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