How to turn your novel into puff pastry

This week – on Tuesday if you really have to know – I did a live event for Premium Members, in which I did some live editing of people’s work. Massive kudos to the people who put themselves up for such things; hat tip to each and every one of you.

There were some lovely pieces of work, include a mental-but-joyous piece on time travel and British sarcasm and anger management and English as spoken by Czechs. It also used ‘you’ as the narrative voice, which is a very rare choice but, honestly, I think it worked. (And I’m not usually a fan of fancy footwork for its own sake.)

Anyway. One theme which came out of the event is, I think, worth sharing more widely.

It’s this:

We’re often told, as writers, that novels should be pacy. The idea is that if a novel is ‘pacy’ readers will keep turning the pages. Indeed, that proposition is so close to universally accepted that ‘pacy page-turner’ feels almost like tautology.

I don’t agree. Yes, there are pacy page-turners. James Patterson is the most prominent practitioner of this approach. Pages seldom go by without a gunshot, a kiss, an escape, an explosion.

But other approaches are possible. Harlan Coben (a talented guy, who’s much funnier in real life than he chooses to be on the page) writes high-twist / high-event fiction, but he pauses much more. There’s more time for character and setting to bloom. Most commercial authors follow a template more like Coben’s than Patterson’s.

In the end, people turn the pages of a book, because they’re engaged in the story. Lots of explosions generates one kind of engagement, but really caring about characters generates another. The best books combine decent story with rich characters: that is, they are not-especially-pacy page-turners.

Okie-doke. That’s a long preamble, but now take a look at this. (From the Countess Elizabeth von Billigerkaese. She had a uniformed flunky cross the North Sea in a rowing boat to bring us the text; she thinks email is for poor people.)

Pam realised the landlady had mistaken her pause as a compliment. ‘I used to stay here with my husband. The last time was just before he became.., before he died. I think we were in this very room. It’s certainly changed a lot. I mean the rooms didn’t have an en-suite then,’ she added.

‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’

‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’

The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Dementia?’

Now this is good (and the passage gets better. Turns out the landlady believes in the spirit world and ‘communicates’ regularly with the dead. She assumes that’s why Pam is here: to reach her husband.) The piece is simple, but deft. Even from this tiny fragment, we feel Pam keen to please, to say the right thing. The landlady is played just right too. Not purple veils and rings on every finger. Just – a woman who really believes she can talk to the dead.

Good stuff.

But? For my money (and it’s always hard to judge these things out of context) we want a tiny bit more here. So Pam says to the landlady, ‘she was so kind and a great cook…’ That’s clearly Pam’s version of the socially necessary politeness. Oh, it was your aunt who used to run this place? You probably quite like her. I should say something positive.

But that doesn’t tell us what Pam really thought, so that’s something we might want to add. And what about Pam’s dead husband? He’s in Pam’s thoughts, because she’s here, in a place where they used to stay, remembering their last visit. And the room has changed its décor. And were the breakfasts all that good anyway?

Now, we can’t just fill in every detail that occurs to us – we don’t want to drown the text – but we can do something.

I wrote something impromptu on Tuesday, which I can’t now recover, but it went something like this:

‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’

‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’

Pam wasn’t sure that she had been a great cook. The breakfasts were abundant and full of meat, and her husband had loved them. But the only time Pam had cleared her plate, she ended up feeling rather like the new bolsters on the bed: overstuffed, yellow, inert. A slight sheen.

The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’

That’s the addition of 50 words. That’s hardly going to capsize things, but here we have:

1.      Pam’s real thoughts as opposed to her purely social ones.

2.      Something connecting this dialogue back to her husband (whom she is surely thinking about.)

3.      Something that connects to the physical setting.

4.      And something that connects to the theme here. Those references to meat and inert bolsters put a little scent of death into this scene, without our needing to name it.

Now, of course, I don’t know the book and maybe this added piece of text is quite wrong for Pam, or her husband, or for the theme, or whatever. But assume that Countess Elizabeth sits down in her Schloss and adds 50 words of text to her own specifications that picks up the four elements above – inner Pam, husband, setting, theme.

Her book has just got a little less pacy, and a little bit more layered. Less shortcrust, more puff pastry.

Has it got better or worse? I’m pretty diddle-dum-certain that her book’s just got better – and not least because this is a significant passage. It’s the one where the book’s Big Idea is about to be introduced.

Layering matters, and you can do a lot with a little.

That’s it from me.

The Countess Elizabeth is annoyed with me. She handwrites her book on vellum made from calves reared on the Billigerkaese estate. Each time she makes a correction, it’s a lot of rewriting – and a lot of calves.

Feedback Friday

This is self-editing month and the task this week picks up from the event on Tuesday – and this email.

Please pick a passage where you sense a bit more layering is needed, and add those layers in, just as I did above. Aim to add about 50 words to a 200-word passage, but you can add 75 if you really must. You get points for lovely writing, of course, but in particular, we want to see you adding a lot of layers in as few words as possible. My 50 words above added four new layers to the text. See if you can do the same, or better.

What I want is:

Title

Genre

A line or so of explanation, if needed.

A 200-word passage with 50-75 words added in bold. The text you add should add layers of depth and richness to the passage you started with.

Got that? You’ve got that.

That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to rescue some Bavarian calves … 

Til soon.

Harry