It’s summer vacation time, which means school’s out and my office hours shift toward the nocturnal because during the day I am surrounded by people who are boooored. What do we do when we’re bored? Read a good book, obviously. Or write one. For those of you struggling with drafts of your fiction, here are the top three problems I run across in novel manuscripts and what to do about them.
1. throat clearing
By this I mean taking the first two or three chapters to find your voice, to really get your story rolling. Guess how long an agent will read a book that doesn’t grab her by the eyeballs in the first paragraph. About as long as it takes to read that first paragraph, possibly less. Skipping the whole agent thing and self-pubbing? Most prospective readers of fiction will give you even less.
This is one of the easiest problems to fix, however. Simply take everything that precedes the scene in which everything starts happening for your main character and delete it. You might have to add a sentence here and there for exposition. That’s it. “But—” No. You don’t need it. Listen to your inner 7-year-old moaning about the second week of summer vacation, and jump right into the action.
2. low stakes
You’ve set up a story, some characters, some situations and obstacles, and everything is going great, except that nobody’s really sure why the MC has to do whatever it is he has to do, or else. Or else what? In a good story, there are stakes clearly outlined in the beginning of the second act, and then, as the action continues, the stakes go up. The screw is turned. Your hero doesn’t have to save the world, but in a way he does. He has to save his world as he knows it or have a fantastic reason to let that world go straight to hell to save someone else’s.
This is a harder fix because if the stakes aren’t there, you’ve got no story. Get it done in your storyboarding/outline stage and save yourself a lot of heartache and liver damage.
3. I hate this guy
A corollary to the one-dimensional hero/villain problem in fiction is the character that is profoundly and thoroughly annoying, so annoying in fact that your annoyance yanks you right out of the story. There’s “Dude, I totally know someone like that,” and “OK, that’s like my old boss, but worse!” and from there you drift uncontrollably into “No! No one is like that, and if anyone were, someone would lock that person in a construction site portable toilet and drop it off a bridge. Into a dry ravine. That’s on fire.”
Go on and write that guy. Get him out of your system. It’s one of the great joys of being a writer: the ability to lambast jerks in print. Then take a few days off and go back and add a little realism, even and especially if you’re working in genre fiction. There is no room in a book worth reading for someone whose sole purpose is to be the human equivalent of a Claymore mine. All your characters need to pull their weight, and none of them should be upstaging the primary movers.
Enjoy the long (so very long) summer days, and when the editor in your head says, “I’m bored! This is boring,” pay attention and do something about it. If you have real live children telling you this, pat them on the head and tell them they’ll make fine literary agents someday.