The Eighth Element

From Donald Maass, at Writer Unboxed, this: The Eighth Element

As some of you may know, Donald Maass is a very well-known agent. Here’s how this post starts:

As you can imagine, I’ve read a lot of manuscripts.  How many?  Many thousands, certainly.  Generally, they are good, just not ready.  Why not?  There are eight common lacks but the last one is the hardest to pin down.  It’s not so much a craft technique as it is a quality.

The missing quality is one that falls somewhere between insouciance and recklessness.  It has aspects of courage and authority.  … It’s not safe.  It’s not careful. … Not that a novel should offend readers, but neither should it make few ripples in readers’ minds. …

Timeless stories are written with high authority.  It’s authors who don’t apologize or wonder if they are worthy.  They assume that they are and not only that, they have been appointed to tell us who’s who, what’s what, and to do that in their own quirky way and if you don’t like it then go jump in a lake.  It’s as if those authors don’t care a damn who approves their novels but care like hell about the ache and joy of the human condition.

Maass goes on from there. It’s a fiery post — I like it! — and then he offers a bunch of writing prompts and suggestions, of which the last struck me:

Write better than your favorite author and/or better than anyone.  Write that way right now.  Who’s telling you that you can’t?

Writing prompts never work for me — writing advice is normally something I ignore or critique — but you know what, I actually think that’s good advice. I really do. Aim high! Write better than your favorite author! Do it right now!

That’s exactly what I aimed to do when I wrote The City in the Lake. Maybe not better. But I was aiming to write as well as Patricia McKillip, the same kind of story. That was exactly where I aimed. Aim high!

The funny part of this post is what isn’t in it. There are eight common lacks but the last one is the hardest to pin down. Really? Could be, hard to say, because Maass never mentions what the other seven are!

That certainly leads to a sudden urge to guess what he might mean. At least, I have that impulse. Seven elements of craft or art where authors fail? Let me see. Seven. Okay, in no order whatsoever:

Lack of setting up front; “white room” opening.Lack of engagement in the opening; failure of the voice to engage the reader; “boringness.” I mean the prose may be functional, but it goes beyond plain or unadorned to drab.Lack of coherent plot; episodes of disconnected action.A failure to draw out an effective character arc; a failure to give the protagonist or others motivations that seem plausible and strong enough to drive their actions.Sheer lack of sentence-level craft; awkward syntax or using words that don’t mean what you think they mean — like “tenet” instead of “tenant!”Unrealistic dialogue — I mean dialogue that feels unrealistic, of course, as all dialogue is pretty unrealistic. Or boring dialogue. Or clumsy dialogue.Failure to land the ending. An unsatisfying ending is a dire fault.

I have absolutely no idea what Maass had in mind. Maybe he’s listed those out in other posts. In fact, I’m sure he has. Also, these sorts of things mostly take a book out of the “good but not ready” category and drop it into one of the many and various “not good” categories. Still, when I think of points of potential failure, these are some of those points.

None of that interferes with his essential point:

Write better than your favorite author and/or better than anyone.  Write that way right now.  Who’s telling you that you can’t?

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