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What the novel needs

What the novel needs“With all your expe­ri­ence writ­ing,” some­one asked me, “and if your new nov­el is going bad­ly, do you always know what to do?”

The short answer is no. More­over, I would sug­gest, if the work is not going well, you do not need to know what to do. You need to know what the nov­el needs.

I think this is a dif­fi­cult aspect of writ­ing to grasp. Yes, the writer cre­ates the sto­ry, the char­ac­ters, the essen­tial para­me­ters, the arc, as peo­ple like to say these days. The key thing is, how­ev­er, at a cer­tain point, the nov­el becomes a work unto itself, and you need to respond to its demands, not your own.

You may have set out to write a light-heart­ed com­e­dy about what­ev­er. In the process it has become a hard, real­is­tic work about what­ev­er. And you have not noticed. So there you are, still try­ing to add light­ness, when what the sto­ry needs is dark ten­sion and suspense.

Writ­ers, like every­one else, can fool them­selves about what they are doing, and find it hard to stand back and look at self with objec­tiv­i­ty. Instance: You try to do good but you are real­ly doing harm.

There comes a time when you have to be able to look at your own work as if it is not your own work.

I believe I once read that Madeleine L’Engle had her hus­band (an actor) read her drafts to her, as a way of hear­ing her work objec­tive­ly. To be hon­est, I do not think I could bear it, but I bet she learned a whole lot.

Some­times to make your work bet­ter, you have to act as if it is not yours.

2 thoughts on “What the novel <em>needs</em>”

  1. This is a great post. I’m in that stage right now — edit­ing the first book in a series. It is very dif­fer­ent now than when I first con­ceived the idea, and wrote it…

    Reply

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