A Plot is not Just to Grow Potatoes - Debbie Bennett
I’ve always been me online. My accounts are always as near to my name as I can get, and I don’t hide behind pen-names or aliases. I can understand why people do, but I’ve never felt the need until now.
Because this post is really about editing. And I’ve done
editing to death on this blog and others, but here’s a different slant on it.
Take this book I read last week. Young adult fantasy and the blurb looked good
and it was reasonably-priced with an OK cover. But I can’t review it. Why not? I hear you ask. You’re a writer – surely you know the value
of reviews? Well, yes, of course I do. But I can’t review this one. And I haven’t. Because
it’s YA fantasy and I can’t give it 5 stars and a glowing write-up. And if I
give it anything less, there’s a real possibility that the author and/or her
fans will hunt me down across the internet and 1* all my books in revenge. It
happens, especially in YA fiction – I’ve seen it in action. I’m not hard to
find online – just google my name and I’m top of the first page. And that’s a
shame, because future readers need all reviews, even those that don’t think the
book was damn-near perfect. It’s not even always the poor author’s fault that
she has an unknown army of rabid teenagers guarding her back online. I think
maybe I’ll create a new amazon account just for reviews.
But back to editing. What was it about this book and others
that I’ve read recently? I don’t buy books where the sample is full of typos,
so those writers have already lost me as a customer. No – these are the books
that on first glance seem well-written with few typos and nicely-constructed
sentences. They’re just … boring.
The YA fantasy started off well, but by 50% of the
ebook, she’d barely met the strange boy from another world. And after clues as
heavy as bricks, she hadn’t realised she herself was Not Completely Human. I
mean come on, darling – you’d have to be pretty thick not to have worked it out
by now. Instead we have pages and pages of getting up and going to school and
having a shower and going out with the family – none of which advances the plot, or illuminates character or does anything really except make me shout Get on with it! And by the end of book 1
in the series, she’s had just one (small and meaningless) encounter with the Bad Guys and that’s it. Over.
Buy book two for the next thrilling instalment. Or not.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d never write a review like that.
It was competently written, there were no typos, homophones or spelling
mistakes I noticed. But it was crying out for a structural edit. It needed 50%
of filler removing, the adding of a plot and a bit of pace, some sense of danger – and
probably books 2 and 3 brought into the same story to provide a satisfying
read. Editing is about way more than proof-reading, you know?
And there’s the adult thriller I’m reading now. Great
cover, good premise and the writing again is competent. But it’s all over the
place and the author has clearly never heard of adverb and adjective slaughter.
Every noun has at least three adjectives attached – do we really need to know
that a very minor character wears a watch that is old, tarnished, etc etc. It
bears no relevance to the character or plot. Now I’m not against adverbs and
adjectives – used sparingly they can add subtle flavour to a novel, but
over-use them and you drown the story completely. He urgently picked up his x,y z jacket and quickly tossed it into the a,b,c laundry basket
before going for a shower … I’m so stuffed with extraneous words that I may
just urgently vomit into the empty, grey wire bin underneath my old, light-brown wooden desk.
I’m seeing more and more of this now in indie work. Less
typos, but the stories lack plot, pace and a recognisable structure. They
ramble up and down the leafy lanes of the author’s imagination without thought
to the journey’s end or even a vague direction sometimes. I know the three-act structure
is more film-orientated and rules are indeed made to be broken, but many books
are written that way because it works. It’s satisfying. And I’m not talking
litfic here – I’m talking thrillers, crime, fantasy where there are genre expectations
and if you don’t meet them, you may well lose your reader. Break the mould by
all means – but do it deliberately, with pride, purpose and direction, and not because
you think the word plot only relates
to the land down the allotment where you grow your potatoes….
Comments
The problem with commonplace advice like this is that it can help someone write a competent novel, but not a really good one. And competent writing is often very boring indeed.
And a book where 50% of the words are adjectives and adverbs - and there is no plot at all - is very boring indeed to me.
Which is the point, Lee. All craft starts at the beginning. Learn to grind paint before you paint the fresco. Learn about the grain of wood before you create the breathtaking cabinet.
And before you can write wonderful, ground-breaking, rule-breaking literary fiction that raise the bar for the next generation - well, perhaps you should know about the basics so, as Debbie says, you can break the rules 'with purpose and confidence.'
If you're already writing wonderful, ground-breaking, rule-breaking literary fiction that raises the bar for the next generation - fine. Have away and do it. Debbie wasn't addressing you.
I have a feeling that we may be in for whole lifetimes of overblown prose from new writers unless we head it off at the pass. The new guidelines for writing in the primary school have come out and they make disturbing reading. The Scattered Authors Society is sending a letter to the DfE, Ofqual, etc, pointing out their folly and I guess they'd like extra signatures. So here's the draft letter, written by Celia Busby. I think she'd like to get even more signatures.
We are a group of children’s writers who have become increasingly concerned about the teaching of writing in recent years, particularly in primary schools. As professional writers, we often visit schools to promote reading and encourage creativity and enjoyment of writing among children of primary age.
All of us have noticed a very damaging tendency for children at primary schools to be steered towards certain styles of writing in line with the assessment criteria used to measure children’s levels of attainment. As a result their writing is in general less fluent, clear and engaging and has a tendency to be cramped, stuffy, over-complex and just plain poor in style. This has knock-on effects on their writing at secondary school and has been noticed by some of us in students at university level.
National Curriculum guidance on the use of ‘varied vocabulary’ and ‘imaginative language’ has meant in practice (and we have all seen examples of this in classrooms) children are taught not to use simple words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘small’ or ‘big’ but to always find other more ‘interesting’ words to replace them – such as ‘wonderful’, ‘terrible’, ‘minuscule’ or ‘enormous’. They are also taught never to use ‘and’ or ‘said’ if they can shoehorn in ‘additionally’ or ‘exclaimed’.
Because these words and constructions are in effect handed to children as ‘better’ alternatives to simple words, they do not come across them in context. They fail to understand the nuances of their use, and they also fail to realise that they are relatively unusual – that they are used sparingly in good writing. For every use of the word ‘minuscule’ in actual books, there are probably twenty uses of the word ‘small’.
We would urge the government, Ofqual and the Standards and Testing Agency to consider ways in which they can make it quite clear to teachers and assessors that complex vocabulary and complicated sentence structures should be used with caution and their use should always be subordinate to good, clear and fluent style. Otherwise we risk producing a generation of children who believe that a sentence such as ‘I bounded excitedly from my cramped wooden seat and flung my arm gracefully up like a bird soaring into the sky’ is always better than ‘I stood and put my hand up.’
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For the writing itself, what else to expect? Folks like us can publish for practically nothing up front, and all the advice we're getting is about having lots of books in the pipeline. So we either stretch out the plot (more books) or chop up a novel into parts (:: raises hand, claims guilt ::) anything to have more TITLES on the virtual shelf and look like a prolific author. Whatever happened to the long view?
As for stylistic concerns, it will surely vary by genre a bit- epic fantasy carries a burden to explain an entire world where everything (potentially) is different, and you can't wait to tell the reader until later because they'll form their image around a default based on this world. So descriptive words and qualifiers become vital, or else you have something more like The Jetsons or Flintstones- a patina of fantasy over the everyday. Tough row to hoe! But fun.