate vs payoff.” How much space are you giving in your novel to minute pieces of information? One of the first books I edited back when I was working for a literary agent, was a mystery that took 65 pages to set up the very first clue. Usually, that first clue in a mystery is pretty low stakes, the more important pieces of information will come later as the plot becomes more complicated and the situation more dire. I suggested summarizing most of the original setup, streamlining the scene where the information is revealed so only the most relevant parts of the conversation were rendered in dialogue, and simplifying what leads the main character to this moment in the first place. The result rebalanced the pacing of the novel, so this first clue took up space (real estate) was more in line with how important (payoff) it was to the overall story.

The same is true no matter what genre you write. A literary novel I worked on recently took roughly 5% of the entire novel to explain a small detail of how the world of this novel functions. By integrating that facet into the way characters interact from the very first page, the explanation wasn’t necessary. This, again, is a part of paying attention to the difference between what you (the writer) need to write to create the world and what the reader needs to see or know to understand it.

The main thing to keep in mind when working on this revision is paying attention to what’s truly essential to the story and what isn't. 

Up next: Stage 3 – Telling the Real Story (I’ll try to make it a shorter blog post, but I’m not promising anything).

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs