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 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