How's the Book Coming? Questions You Have to Answer
How’s the book coming?
You’ve heard this question, right? It’s the curious, thoughtful, awful question you get from well-meaning friends and family members when they want to let you know they take an interest in your writing career. Everyone gets excited about knowing a writer with a new book, right?
I love them all. They're my support system. A bedrock. They mean well. And it’s all so nice . . . right up until they pop that question.
Underlying the question are others. Are you almost finished? How long have you worked on it? When does it come out? And others. You feel as if you have to justify the time you're spending on something that no one (or very few people) can see. It can get old, fast.
There are only a few answers to the original question. The book is in progress. The book is with an editor/agent. The book is available through Amazon (or your website). The book will be out this winter/spring/summer/fall.
Always a WIP (Work in Progress)
When your book sits in the first stage – in progress – is where the frustration lies. How do you tell your spouse that you’re more than halfway through your manuscript and now you’re wrestling with your protagonist? How do you tell your brother-in-law that you think you have to cut two characters out of your last draft? Why do you want to share the fact that your last draft needs an overhaul? Will anyone really understand it when you tell them you have too many characters (or POVs) in your last draft and you have to tighten them?
There’s nothing wrong with any of these scenarios. If you learn anything about working on a book, at least seriously, you know that writing is rewriting. You know that, absent detailed early outlining and mapping out, you’re going to make mistakes in plotting. You also know you’ll overwrite or produce early drafts that need refinement. That’s the process. Writing is rewriting. And you have to love rewriting or else you’ll never finish.
John Sandford once spoke at ThrillerFest about people he knows who are fine writers. They can, he said, do everything related to writing a novel except finish the book. They might get a first draft written, but they never get to the point where they are ready to submit the draft to an agent, editor or publisher – for various reasons.
[caption id="attachment_567" align="alignright" width="300"] John Sandford[/caption]
I keep this anecdote in mind. And this one:
At a Poynter Institute writing conference years ago, Stephen Hunter delivered a solo address about his books, about writing them and about his career. Eerily prescient to what Sandford said years later, Hunter told a story about when he first started writing more than movie reviews. (He was a Pulitzer-Prize winning movie reviewer for The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.) He said he had a group of friends, all of whom aspired to write novels. And they all embarked on the journey.
Hunter was the only one who published a novel. Why? “I was the only one who finished,” he said.
At some point, he said, you have to realize that you have to get up and get to work on it every day – every day.
[caption id="attachment_568" align="alignleft" width="300"] Stephen Hunter[/caption]
I have to forgive myself for not finishing yet. But I will finish.
Stages of Manuscript Progress
So, how could the book be coming? Let us count the ways – for me, anyway.
Mixed POV. Omniscient POV. As I learned much too late, you have to be consistent and tell your story the from the best point of view possible. You also have to remember, when you're writing, whose head you are in and what they know (and what they don't.)
Too much detail. The technical term for this is toothbrushing, as in, “We don’t need to see a character brushing his teeth. We can just assume it happened.” Another more practical way of thinking about this is the room entering principle. We can just assume that all characters walked into and out of the room (unless you write about vampires). We don’t need to see it happen. The reader doesn’t need to follow a character’s every step to want to follow them through the story.
Too many characters. This happened for sure. I ended up cutting two strong characters in my manuscript and a handful of minor characters. Word is, readers can’t keep up with a giant roster of characters. They want only a few they want to care about – love or despise – and the rest help drive the story.
Too many extraneous scenes. If the scene doesn’t push conflict, character or plot, it doesn’t belong. Good advice, I think: Human beings like to think in pictures, so when you think about your scenes, think about them as scenes in a movie. If the scene doesn’t fit, pitch it.
Continuity issues. In my case, the actual writing process from start to end of first draft was five years. It was hard at the end to remember all the details of the beginning. I decided to fix these in the second draft. But the fixing took more than one draft – and more than a couple beta readers to help.
Character names. I had too many characters with similar sounding names. Yes, this matters.
Data dumps. Also called info dumps. This is paragraph after paragraph of character back story. This is information to put in your master sheet about the book before you start writing. The challenge is to reveal as much of this back story as you can, spoonful by spoonful, throughout the book.
Wordiness. This is everyone and everywhere. It always is.
Things that don’t work. This could be scenes, jokes, dialogue, plot.
Word overuse. We all have favorite words, and we like to use the words we like too much. In my case, I discovered that I had too many characters “looking away.”
Slow start. It too much, much too long for it to sink in that my first five chapters didn’t work. And when I accepted that, it took too long to fix it properly. This is called procrastination.
Proper editing. I can only speak for myself here. There’s only so much I can do to my own manuscript. I’m prone to typos, and I’m prone to reading over them. (Age, it’s a bitch.) Bottom line, I need another set of eyes, and at the end of the process, I need a pro. I’ve hired one.
Final Answer: Great!
So how’s the book coming? My answer: Did you ever have a long English paper that was due in class? And as you get ready to hand it in, you know in your heart it needs to be rewritten, even though you’re already rewritten it once? That’s where it is.
It's great. I'm happy with it, but I'm still working. "But if you know any agents . . ."
