Asking for feedback
If you want to ask someone to read the story, please, please tell the person to read it without a pencil in hand. You don’t need little notes and circled spelling errors. Remind the reader that you just got your ideas down, that you know it can be better with more work. All you need is a general reaction. I’d say to this person, Here’s all I’m asking you to do. Tell me:
Were you ever confused? Bored? (Yes, I need to know.)
Were there moments when you felt immersed in the story?
What would you tell another person if asked what the novel is about?
What would you say was the best scene or passage?
All of your attention for now is on your story.
How much work is this going to be?
How much work it’ll take is entirely up to you. Follow my advice in this book section by section, considering each concept as I discuss it, considering your manuscript. The order I’ve used starts with describing what you have done, then moves to evaluating enough of it to make a decision about what you need to do next. Choose the tasks that seem most relevant to you. I think of myself as a coach and I offer a lot of help, but everyone won’t need the same things from my book.
The thing is, you’ve put in a lot of time developing your story into a workable draft, so this isn’t the time to hurry. Be open to discovery, chagrin, exuberance, fatigue. Be willing to take the time to think.
Two important notes
1. Be sure that you have at least one novel on hand as you read this book, other than your own manuscript. Choose ones that you know well or read recently. I refer to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, so you may want to read it as part of your study. One of the most interesting things to study in that book is how Gatsby’s biography is revealed. Fitzgerald wrestled with this a lot, and, taking the advice of his great editor, Maxwell Perkins, he broke up the information and delayed its revelation instead of dumping it all in the beginning.
You may prefer a book that is more contemporary, more like what you have in mind for your own novel. When I talk about a concept and present examples, look to the book you have chosen and identify the same concept as it relates to that story. If you feel that you are well-read and can call up examples on your own, you may not need to work with a single text. It just depends on how studious you are. The most important text, of course, is your own. Keep model novels at hand as you read and work.
2. Write your responses to questions and exercises; write your concerns about your text and new ideas about possible revision ideas. Don’t count on remembering. You have several ways to record revision ideas:
a. You can keep notes on index cards. Key them to the section that they relate to, such as:
Aboutness: vision
Timeline: backstory
Novel world
b. You can write on Post-it Notes and stick them on the relevant passages in this book and in your bound manuscript.
c. Write on the back of your bound manuscript pages, across from the relevant pages of text. Underline, block out chunks of text, etc. It’s really important to record your thoughts as you go along. Later you can go through everything and see what makes sense and how your observations help you make decisions about your manuscript.
d. You can use the loose manuscript pages, which you have organized in sets of chapters, when you begin cutting things up and moving them around for revision purposes. I do advise you to compile your notes on the bound copy, however, as the point of having loose pages is to be free to jumble them about.
The important thing is: Don’t expect to remember your reactions to these exercises. Write them down.
The long perspective
I’ve assumed that my reader is writing a novel or wants to. But maybe you want something else: to be a novelist. Maybe you are starting on a life’s journey. If so, I think this book will help, because if you study all of it, if you read all the novels and craft books I recommend, if you make all these concepts and skills your own, you will have a strong foundation. Many of the ideas I am exploring are never discussed comprehensively (if at all) in classes or workshops. There isn’t enough time, and there is an overemphasis on short fiction, for practical reasons. Some concepts are mentioned, of course, across disparate texts, such as books about plotting, and you may end up comparing what different writers advise. Choose what makes sense to you and leave the rest aside for now. Writing doesn’t follow a recipe. We aren’t baking cakes here. Of course you may sometimes disagree with me; articulating why you see an issue another way is useful, too. My main role is to give you a scheme for organizing your revision. If you have read other books on writing novels, some topics will be familiar, though my vocabulary may be different. Some ideas will probably be new to you. Mostly, you will start to build your own strategies for writing and revising fiction.
Simply follow the general outline:
Describe your story concept and intention.
Describe the way you have put the story down.
Think about various structural issues.
Identify your areas of concern.
Articulate the goals of your revision.
Decide what goes, what stays, what gets written.
Make a plan.
Write.
Give your manuscript a loving gloss.
That’s it!
Exercises
Write a statement of intention. What do you hope to accomplish? How much time can you give to the effort? Do you have any kind of peer support? (Someone you can report your progress to? Another writer who is also using this book to revise her own manuscript?)
Have you chosen at least one book you like, to work with as you go through the revision sections? Start by writing a short summary of the book—just a few sentences. Write down why you like the book, and be specific: characters? scenes? descriptions? structure of chapters? feeling of suspense?
One: A Close Look
Everything to follow is concerned with these three questions: Who is the story about? What happens? Why does it matter?
Description
What is the story?
Write a summary of the first draft.
State the subject of your novel in a single sentence.
State what your novel is about (action and effect).
State the vision or intention of your novel.
Describe the world of the novel.
Create timelines for foreground and backstory chronology.
Identify the most important backstory events.
Describe your protagonist in terms of agency, struggle, and transformation.
Describe your protagonist’s fate and its relationship to your vision.
Describe your other major characters.
1. Write a summary of the first draft.
A few pages will suffice. You want to cover the main thrust of the plot and the nature of the protagonist and his or her driving force. Indicate how things are complicated and resolved. This is a working document for you, so try to be precise but don’t worry about polish. Don’t get caught up in “this happened, and then this happened . . .” Think of yourself as looking at the story from a more distant location.
See the broad movements of action, the larger complications. Mention the moments that matter most.
If writing the summary is difficult for you, set it aside and try again later in the day, or the next day. Don’t try to “fix” the flawed summary draft; start over. You could go on to the next few exercises and come back to the summary. But do work until you get one that “feels right,” one that captures what you have done, with a touch of what you mean to do.
Is this an unfamiliar or intimidating assignment?
It can be helpful to read reviews of novels, summaries on publishers’ and booksellers’ websites, jacket copy, etc. (A library will give you acc
ess to many options. Ask a research librarian for help finding reviews.) Each “take” on a novel has a slightly different purpose and strategy, but reading various summaries highlights for you the idea that each novel has an essence, a heart, a core; and you will see that a summary has a general pattern. I recommend going to a library and reading back issues of Publishers Weekly, which encapsulates forthcoming books on a weekly basis. The summaries aren’t richly evocative the way good reviews are in journals, and perhaps for that very reason they are instructive. The reviews aren’t style models, but they can give you a huge array of samples of summaries. There are several journals that review for librarians, including Kirkus Reviews. You can also get a good idea of how to summarize by reading the plot overviews in study guides to various novels.
If you feel drawn to make some changes in the story, the summary is a good place to test them. Don’t feel chained to your draft; you have begun the steps that take you to a revision. Or you might write a summary of what you have, print it out, and then annotate it with questions and comments in the margins.
Ask yourself:
Does my story sound “large enough” for a novel? Does it need at least sixty thousand words to be developed? (About two hundred manuscript pages, minimum.)
Does the summary sound dramatic?
Does it have a fascinating protagonist—someone a reader will want to follow through the book?
Is a question raised that takes a novel to answer?
Can I read the summary and put my finger on sentences that stand out as events—the things that should happen in scenes (fill up pages!) in the novel?
All those qualities probably won’t have been developed in the first draft, but the potential has to be there. A big part of revision is deepening the story. You can start by deepening the summary.
If you are a little shaky about answering, Yes, I’ve got what it takes, you probably need to think about subplots (sequences involving secondary characters’ actions and issues that crisscross and affect the main plot) and about a protagonist with bigger problems. (Both issues are discussed in this book.) You should go back to consider what made you think you wanted to write this story. Wrestle with it; make it reveal itself to you. Go ahead and work through the activities; the exercises will inspire new ideas and your story will plump up. (Write new summaries whenever you think you have a significant change of mind.) Think of yourself as building a dossier, a kind of case study of the story you are looking for. Keep writing new summaries.
To give you an idea, here are a few summaries from publishers’ and booksellers’ websites. Your summaries don’t have to be elegant and could certainly be more forthcoming—you don’t need to tease a reader with yours.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. (Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com.)
The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly
In a land of saffron sunsets and blazing summer heat, an Englishwoman has been found dead, her wrists slit, her body floating in a bathtub of blood and water. But is it suicide or murder? The case falls to Scotland Yard inspector Joe Sandilands, who survived the horror of the Western Front and has endured six sultry months in English-ruled Calcutta. Sandilands is ordered to investigate, and soon discovers that there have been other mysterious deaths, hearkening sinister ties to the present case.
Now, as the sovereignty of Britain is in decline and an insurgent India is on the rise, Sandilands must navigate the treacherous corridors of political decorum to bring a cunning killer to justice, knowing the next victim is already marked to die. (Source: https://sohopress.com.)
The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith
Smith’s latest novel is a rich and detailed story that connects a seventeenth-century Dutch painting to its twentieth-century American owner and the lonely but fervent art student who makes the life-changing decision to forge it. . . .
This is a beautiful, patient, and timeless book, one that builds upon centuries and shows how the smallest choices—like the chosen mix for yellow paint—can be the definitive markings of an entire life. (Source: Kirkus Reviews.)
The Piano Maker by Kurt Palka
Helene Giroux arrives alone in St. Homais on a winter day. She wears good city clothes and drives an elegant car, and everything she owns is in a small trunk in the back seat. In the local church she finds a fine old piano, a Molnar, and she knows just how fine it is, for her family had manufactured these pianos before the Great War. Then her mother’s death and war force her to abandon her former life.
The story moves back and forth in time as Helene, settling into a simple life, playing the piano for church choir, recalls the extraordinary events that brought her to this place. They include the early loss of her soldier husband and the reappearance of an old suitor who rescues her and her daughter, when she is most desperate; the journeys that very few women of her time could even imagine, into the forests of Indochina in search of ancient treasures and finally, and fatefully, to the Canadian north. When the town policeman confronts her, past and present suddenly converge and she must face an episode that she had thought had been left behind forever. (Source: penguinrandomhouse.ca.)
Exercises
Read your summary. If it doesn’t sound right to you, write it again.
Start a file of summaries. Go to publishers’ websites, booksellers’ websites, and prepublication review journals like Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.
2. State the subject of your novel in a single sentence.
You will be asked many times to say what your novel is “about.” There are several ways you might answer, and this is probably not the one you will choose, since people expect to hear about events. But it is helpful to articulate “aboutness” at the subject level as a starting point. Madame Bovary’s subject is the stifling narrowness of French middle-class life for a woman. All Quiet on the Western Front’s subject is the grim experience of ordinary German soldiers in World War I. The subject of The Grapes of Wrath is the migration of poor farm families during the Depression. The subject of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a boy’s determined struggle to overcome his limitations and expand his independence. The subject of Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements is the culture of a WASP family on an idyllic Cape Cod island. The subject of More Than Allies is mothers trying to raise fatherless sons; When the Emperor Was Divine is about a family in a World War II internment camp for Japanese residents on the West Coast. All the Pretty Horses is about rootless teenage boys looking for an ideal West in Mexico. The Scarlet Letter is about a woman’s experience as an adulteress in the cruelly repressive Puritan environment. The Piano Maker is about a French widow’s journey from great loss to redemption in Canada.
None of these statements tell you what happens, but each establishes a subject for a novel to explore, suggests characters and setting, and easily nudges you further toward a statement of “what happens.” I daresay a subject statement already says enough about your story to test the interest of potential readers. Try it out on any
one who will listen.
I could pare the statements down further, same order, and say these books are about: ennui; war; poverty; autism and adolescence; class systems; broken families; prejudice; coming-of-age; persecution; fate and cruel environment; but we are also thinking of context (discussed shortly).
Try to state the subjects of novels that you know. Lots of them. Why? Because it is possible to write a long novel and think it is about a lot of things—marriage and death, love and betrayal—when truly there is no basic subject. You want to train yourself to grasp the story idea. A love story, for example, takes place in a context. So is the subject the rivalry of families? The dissolution of community in the suburbs? The return to civilian life of soldiers home from war? It isn’t enough to say a book is a love story, a crime story, a family story. Something is special about the time, the place, the characters; find a way to touch on that in the statement of your subject. Think of yourself as putting a lens in focus.
Is this just an exercise? Maybe. But my students who have the hardest time with it are the ones with the fuzziest notion of their stories. And if reviewers and readers talk about your novel when it is published, you can be sure they will be saying, “It’s about—” Do you think they will know what to say if you didn’t know? (Take a look at the way novels are described in the abbreviated descriptions in magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Oprah, The New Yorker, etc.)
Subject yields idea
Flaubert wrote a novel after reading about a small-town French physician’s wife who killed herself. In Walking Dunes (teenagers in West Texas in 1959) I wrote about a boy from a working-class family who faces ethical choices he isn’t prepared to deal with. The idea for the novel arose from reflections on my own adolescence, and especially from my memories of a boy who was my friend, a person of great promise who killed himself in his early thirties. In All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr wrote about a blind French girl and a young Hitler Youth whose lives cross in World War II. In The Indian Bride, mystery writer Karin Fossum wrote about murder in a Norwegian village (what happens when an immigrant bride is murdered immediately upon arrival to join her husband). In the popular Maisie Dobbs novels (e.g., Leaving Everything Most Loved) by Jacqueline Winspear, the protagonist, trained in World War I as a spy, is always caught up in political and social undercurrents: London between world wars, England and Germany during World War I and after; India, Egypt. I heard Swedish author Henning Mankell speak at Chicago’s Printers Row Book Fair about his series of mysteries. He said they were about the incursion of evil into the beauty and solitude and peacefulness of Sweden. This was in 2004, and his talk came to seem prescient as, in subsequent years, Scandinavia became deeply embroiled in economic and cultural challenges.
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