Is It Done Yet? - Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts I’m doing based on a presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in May of this year focused on how to know when your manuscript is ready to query. 

Part 1 – The Goal: A Fully-Realized Novel

Knowing when your manuscript is ready is a topic that comes up quite regularly in many writers’ groups both online and off. Most of the time, the usual advice gets offered: it’s done when you can’t stand working on it anymore; it’s done when all you can revise is punctuation; it’s done when you think it is; it’s done when your beta readers tell you it is; it’s done when you’ve done x number of revisions; it’s done when you don’t know what else to do with it.

All of these responses miss the mark because the question being asked is: when is my novel ready to query? Underneath that question is the real one: how do I know my novel will attract interest from an agent?

My answer, based on my work as a developmental/ content editor, and several years reading and editing submissions for a literary agent, is a bit more complex and based on both the writer’s understanding of their work and the demands of the publishing marketplace.

Reading for the literary agent taught me a lot. Mostly, it taught me that the vast majority of manuscripts being queried weren’t ready yet. They needed at least another revision to become what I call a fully realized novel.

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 last 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 is relevant and necessary to create the overall effect of the work. The overall effect of the novel is vastly greater than the sum of the individual parts. 

A movie I think does a near-perfect job demonstrating what fully realized storytelling looks like (and I’m using a movie here because they create a complete story arc in roughly two hours) is EverAfter, the Drew Barrymore and Angelica Houston retelling of Cinderella.

What I love about this movie is that nearly everything, from the costuming to set design to dialogue has an arc with a purpose and a payoff.

For example, the line, “You have been born to wealth and privilege and with that comes specific obligations” is spoken three times. First by the Queen of France and then Danielle (the Cinderella character) to Prince Henry, and lastly by the Prince himself. Each time, the line changes in meaning and it effectively shows Henry’s growth from the errant prince attempting to shirk his responsibilities, to realizing the opportunities his position might afford for helping others, to a belligerent response after Danielle’s identity as a commoner is revealed at the ball and embarrasses the prince in front of his subjects and father (in response to which, Leonardo DaVinci, this movie’s fairy godmother, says, “Hogwash” and tells the prince to get over himself; if that's truly what he believes, he doesn't deserve Danielle).

Similarly, a distinctive ruby and pearl necklace provides a subtle detail that has significant payoff. One of the royal pages took the necklace from the queen’s bedroom and gives it to the stepmother so that a meeting can be engineered for the older daughter, Marguerite, and the queen. After church, Marguerite “returns” the necklace to the queen saying it must have fallen off while she was inside. The queen rewards Marguerite’s honesty by inviting mother and daughter to the palace for a chat. At the end of the movie, when Danielle is presented to her family as the prince’s wife, she’s wearing that necklace. No mention is made of it, but the arc of that small detail is clear. In addition, there’s an earlier scene in which the baroness is buying a broach with the intention that Marguerite wear it to attract the prince’s attention. She keeps telling the seller that it needs to be bigger, to which he says, “I fear if it were any larger, she might tip over.” These are two instances where the details that are called specifically to the viewer’s attention have significance and meaning.

A fully realized novel provides the same sense of purpose, arc, and payoff for all its elements. Every scene carries a sense of the underlying premise or question, every detail relates to it, every plot point builds toward the payoff. 

A great test for whether the novel is fully realized is how easily you can write your query letter or create an elevator pitch for your novel. I think many writers struggle with their queries because their stories haven’t coalesced around a central focus that drives the narrative forward, and this is mainly a result of not pushing past the initial stages of revision to the place where the story, that connective tissue that creates relevance and unifies the narrative, emerges and becomes clear.

In Part 2, I talk about knowing your genre as an important first step in the revision process. 

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

Can You Believe It?

There was a discussion on one of the agent blogs I read several weeks ago (months, probably, knowing how chronologically challenged I am) about whether a teenage protagonist in a YA novel would use a particular word or not. The agent said that no teenager she knew would ever use this word and so it ruined the veracity of the character for her. Many of the blog readers commented that they've heard plenty of teenagers use that word or words of a similar elevated vocabulary level (I forget the exact word, but it was a mult-syllabic, Latinate, SAT-type word).

Similar discussions come up in workshop classrooms all the time. One person says something in a story isn't believable and another says, "Oh no, the same thing happened to me (or my brother, best friend, dog) and it happened exactly like this."

I think the discussions actually miss the point.

The question isn't 'can you believe it?' but 'is it believable for this character?'

To paraphrase Shakespeare (because I'm not going to get the quote right, and I don't want to take the time to go find it): there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Or, to paraphrase Douglas Adams: In an infinite universe, everything is possible.

These discussions came to mind while I was working on my own novel tonight and wrote the phrase I haven’t made up the reading I’ve missed nor gotten the class notes from anyone and realized it was the wrong language for my character. I've taken a lot of care to make it clear Matt is intelligent and observant. He has to be. He's carrying the observational weight of the entire novel. The reader has to trust his ability to tell the story and give valuable insight into his own character as well as those around him, otherwise the whole conceit of the novel collapses into the diary of a precocious fourteen year old. And that's not what I'm after.

I'm reminded of a friend who wrote a stunning first novel years ago with a very young narrator. She wrote a very smart scene early on where her narrator observed her mother walking through the grocery store, commenting not only on the height of her heels and the tightness of her shirt, but the reactions of the other customers in the store. Instinctively, my friend had done the work of getting the reader to trust this narrator's ability to reveal truth and tell the story even though she was ten years old.

So I don't think the question is one of whether a particular word or observation is believable. If the question of believability comes up, it's usually because the writer hasn't done the work to make the reader believe it.

In the Name of Love

A few years ago, when I finished reading the seventh Harry Potter book, my first thought, upon closing the cover of that magnificent book, was not about how the series had affected me, but to wonder what J. K. Rowling felt like now that she was done writing about Harry, Ron, Hermione, Snape, Dumbledore, and all the other remarkable characters with whom she had been living for the past fifteen years.

Writers have a much different experience of their characters than do readers. While I can appreciate the many layers of Snape's character and envy Rowling for creating a character like Dumbledore, I'm an observer only. It's much different on the inside.

Writers feel their characters. We hear them whisper to us, know what they long for, experience their sorrows on a deep, visceral level. They are like our children, but more than that. They live inside our bodies and minds, and we watch them develop and grow, become multi-layered, complex beings. Like children, they start out as single-cell organisms, simple. Something happens to them, they react. Then, we figure out why they reacted that way. They acquire history and a backstory. We write about their actions, what they look like. A simple change of hair color or the way a character stands, can reveal an entire strata of meaning we didn't know about before. And that moment of understanding, of looking into the character's eyes and figuring out just what this person (because that is what they come to feel like after awhile) has been trying to tell us, feels like falling in love.

The relationship is far from one way, either. Because our characters seem to know they need us to tell their stories, they come to us willingly. They want us to know things about them. Many, many years ago while I was working on another novel, I was having trouble with the female protagonist. I couldn't get her exactly right. I wasn't understanding what would cause her to act the way she was in the story (yes, I was creating the story, but, sometimes, in the act of writing, things flow onto the page you didn't expect, and then you've got to figure out what to do with them). So I set up a meeting. I was freelancing a lot during this time and doing one or two interviews a day, so I decided to interview her.

We met for tea in my office. If I remember correctly, I actually did set up a tea cup for her opposite my own. Then I sat down and started asking questions in my notebook and writing her answers as they came to me. "Why do you keep pushing Peter away?" "What did his drawing mean to you?" "How do you feel about the time you saw each other in New York?" As I did this, I heard her voice in my head, more clearly than what I'd been hearing while I was writing the novel (which was told primarily from the male protagonist's point of view), and I started to get a picture of her in my mind as she sat across the table from me. And then, I realized, she was holding her right hand in her left and massaging the back of her hand. It was a stress reaction, something she did when she was uncomfortable. So I asked, "What's going on with your hand?" And she told me. Her mother was an alcoholic who had thrown a copy of Gray's Anatomy (her father was a doctor) at her during a drunken rage (she'd been sent home from private boarding school because alcohol had been found in her dorm room, left there by a roommate who had moved out). She'd put her hand up to protect herself but the force of the book falling against her hand had broken it. Furthermore, she wouldn't let her mother touch it, but waited several hours until her father came home so he could take care of it. Several hours in excruciating pain. This told me a lot about why she'd been so reluctant to speak to me before this, why she was such a difficult character to get to know. She didn't trust people easily. But it also told me, this woman could be incredibly resilient, incredibly strong-willed. It told me, in short, the things I needed to know to be able to write her effectively and compellingly.

I write this because, in the chronology I've worked out for Altar, this is the weekend Denny dies. March 12. The funeral is the 16th. All this past week, I kept thinking I needed to get candles to light for Denny. While it made sense in a certain way, it wasn't something I'd felt such a strong need to do in previous years. Then it hit me. This is the last year I'm going to be with Matt and Denny. The book is almost finished. And, even though I'll most assuredly be doing revisions if it sells, I won't be creating these characters in the same way ever again. These are our last days together in such intimate company. While I feel as sense of joy and accomplishment at that, there is still a measure of sorrow that these characters will no longer be my constant companions. I'll be moving on to a new set of characters, falling in love with them in the way I have fallen in love with Matt and Denny and Alan and Rachelle and all of them.

So I have two candles on my desk, one for Matt and one for Denny, and I light them when I start writing and blow them out when I'm done. Nothing magical has happened because I've done this, it's just enough that it's been done.

Writers sometimes talk about a mourning period after a book is finished. They talk about needing a period of not writing to give the previous book some honored space, or of not being able to move forward right away with the next project no matter how hard they try. Which is why, after the seventh HP book was released, I read interviews with Rowling with increasing disappointment, and would have loved to have interviewed her myself. I would have asked her how it felt to no longer be in such close contact with her characters, if they still came to her with lines of dialogue or thoughts about the action, and if she worried about being able to fall in love with a new set of characters as deeply as she had with these. Because, it was clear from her writing that she loved each and every one of them, and understood that if you don't love your characters, no one else will.