by Lisa Cron
Of course, that doesn’t stop the protagonist from acting on the assumption that what he believes is true actually is true, and often he pays a big price for it. For instance, Romeo—fully believing that Juliet is dead when he returns, heartbroken, to Verona—pursues the only option he sees as viable. He drinks a vial of poison and very dramatically dies. He has no way of knowing that in two itty bitty minutes the potion Juliet swallowed will wear off and she’ll yawn and stretch. Then they could have hightailed it out of there and lived happily ever after. In this case, the “real world” and the world Romeo thought was real were, tragically, two very different places.
Reality Check
This brings us to a very helpful set of questions to ask yourself as you begin writing or rewriting each scene:
• What is actually going on in the story’s “real world”—that is, objectively?
• What does each character believe is going on?
• Where are there contradictions? (Joe, believing that his brother Mark is their dad’s favorite, is forever trying to win his dad’s approval; Mark knows that their dad is really an evil alien, so he has been protecting Joe from him ever since he was born.)
• Given what each character believes is true (as opposed to what might actually be true), how would they act in the scene?
• Does what each character does in the scene make sense, given what he or she believes is true?
In fact, it’s a good idea to make a chart for your entire story, called:
WHO KNOWS WHAT, WHEN?
First, make a timeline chronicling what actually happens in the “real world” during the span of the story. For instance, Romeo meets Juliet; they fall in love and secretly marry; she asks him to stop a fight between their houses; he tries and ends up killing her kinsman; her parents betroth her to a man who leaves her cold; Romeo, not knowing that Juliet has been betrothed, flees for the time being; Juliet, with the help of the friar, fakes her death to get out of marrying the other guy, sending a letter to Romeo explaining the plan; Romeo doesn’t get the letter, rides back to Verona, finds the drugged Juliet in a crypt, and thinking she’s dead, kills himself; Juliet wakes up, realizes what’s happened, and does likewise. Their chastened families make up.
Beneath your overarching timeline, make a corresponding timeline for each major character, charting what they believe is true throughout the story. This will not only reveal exactly where and when characters are at cross purposes, but also help you make sure your characters’ reactions are in accordance with what they believe is true in the moment.
Finally, there is one more person whose shifting beliefs you want to chart: the reader. Ask yourself, scene by scene: what does the reader believe is happening? This question is so important that you might even want to close the laptop, get out of your PJs, and head into the real world to test the waters. After all, you now know exactly what readers are hardwired to hunt for, so you can use them to do reconnaissance for you.
Starter Feedback—Priming the Pump
Before you begin asking for gut-wrenching critiques (anything short of “It’s the best thing I ever read! Where can I buy a copy or, better yet, a case?”), there’s an incredibly helpful type of feedback you can request at just about any stage without having to weather anyone’s actual opinion. What’s more, the info it yields tends to be clear, concise, and specific, and even your old Uncle Rolly can give it. Ideally, it’s best to recruit friends and family who don’t even know what your story is about. All you have to do is ask them to read what you have and at the end of each scene to jot down the answers to these questions:
• What do you think is going to happen next?
• Who do you think the important characters are?
• What do you think the characters want?
• What, if anything, leaps out as a setup?
• What information did you think was really important?
• What information were you dying to know?
• What did you find confusing? (This is as close to a real critique as we’ll get.)
Their answers will be extremely helpful in figuring out how much of the story hasn’t quite made it from your head onto the page. Not to mention turning up plot holes, logic gaps, redundancies, digressions, and long flat stretches that stop the story cold. But be sure to tell them this is all the feedback you want right now. If you give Uncle Rolly carte blanche, you might have to hear his theory on how much better it would be if it was set on the planet Zelon instead of in Cleveland, if the hero was an intergalactic warrior instead of a kindergarten teacher, and if lots of big things blew up instead of that one measly fight when Wally threw a handful of sand at Jane during recess.
Other People’s Opinions
But at some point—on draft three or six or twenty-seven—you will need to let other people read your story for real. This is because, no matter how painstakingly objective you are, how ruthless when it comes to ferreting out digressions, how willing to subject everything in your story to heartless scrutiny, it’s still, um, you doing it. And no matter how accomplished you are, the one thing you can’t do is read your story as if you’ve never heard it before. It’s already there in your mind, fully realized, before you start reading. Since you know what everything means and where it’s really going, how can you possibly tell whether the words on the page are capable of conjuring the same thing in someone else’s mind? Someone who has nothing but the words on the page to go on? Remember the Heath brothers’ “Curse of Knowledge”? You can’t tell your story’s effect on a fresh reader, because you know way too much.
That’s why you have to subject your story to the most merciless thing on earth: a reader’s eyes. It could be those of a trusted writer friend, a writer’s group, a paid professional, or even better, all three. This can feel a bit like asking the entire neighborhood to take pot shots at your children while they’re playing in the yard all by themselves. And guess what? They will. Readers are more than willing to take a whack at our darlings, because to them, they aren’t darlings at all. They’re merely the things that get in the way of the story.
As humorist Franklin P. Jones famously said, “Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”
EMBRACING FEEDBACK
The importance of getting outside feedback—and then actually listening to it—can’t be overstated. What’s more, and trickier still, you want to be sure that the person giving you feedback is capable of it. This doesn’t just mean they have the ability to zero in on what pulled them out of the story, but that when they see it go off the rails, they’ll tell you.
Consider the story of a woman we’ll call Zoe, who had written a memoir. She grew up in a small community where her mother was a local celebrity, thrusting Zoe into the limelight from kindergarten on. Even more compelling, her personal life sounded like a very successful movie of the week—the kind that makes you laugh, makes you cry, and leaves you with an authentic sense of hope. The trouble was, she did not know how to tell a story. Without a genuine narrative thread (read: no story question, no internal issue), the book didn’t build. So it wasn’t long before what little momentum it started with dissolved, leaving in its wake a series of disjointed vignettes. Somewhere around chapter 3 it went flat, and it stayed that way. It didn’t matter that each individual scene was well written, because without an overarching context to give all the scenes meaning, the reader didn’t know what to make of them or where the memoir was headed.
But Zoe did. She saw it very clearly. Why wouldn’t she? She’d lived it. She’d shown the manuscript to close friends and an old college professor, all of whom told her how much they loved it and how well written it was. So when her agent gave her specific notes for the rewrite, instead of listening, she spent hours explaining why each suggested change was unnecessary and why everything that seemed to be missing was actually there. She felt it was good enough. She was a very likable young woman who had been through a hell of a l
ot (as her memoir attested). And it soon became clear she wasn’t going to back down. So the manuscript was submitted, as is, to editors at twenty publishing houses. These editors didn’t know her at all, nor had they heard her lengthy explanations for the things that they instantly saw weren’t working. Every editor it was submitted to turned it down, each rejection letter echoing the notes the writer had already heard from her agent and blithely dismissed.
Sure, her friends thought it was perfect. But they were already familiar with her story, so they automatically filled in whatever blanks she’d inadvertently left. And, even more dangerous, they loved her. Which meant they were predisposed to like what she’d written, not to mention quite impressed that she’d sat down and written an entire book in the first place. In other words, what made it a page turner for them wasn’t her storytelling skill.
Does that mean that when they told her they thought it was a great book they were lying? Of course not. It means the standard they applied to her manuscript wasn’t the same one they use when they walk into a bookstore, pull a random book from the shelf, and start reading.
However, they didn’t know that. And to further complicate the matter, chances are they couldn’t have told her what their criteria for loving a book actually are, anyway. It’s like that old saw, I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.9 Which means it’s a gut feeling.
Or, in the case of pornography, sometimes that feeling is a little further south.
The truth is, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the gut feeling you get when you’re reading a fabulous book and the feeling you get when you’re reading a manuscript written by a close friend. It’s surprisingly easy to misattribute the cause of a gut feeling. For instance, there’s a classic experiment in which an attractive woman approached men in the middle of a scary, heart-pounding suspension bridge over a deep gorge, and after asking them to fill out a questionnaire—supposedly for a class project—she gave them her phone number. She then did likewise with an equal number of men after they had crossed the bridge and were sitting on a bench, recovering. Around 65 percent of the men on the bridge called her, compared with 30 percent of those on the bench, whose hearts were no longer pounding when she approached them.10 That is to say, a majority of them had mistaken an adrenaline rush of fear for the giddiness of attraction. In the same way, friends and family tend to misattribute the adrenaline surge they feel when they read your book to their appreciation of your prowess as a writer rather than the thrill of knowing you actually wrote it. This isn’t to say you may not actually have written a crackerjack book, but chances are, they won’t be able to tell the difference.
In other words, love is blind.
And when it’s not, it tends to be supportive. When you read a friend’s writing, your first allegiance is to your friend. So even when your gut tells you that it’s probably not time for her to quit her day job, you take into consideration how hard she worked, how much the book means to her, and the fact that you don’t want to hurt her feelings. Or start a fight. The same is true with acquaintances. No one wants to be the bearer of bad news; it inherently stirs up strong emotions—in this case, most likely the kind of conflict-induced tension that the manuscript in question probably isn’t generating. But as we know, whereas in books, conflict is what draws us in, in real life, it’s something most people will go out of their way to avoid. Which is why when you read a friend’s manuscript and find it completely devoid of tension, the last thing you want to do is actually create some by mentioning it.
So you find nice things to say: Loved the premise. Fabulous thesis. Great sense of place; I really felt like I was in downtown Barstow. And Tiffany’s clever retort when she caught Tad rifling through her underwear drawer—priceless! Your friend beams, and you haven’t told a single lie. Except by omission. But hey, you tell yourself, you’re not a professional critic. Maybe the book really is great, but you’re just too much of a dolt to see it. And so you breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief and enthusiastically give the manuscript the benefit of the doubt.
But as a writer, is that something you would really want? The benefit of the doubt? Hey, why not! When you’ve sweated blood over something, given it your all, you want to hear that it’s great. Perfect. Brilliant, in fact. Then again, would you want your doctor to have been given the benefit of the doubt throughout medical school? Or the pilot of the jumbo jet you’re about to board?
But wait—doesn’t your story belong to you? Who says writers have to please everyone? First and foremost, don’t we have to write for ourselves, to speak our truth? Maybe. But ask yourself, when you read a novel, do you really ever want to know the writer’s truth? Do you even think about it? The truth we’re looking for is something we can relate to ourselves. Writers who focus on “their truth” tend to forget that as far as the reader is concerned, writing is about communication, not self-expression. That brings us to another myth whose neck we might want to wring:
MYTH: Writers Are Rebels Who Were Born to Break the Rules
REALITY: Successful Writers Follow the Damn Rules
Writers are often rebels. We buck the tide by trade. We have a fresh take on the familiar, and our goal is to translate that vision into a story so others can step into our world. Since we’re all about originality, why should we have to follow a tired old set of standards, anyway? Can’t we just peel that girdle off and breathe freely? After all, we make up stories; can’t we make up the rules, too?
It’s at about this point in the argument that someone always starts talking about Cormac McCarthy. He doesn’t follow the rules, and he won the Pulitzer. My response is always, He does follow the rules, but he’s done it in such an idiosyncratic way that it’s easy to take his style for a new set of rules. Yes, there are masters out there with such utterly distinct voices that they have the ability to instill an intoxicating sense of urgency in ways that seem to defy analysis. It’s in their DNA, which is why it cannot be duplicated. They’re in a rarefied minority. If we could write like them, we’d have long since been published, and universities would offer graduate seminars on our work.
On the other hand, the vast majority of extremely successful writers don’t write like them, either.
And here’s something a little more sobering. For every successful writer who seems to flout the rules, there are millions along the way who tried to actually flout them, and whose manuscripts crashed and burned as a result. You just never heard about them because, well, they crashed and burned. Chances are they either ignored the feedback they got or, worse, never asked for it.
HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG?
Writers need impartial feedback, and one of the logical places to get it is in a writers’ group. The members of an effective writing group need to be astute and able to not only point out what isn’t working but also tell you why. The rub, of course, is that they also have to be right. The places where something isn’t working are not hard to spot. What’s hard is explaining exactly why it isn’t working. This often leads to misguided advice, which results in the writer either making the problem worse or simply substituting one thing that isn’t working for another. So when you join a writers’ group—especially if you don’t know anyone in it yet—your best bet is to sit back and listen. You will learn far more about them by how they critique each other’s work than how they critique yours. Why?
First of all, because you can actually hear it. Being singled out in a group, especially for the first time, can be overwhelming. Remember what we said about the mortification of discovering you’ve made a mistake in public? That’s what a critique can feel like. Everyone is looking at you, and your face goes red, there’s a loud buzzing in your ears, and suddenly the room gets very hot. People are talking, but you can’t make out the words. It’s hard enough to hear, let alone be objective.
On the other hand, when they’re critiquing someone else, it’s infinitely easier to judge whether their comments are on target or flying w
ide of the mark. You’ll have your own opinion of the work you hear and so be able to gauge whether their comments are insightful, astute, and expressed in a way that is supportive while at the same time, pulling no punches.
Keep in mind, too, that a writers’ group, by definition, will hear your work in pieces. Thus it can be difficult for them to tell whether the story is building, if the setups are paying off, or if that beautifully written passage about Jamie’s first kiss that had them all crying has anything to do with the story of how she and her sixty-eight-year-old grandmother climbed Mt. Everest.
HIRE A PRO
The other option when it comes to getting feedback is a trend that is gaining momentum. A colleague at a literary agency in New York recently told me, “More than ever it is important for writers to hone their craft and submit only their most polished professional draft. Do not count on anyone—agent or even [in-house] editor—to ‘fix’ it. Everyone is so tight for time that material has to be rewritten several times, and edited, before anyone in the business sees it to consider.
Using freelance editors and consultants to help get a manuscript in shape is increasingly common.”