Just because you can write well, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can write good fiction.
I’ve always thought I can write pretty well. In my previous life as a senior director in industry I used to take quite a bit of trouble over reports and other pieces of writing that I needed to do. I would always make sure that my words were accurate, concise, and unambiguous. If I wrote a sentence that seemed clumsy, I would rewrite it until it flowed nicely. My command of grammar is pretty good, and my writing therefore contained few grammatical errors. If I say so myself, my reports etc. were, in terms of the quality of writing, a good deal better than what one normally sees in industry.
When I came to write my first novel, ‘Buyout’, I applied all of these skills, and when the first draft was completed I felt I had done a pretty good job. Nevertheless, I decided to send my work to a literary consultant (Daniel Goldsmith Associates – http://www.danielgoldsmith.co.uk) for an independent assessment. It was one of the best decisions I have made.
The report on my manuscript was pretty scathing: it acknowledged that my writing was accurate and grammatically correct, and also that the basic plot premise was good, but pointed out that I had made just about every common error that first-time fiction writers typically make. Here are just a few:
- My characters were introduced too quickly, one after the other. This overloads the reader and doesn’t allow time for him/her to become familiar with each one.
- Many of my scenes were too short and I hadn’t included enough descriptive text to allow the reader to settle into the scene before moving on to the essential elements which move the plot forward or reveal more about a particular character. (Interestingly, my years of writing as concisely as possible actually worked against me in the context of writing fiction).
- I had been mixing ‘points of view’ of different characters in the same scene, which detracts from the writing. For example ‘Harry told me that he hadn’t been there that night’ followed by ‘Harry wondered whether Sarah believed him’. If the scene is being written from Sarah’s point of view, she has no way of knowing what Harry is thinking. She might observe that he is sweating or looking uncomfortable and interpret these things as clues that he may be lying, but if that’s the case then that is what I should have written – not suddenly jumped inside Harry’s head.
- I had ignored the golden rule (of which I was blissfully unaware at the time) of ‘Show, don’t tell’. In other words build a ‘word picture’ to indicate how someone may be feeling rather than just state how they appear to be feeling. For example, rather than say ‘Jonathon looked angry’, say something like, ‘Jonathon clenched his fist and narrowed his eyes; a vein in his temple began visibly to pulse’.
I could go on and on; in fact I think I could now write a book on the subject! Happily, there is no need, as Lorena Goldsmith has already done so, ‘Self-editing fiction that sells’. I wish I’d read it before I wrote ‘Buyout’ – it would have saved a great deal of time and heartache. I’d recommend it to any first-time author. Anyway, hopefully the few examples above will be sufficient for you to see what I am driving at: just as report writing has its particular rules, fiction writing does too. No -‘rules’ is too strong a word, for fiction should not be formulaic or it will become boring and predictable, but there definitely are technical aspects of writing fiction which if not observed, detract from the quality of the outcome.
What this experience has really brought home to me is that there are two distinct phases to creating a novel, and each requires a different mind-set. When you are writing the story you need to be in creative frame of mind and concentrate on the flow of the narrative, without stressing unduly about the kind of things mentioned above. When you come to self-editing your work, you need to adopt a critical mode of thinking to spot these errors.
This story has a happy ending. With patient coaching from Lorena Goldsmith and Katie Green at Daniel Goldsmith Associates I rewrote and re-rewrote the manuscript of ‘Buyout’ as many times as was necessary to correct these errors and realise the potential which was always there in the book. That’s not the end of the process of creating a book, though. After self-editing, comes copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading, cover design, and more. These are subjects for future posts though.
