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.
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
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