Is It Done Yet? Part 3 - What the Writer Needs

This is the third 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"

Part 3 – What the Writer Needs

The goal of revision is to produce a fully realized novel. As I said in part 1 of this series, a fully realized novel is one in which all the novel’s elements work together to create the dynamic forward movement that propels the characters (and the reader) from the first word to the in a satisfying and unified manner. There is a clear and well-defined premise or central question that organizes the plot, characters, theme, setting, relevant details, structure, information flow, and sequence of scenes. In a fully realized novel, everything that is on the page has a purpose and a payoff and is relevant and necessary to create the overall effect of the work.

This is why, in my editing work, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the number of revisions writers tell me they’ve completed. There’s no magic number of revisions after which the manuscript is suddenly done. Instead, I look at revision in terms of stages. Without understanding the stages, it’s difficult to know what work you need to do in order to bring the novel into its fully realized form, and a lot of the issues that I see in clients’ work stems from issues that arose in the initial stage of writing and were never integrated into the story.

I want to stop for a moment and define my use of “story” vs “plot.” There are a number of definitions out there, but this is how I think about them and how I will be using them in these posts. 

Plot is the string of events that occur within the scope and timeline of your novel (this includes events that happen “off-camera”).

Example: the king died; the queen died

Story is the connective tissue that creates meaning between the events, their effect on the characters, and the selection of details used to provide context.

Example: the kind died, then the queen died of grief.

Or: the king was poisoned by his brother, and the queen, knowing nothing of this, married the brother to keep her crown, only to die when she drank poison her new husband intended for her son.

Or: the king encounters a young man on the road who refuses to move out of his way. The two fight, and the king is killed. The young man eventually comes to a new city where he meets the queen, they fall in love, and marry. Years later, when hardship strikes the city, it is revealed that the young man is actually the queen’s son. The queen goes mad and kills herself.

So when I talk about the story or writing in service to your story, I am talking about it in these terms.

Stage 1: Telling (Yourself) the Story

No matter if you are a plotter or a pantser, there’s no getting around this one because it is the very basic stage of taking your idea from inspiration to completed first (or zero) draft.

I liken this stage to when you do or experience something. In the moment, it simply happens. You don’t necessarily know what the outcome is going to be, so you don’t have the perspective yet to know what’s going to be the most important aspect of the experience. You don’t know what was relevant before it happened, that maybe gave you warning about it, and you don’t know yet where to direct your reader’s attention. You’re figuring all that out as you write or outline.  

This stage is driven by the writer’s needs. What do you, the writer, need to know in order to tell this story? What do you need to know about your characters in order to make them compelling, know their conflicts, their reactions, who they are? What world do you need to build around your characters (even if you aren’t writing SF/F or spec fic, you still build a world within your novel that has rules specific to your story. In general fiction, most of the rules mirror the world we live in, but there are still rules that govern how your character interacts with friends, families, work peers, etc., that have an effect on your novel) in order for it to be the most effective container for your story?

This stage is about discovery, and most writers have to write A LOT more than the reader will ever need to know in order to figure these things out. In addition, the things the reader truly needs to know may only arrive on the page after two or three pages of backstory, scene setting, dialogue, etc. Most of the decisions you make at this stage are not going to be conscious or deliberate. Happy accidents, synergy and inspiration, sudden connections and realizations abound in this initial draft, and, often times, the completed Stage 1 draft reflects this.

A completed Stage 1 manuscript will often contain a lot of backstory, especially in the first 50 pages. The writer needed to write the backstory because the writer needed to know these things about the character or the situation, and writers often leave these “core dumps” of backstory in the draft where the ideas occurred to them.

The advice I most often give to clients is: 1) backstory is not story, and 2) backstory ONLY becomes relevant to the reader when it informs the forward movement of the narrative. I’ll come back to this more when I discuss the next stages of revision.

Some of the other hallmarks of a completed Stage 1 manuscript (and remember, all this is fine at Stage 1 while you’re discovering your story, it’s what the manuscript SHOULD be doing here):

-        “Withheld” information: I put withheld in quotes because I think what happens during the initial writing is the writer discovers something really wonderful about the character or the situation. Instead of incorporating it earlier and building the foundation for it, the writer holds back that information thinking it will be a dramatic twist or character reveal. The problem here is that, without knowing that piece of information, the reader might not be able to understand your character’s motivation. My second most-given piece of advice to clients: the drama is not in the thing (the reveal), the drama is in your character’s reaction to the thing, the complications is causes, and the way in which your character resolves it. In most cases, and in most genres, you actually increase tension and drama by letting your reader in on it.

-        False starts and disjointed second or third acts: this occurs because the writer started off in one direction and wrote toward this new idea without going back to the earlier pages and revising them to build the foundation for the new resolution or complication.

-        Mushy middles/second or third acts: basically, it feels like characters are wandering around in search of a plot or that thing happens, thing happens, thing happens, without the connective sense of story that gives meaning and subtext to those plot points. Events in the novel feel contrived rather than arising organically from the characters and their conflicts. There can also be a lot of what I call “place holder” scenes where the writer knows something needs to happen but hasn’t chosen quite the right something in the right place yet.

-        Character overreactions: this is another form of place holding is caused because the writer knows the character needs to react but doesn’t know the character well enough yet to understand the nuances of their reactions nor know how to chart their character’s growth through their reactions – I see a lot of characters who yell, scream, shriek, become furious, pound walls, slam doors, behave in ways that most adults don’t in public.

-        Irrelevant details: overly descriptive scenes, expansive cast of characters, authorial intrusion.

All of these are examples of the creative marks left by the need to tell yourself the story before you can move on to Stage 2: Telling the Story, and Stage 3: Telling the Real Story, and are necessary parts of a stories creation. As I said before, writers need to write a lot more than readers will ever need to know. We have to create whole worlds and entire people in our heads in order for them to feel real to us, and we need them to feel real to us, so can they feel real to our readers.

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’s not. It is very important and very valuable to the writer, but the distinction I’ll be making in my next posts is learning what is important to your story (Stage 2, which focuses on information flow and making active, conscious choices about the elements of your novel, and Stage 3, which focuses on your novel’s essential questions, what drives its forward movement, and ) and what is important to your reader (Stage 4).


In Part 4, I turn my attention to the What the Story Needs and look at how to develop your novel's central organizing principle. 

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