May 8, 2006
Over the last couple months I've had the opportunity to read the first 50 pages of manuscripts by beginning novelists. I don't mean to be patronizing by using "beginning," but I believe they were first novels.

Their problems were so similar, and if I were crazy enough to go back and read my first manuscript, I'd probably find all the same problems, that I figured they were worth mentioning here.

1. They TELL rather than SHOW. Fiction should be like painting a movie or painting a picture. Both these writers needed to show things rather than tell the reader about them.

2. Passive voice. I think all writers battle with this. I do. "He had bought sixteen rakes at the local hardware store. The owner had said, 'Bill, you're losing your mind.'" Better: "He bought sixteen rakes at the local hardware store. The owner said, 'Bill, you're losing your mind.'"

3.Too much backstory. Stay in the now. Your story has forward momentum, don't slow that momentum down with long flashbacks, dream sequences or explanations of how they met their wife, what their dates were like, etc. Those may very well be important, but in this case, you've got to fit them in without jerking the reader out of the story.

4. Bad beginnnings. The technical term is "in media res," which translates loosely to "in the middle of things," which is generally a good place to start your book. I was quite pleased to read Eric Mayer and Mary Reed's latest novel and find that it began with the main character literally running away from the law enforcement authorities, who believed he had murdered a senator. Talk about in the middle of things! You don't have much time to get the attention of a reader, editor or agent. Get started fast. John Sandford told me when I interviewed him that the best writing advice he ever got was from Lawrence Block, which was, start your novel with your second chapter.

5.Conflict. By the same token, when I i nterviewed Michael Connelly for a profile (yep, I'm dropping names today), he commented that the best advice he ever got was that on every single page your character needs to want something, even if it's only a glass of water. This may or may not be in conflict--he could be in the desert, he could be in a grungy bar, he could be interviewing a witness, whatever. This is a case of you need some sort of conflict, large or small, ALL THE TIME.

6. Focus. Both of these new writers' works felt unfocused to me. They sprawled. They meandered. They went off on distracting tangents. The timeline jumped (see #7). It was a little bit like they weren't sure what their story was.

7. Timeline. There are wonderful novels that cover huge amounts of time. Days, weeks, months, years, centuries. But they're tricky. Whenever you jump in time, you threaten to lose your reader. The transitions are brutally difficult this way and, like #6, it suggests that your story isn't focused. If you're writing about a battle that lasted two days, we may not need to know about what led up to it. What first comes to mind for me is the movie "Saving Private Ryan." Starts with D-Day and moves on to a very specific period in time. The war lasted 4 years, but the movie didn't cover that. It focused on getting them in, onto their mission and how it ended. Yes, it was bookended with the present and there was a scene of the mother receiving the bad news, but the timeframe was tight. Think TV's "24." Nice clear timeframes.

There are other issues, but these seem to be the really big ones. Story issues concerning structure and plotting and the type of story chosen are more sophisticated--and they were problems in these cases, too.

Both these writers showed promise. They had, for want of a better word, talent. They were able to string words together, create pictures in our heads, describe characters who were, at least somewhat, interesting characters we might want to spend time with. What they lacked, mostly, were experience and proficient technique. It can be learned. But it takes some teaching, a lot of study and a whole lot more practice, practice, practice.

Best,
Mark Terry