How to revise your novel (part 2)
Originally posted: August 24, 2020
This is the second post in a series about novel revision. In part 1 we considered characters and pace. This post will tackle conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action.
CONFLICT
Or rather, lack thereof. After flat characters, lack of conflict is the second most common problem in manuscript after manuscript. Including my own! Being a published author doesn’t make you immune to shitty first drafts.
Are your characters too virtuous? Are they too obliging? Does every conversation end with everyone getting exactly what they want? Are you letting your characters off the hook too easily or too quickly? Put your characters in peril. Make them morally complicated and imperfect. Make the people in their lives intractable and difficult. Let bad things happen to your beloved protagonist. A common pitfall: dumping all the problems on the side-kick. That’s how hard we work to spare the protagonist! But now your sidekick has the more compelling storyline so why should the reader care about the supposed main character?
There is a scene in The Boat People where Mahindan is in a detention camp in Sri Lanka. The war is over and he’s trapped in a literal hell. In a very early draft, my writing group pointed out that in the entire scene, Mahindan was the only character who didn’t seem hungry/ in pain/ in physical discomfort/ scared. This was a huge failure of imagination on my part. I went back to the drawing board. Added hunger pains, insect bites, the ick factor of being without a bath, the hum of anxiety, the high pitch of terror. It took time to really settle into that uncomfortable difficult place with Mahindan. But writing is work. Suffer for your art.
FLASHBACKS AND OFF-STAGE
A while back I read a manuscript by a promising and talented author. Most of the scenes were framed inside a flashback. Now this framing structure can work well. The novel A Little Life is narrated in this structure and the device adds to the sense that life is happening in a circular way for the characters, blurring the lines between past and present. For that book, with its particular themes, and its excess of conflict and tension, the flashbacks worked. But that’s rare.
More often flashbacks, like minor characters, can be vestigial organs. You started writing without really knowing what was going to happen and mid-way through a scene you realized “oh, this important thing has to come first” and rather than pause the flow of your work, wrote that thing as a flashback. That’s a reasonable first draft strategy. But later, in revisions, scrutinize those flashbacks. Would the action unfold better in real time?
One sneaky way we writers avoid conflict is by making it happen off-stage and/or in flashbacks. Flashbacks can be useful but they lack the immediacy, the heart-stopping quality, of real time events. So be sparing when you are utilizing it to relay senes of conflict. Similarly, if Banquo’s going to get knocked off, bring the action centre stage. Don’t fade to black just as the tension is rising and then have some characters recounting the big fight in the following scene. (Booooo! complains the reader)
THOUGHT VS. ACTION
Perhaps because the stories take place inside our own heads, many of us have a penchant for letting characters live too long inside their own heads too. Even if your main character is in a coma and the entire story is taking place in their dreams, there will still be action, right? The character will think they are out in the world running and jumping and having fights about the fence with the belligerent neighbour. And you have to convey those memories or dreams in such a way that it feels like it’s really happening.
Conversely, some manuscripts are all action and zero interior thought so that characters become puppets. The balance between inner and outer life will be different for every book but it is a balance. You can’t just have a character involved in a high speed car chase - say - without giving us some idea of what she’s thinking, how her heart is pounding, how her mind is racing, how her reflexes are taking over, why she’s doing this, what she hopes to gain, what she fears to lose etc.
