A harsh, unforgiving eye

Last week I said this:

Next week … I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.

What I asked people to do was to write a very short plot summary of their novel, either in 1-2 paragraphs or as bullet points: Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint / Developments, Crisis, Resolution.

Obviously, that kind of treatment is nowhere close to being an actual plan for a book. Writing a plan would take several pages of text, even if you were being quite compressed in your summary. I’ll also add that I pretty much never write a plan; it’s not how I work. It seems to me that a detailed plan is optional; a general sense of shape and purpose is not.

And, OK, it’s all very well performing an assignment, but what is it for? What are the lessons you’re likely to get?

The short answer to that is that you need to test your plot for seaworthiness – and doing that at book length is (a) extremely hard and (b) extremely time-consuming. Asking the key questions of a micro-summary isn’t going to give you all the answers by any means, but it does give you a fast, reliable way of understanding the basics.

Here are some of the things you may well find:

Blandness

Here’s a plot:

Status Quo                           Woman (45) is dissatisfied with her life

Inciting Incident                  Her best friend pressures her to go to a pottery class

Midpoint                               She resists the pottery, but ends up entering a competition, and failing badly

Crisis                                      She decides to give up the class and revert back to her old way of life

Resolution                            Her new friends intervene and make her realise that she now has a group of friends who love her; she’s turned her life around

Now, I hope it’s obvious that something like this genuinely describe an important turning point in someone’s life. But as a novel? It’s hopeless. It’s just too dull, too lacking in bite to be picked up by anyone – agent, publisher, reader. Nearly all novels need a splash of the dark – and losing a pottery competition is not dark.

Scale

Another thing to ask is whether a novel has genuine novel-length scale. So take this example:

Status Quo                           Karob is a prince – the king to be. He’s had a sheltered life and a loud, dominant father

Inciting Incident                  Dragons prey on the northern territories. Defence is the traditional task of the crown prince

Midpoint                               Karob fights the dragons and fails

Crisis                                      The king is ailing and courtiers are moving to prevent Karob from taking the throne

Resolution                            He returns to the north with a larger force and defeats the dragons.

And, OK, that has darkness. But does it have scale? Does that feel like a story that could sustain 100,000 words of prose? At the moment, it certainly doesn’t. It feels more like a middle grade story that might run to 30-40,000 words.

It’s always hard to be sure of these things when giving feedback to others. Is there more to this story than we’re seeing in those bullet points? Maybe.

But if you’re doing the exercise for yourself, you know whether there is or is not meant to be more. And at the moment, that story is just too compact, too simple – too dull – to sustain a whole book. Basically it amounts to: X fights Y and loses, then fights again and wins. A book that can be summarised as briefly as that isn’t really a novel. You have to be sure your outline has enough scale to build on.

Tangles

The last big route to failure is writing a novel that doesn’t know what it is. The first two examples might be hopeless, but at least they know what they’re doing. That’s not always the case:

Status Quo                           Jax (27) is in a job that offers geopolitical risk assessment. Even she doesn’t know what that is and she’s kind of bored. Her last partner broke up with her 6 months ago and she’s wanting to find someone.

Inciting Incident                  Yuri persuades Jax to help with his Azerbaijani import/export business. Jax also meets Luigi, a very good looking Italian personal trainer. Jax’s mother gets ill.

Midpoint                               Yuri is working with the CIA but had KGB roots and Jax isn’t quite sure who she’s helping. Meantime, she’s dating Luigi but he becomes very controlling. Jax can’t get to see her mum, even though the mum has a dementia diagnosis.

Crisis                                      There’s a major shootout in Baku. Jax is wounded. Luigi tells her that she has to stay at home and be an old-fashioned housewife. Jax’s mother goes into a home.

Resolution                            Jax hands over her secrets to MI6, who give her a job as a central Asia analyst. She breaks up with Luigi. She sees her mum comfortably settled.

And – erp? What is that story? Who is it for? Is it a rom com? An action romance? Is there any connection between Luigi and Yuri? Quite how does the mother connect to all this? It’s not that you couldn’t slot a romance into a geopolitical spy story – of course you can – but there’s a theme about coercive control that just doesn’t seem to fit into anything else. It’s like there are three stories here and none of them have ever met before.

You usually get this kind of issue when a writer just wants to write about their chosen subjects and doesn’t take any feedback from the story itself.

Truth

And in the end that brings us to the essential element in this exercise – or really any writing exercise: truthfulness. You need to look at your work with a third-party eye, an unforgiving one. What, really, would an agent say about any of these three submissions, assuming they were being completely honest and not caring about the author’s feelings? They’d say: “boring”, “thin”, and “total mess”.

One of the advantages of an artificial exercise – like this bullet point one – is that it puts distance between you and your work. That distance should help you get as close to the truth as possible.

Pitch

And one more thing:

Do you feel your pitch echoing through your plot summary? You should. If your pitch isn’t there in the DNA, then your pitch is probably just a marketing sticker that you’re gluing on after the fact. That doesn’t work. The pitch IS your book, or should be.

That’s all from me. I’m going to take the rest of August off in terms of emails, but Feedback Friday will run as normal – and we’ll give you some of my greatest hits so you still get your dose of Friday yumminess.

The kids have built a massive fort in the garden, including a toilet (“but only for wees”) and a bath, which is a wheelbarrow full of water. So far, they’ve used a puppy crate, a guinea pig hutch, a ton of fence posts, an umbrella, two brooms, some towels and quite a lot of scrap wood. I’m not allowed to look too closely because if I try, they tell me they’re throw a spear at my head.

I don’t want a spear in my head.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #5 / Tools

Watch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)

Do your assignment:

Tell us what your themes are, and give us a passage (250 words) that shows them in action.

A great assignment, by the way. So get stuck in! Upload the result to Townhouse here.

Til soon.

Harry