Why I Fall In Love With a Manuscript: It Feels New

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During my time as a developmental editor, I longed to fall in love with a manuscript. I wanted to read stories that spoke to me, that haunted me when I went to bed and I woke thinking about. Almost every submission had something I could fall for. But far too often I rejected the submissions I read and critiqued.

The attributes that spark a love affair with a manuscript are not the reasons you might think. Sure, I recoil at the twelfth adverb in a paragraph, pervasive passive voice, misspellings and its/it’s mistakes. I grumble at stories that start in the wrong place or have superfluous exposition. But these are lover’s spats. An editor cleans up language, recommends moving scenes and cutting unneeded characters or chapters. I can love a manuscript despite these faults. But the reasons I fall for them are much more fundamental.

No matter your genre, editors want to love your manuscript. Make sure your submission delivers on the following things, and I guarantee they’ll love yours.

Why I Fall In Love With a Manuscript 1: Your Story Feels New

I guarantee your story has been written before.

Think of your favorite book. Game of Thrones? Try Lord of the Rings, George MacDonald or Arabian Nights. Twilight? Anne Rice, Romeo and Juliet, Dracula and Camilla. Eragon? Star Wars, which was in turn influenced by every hero’s journey myth ever. Every plot and story has been told before, and by a master. The manuscripts I love feel refreshing and new, despite having been told before.

How do you accomplish this? First, by reading. A lot. Not only will this inspire you and teach you the craft, it will expose you to tales already written so you can avoid being the carbon copy.

Second, bring something new to the story, like a new setting or theme. Weave two existing stories together in unexpected ways. George R. R. Martin made his fantasy world unique by getting rid of fantasy races, making magic rare and adding realism and nuance to a world more gray than black and white.

Never rest on one or two unique elements. Add as much as you can at every turn and breathe freshness into your tale.

Refine Your Prose: Use The Landscape

Previous Refine Your Prose Posts:

Be a Sadist

Build by Scenes

Learn Dialogue

Refine Your Prose 4: Use the Landscape

Landscape should mean as much to a story as the characters. When used with purpose, landscape is invaluable in creating and emphasizing emotional tone. What would The Great Gatsby be without the landscape of the nouveau riche of the ‘20s, or The Grapes of Wrath without the Dust Bowl? The landscape in these works and countless others is as much a character as the protagonists.

Exactly.

In general, I loathe description of landscape, and over-description in general. It is a prose sinkhole. No other facet of writing gives an author more opportunity to encumber the flow of the story. But many well-known authors describe a lot. Both Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald go to absurd lengths to describe. But they are brilliant at it because their descriptions always matter. Everything described in their works serves the narrative and tone of the story.

Whenever you describe a country, a room or a twig on the ground, make sure it serves the narrative. Use it to establish the emotional tone of your story and reinforce it along the way. When you edit, add description that strengthens your tone, and delete description that doesn’t. Does your detailed description of the rain highlight your story’s themes? If yes, keep it up. If not, rewrite or delete it.

Good description establishes and reinforces emotional tone. It does not show the beautiful picture in your head or act as filler. And it can be deadly for the beginning of a novel. Done well, description can take your narrative further than the characters can alone, and heighten your themes beyond what your protagonists do or say.

Refine Your Prose: Learn to Write Dialogue

Previous Refine Your Prose Posts:

Build Your Story By Scenes

Be a Sadist

Refine Your Prose 3: Learn to Write Dialogue

“As you know, Bob…” is the worst dialogue phrase in existence. If Bob knows, why are you telling him? It’s so you can tell the reader. What follows is likely a patronizing infodump that takes the reader out of the story.

Good dialogue trusts the intelligence of the reader and lets them fill in the gaps without holding their hand. It breathes life, personality and individuality into your characters. Good dialogue hauls your reader into the story and doesn’t let go.

So what’s the secret to learning to write dialogue?

Eavesdrop.

Dude, it’s cool. I’m a writer.

The very suggestion feels dirty. We’ve been taught since childhood not to listen in on private conversations. But it’s the key to writing good dialogue. Besides, everything a writer does is dirty in one way or another. And doing dirty things is a lot of fun.

Go to your local coffee shop, sit down next to a full table and listen to the neighboring conversation. Pay attention to each person’s voice, mannerisms and word choices. Take notes in the notebook you carry for story ideas. (You do carry one, right?) Listen to what they say… and more importantly, what they don’t.

Eavesdropping lets you absorb the nuances of real dialogue. It drives home how much you don’t need to know in order to follow a conversation. The people at the next table are not going to tell each other what they already know. Moreover, they aren’t going to tell you, the dirty eavesdropper next door. You have to figure out the backstory yourself based on context. And you’ll be surprised how well you do. They may make references you don’t understand, but you either figure them out based on context, or decide they’re not important and move on.

Readers are the ultimate eavesdroppers, able to spy on the most private details of your protagonists’ lives. By delivering dialogue that trusts your readers’ intelligence and makes your characters feel alive, you make your narrative that much more compelling.

Refine Your Prose: Building your story scene by scene

Welcome to my second writing advice blog. I thought I’d open with an inspirational message from the Avengers:

Unless you’re currently the Hulk. In which case your Great American Novel would be written with somebody’s bloody leg stump on a chunk of concrete and would just say “Smash.”

2. Think in scenes

What’s a story? If you say a story is character, situation and plot, this is true. A story needs those three basic elements, but it is much more complex than that. That’s like saying a cake is butter, eggs and flour. Those materials go together in a certain way to create an effective cake, whose ultimate purpose is to be delicious. Character, situation and plot have to go together well to create a story, and a story gives your protagonists conflict that ultimately changes them. The act of change makes the story a story.

(We will leave discussions on whether people can truly change for a later blog. Debates on this have made me curse Twitter’s character limit well into the night.)

You need building blocks to create conflict and change in your story, and scenes are those blocks. At its most basic level, a scene is a unit of drama that happens in one location. But like a story, a scene is much more than this definition. Every good scene does at least one of two things.

A scene puts a character in a different emotional place than he was at the start. Say your protagonist, a devoted husband and father, sees an ex-girlfriend at his local coffee shop. He realizes he still has feelings for her. With one chance encounter, his current life doesn’t fulfill him like it used to. He hasn’t done anything, but the scene puts him in a different state emotionally.

A scene also gives characters a choice that they can’t undo. Later in the story, the protagonist sleeps with his ex. Now he has acted on his emotions, and he can’t ignore it or take it back. He must deal with the consequences of his decision whatever they may be.

If each scene in your story accomplishes one – or better, both – of the above goals, then each scene strengthens the impact of your narrative with added conflict and character depth. Building your story through scene after scene, driving your characters forward through the situations they’re in, will make sure your readers are still with your story when it reaches its destination.

Refine Your Prose: All writers are sadists

Having worked as a freelance and content editor as well as an author, I have both made and seen many common storytelling missteps. I’ll post a blog each week about these issues and ways we authors can avoid them. The first piece of advice:

1. Be a sadist

Your characters are not your friends.

This is a difficult truth to accept. You care for your characters. You put hours into crafting their backstories and creating the world in which they live. You live, eat and breathe with them. When you put your tablet or computer away for the night, you feel like you’re neglecting your characters until you open your story to write again.

And your job is to make sure those characters hate your guts.

Think about some of the great characters in literary history and what they faced in their lives. Sherlock Holmes. Anna Karenina. Hamlet. Edmond Dantes. Jay Gatsby. All of them end their literary stories with wildly different levels of success, but the one thing they have in common is that their journeys are full of plenty of suck. If nothing bad ever happened to them, we wouldn’t care about them. I’m sure Holmes would have preferred he not be a drug addicted asshole, or Anna a social exile driven to suicide. But without the misery and tragedy in their lives, we wouldn’t care about them like we do.

You write to deliver your readers a great story, and that comes from tearing down the compelling characters you’ve created. Readers thrive on conflict, on their emotional ties to your characters. That requires a lot of collateral damage. You need to make life suck for your characters at every turn. Otherwise, you’re letting your readers down.

Remember this golden rule: Whenever possible, make things worse for your characters. Much worse. Whether or not you build them back up again at the climax is up to you.

William Reid

Speculative Fiction Author

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