Revision: Thinking of WHY not WHAT

For those of you in the process of sending your baby manuscript off and into the world, I wanted to expand on a previous post regarding conflicting advice.

When reading for critique, the instinct is to try and be helpful. Often, I think the result of that is a critique that offers advice rather than a breakdown of the issues at heart.

This is one of my favorite clips. I really hope no one has received or left a critique session with me feeling like this...

But it transitions us nicely (after a few calming laughs) into the reason you should always focus on the WHY instead of the WHAT: the critique you got very likely could be the reader trying their best to help you with a solution, rather than pointing out something that is actually wrong.

Your job when revising is to figure out if that solution is the right one for your work, or if there is something else causing your reader to make the comment that they did that helps to point to what you really need to revise. How? Ask why.

Let's start with the video. WHY did this gatekeeper start spitballing outrageous ideas instead of directly critiquing the work? Well, honestly: from an outside perspective, and someone who has thrown some pretty outrageous ideas out there, I think probably the gatekeeper just wasn't intrigued by the story.

WHY?

Well, there could be two reasons: first, the story itself IS boring and/or non-fresh enough to really spark interest and stand out, OR this gatekeeper wasn't the right fit.

There's nothing you can do about an agent not being the right fit. But you should explore whether or not your story stands out in the market AND, if it does, if you've started in the right place - if your characters and voice are engaging enough right from the start to capture interest. And there's where you begin. Research - does your book stand out? And evaluate - are your characters and voice engaging?

Much better than trying to re-work it to be JAWS, right?

Here are a few things you can consider if you're getting responses all over the board, lots of "just not for me"'s, or just want to think about other solutions:

• What's at stake in your novel? For your characters? Is it strong enough?
• Does the reader feel like everything will be ok, even if they don't finish the book? (stakes)
• What's the conflict in your novel? Is it easily solved? (a perceived lose-lose situation is ideal)
• Does your character have autonomy in the conflict and stakes?
• When do you introduce the conflict and stakes? Too soon? Too late?
• Could your readers run into your character on the street and know how he/she would react to a variety of bizarre situations? (voice)
• Does your character's voice resonate in your readers' heads even after the pages stop?
• What's your ratio of dialog-to-narrative?
• Do your chapters end with conflict, or resolution?
• Is your idea unique? Can you condense it into a one-line hook that doesn't sound like ANY other book? (PW has weekly deal reports you can browse for free FYI)
• Does your book contain elements not found or not often seen in your genre? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
• What kinds of books does your reader/critique-r generally gravitate to? How would that influence what they would say? (don't focus on what you *think* an agent wants; what have they sold? Who do they represent? What have they read recently?)

Finally: what did YOU intend?

Find your book's focus. What are your comps? (in THAT genre, published in the last THREE to FIVE years). What do those books do well? What do you want YOUR readers to take away? What impression do YOU want to make?

Have you asked your critiquers if you've hit those marks?

If you need help figuring out the WHY: ask a friend! I'm sure the poor guy in the video above left scratching his head and maybe just thinking, WHAT?! And not sure where to even begin with the advice he was given.

Stepping back can be difficult; so try collecting the feedback you've been getting, and asking for some fresh eyes to help brainstorm: what should I read between these lines?

Keep an open mind...and don't be afraid to step back from a project, either, and write something new. You might not have found your perfect execution yet. You may need time, and more experience as a writer, to grow into it.

Dig Deeper: Connecting to Characters and Voice

Making your characters believable and relatable and your voice engaging takes more than surface-level details.

Let's take an example of a surface-level voice/detail and Dig Deeper:

I love flip flops. I wear them all the time.

Why?
They’re comfortable.

Why? Why does that matter?
Comfort is way more important to me than looking posh.

Why?
I don’t care what others think about my looks.

Why?
It’s not important.

What is important?
Family. Getting things done. I don’t need to spend a million years on my looks; I have too much to do.

Using these answers, re-write the sentence:

I throw my flops on; no need to spend a million years on my looks. Who cares what others think – I’ve got too much to do.


See the difference? Having dug into my character's statement, I scratched the surface to find out motivation, perspective, attitude...voice! I've taken a fairly common and bland statement and transformed it into an engaging voice.

Let your character talk to you. Had I gone even farther with my questioning, I might have hit on some internal flaws, internal motivations, fears...the deeper you go, the deeper the connection.

If you're struggling to make an emotional scene really punch hard, or trying to find that authentic voice, take some time to Dig Deeper.


An exercise in digging deeper:

1. Find three places in your first chapter where you tell us something your character likes or is feeling.
2. Ask "why" (and/or why-questions) a minimum of six times.
3. Use the answers to re-write the original sentence.

Feel free to share before and after versions in the comments. I'd love to see them!

What is Authenticity in Voice?

Are you hearing from agents that they're not connecting to your characters? Perhaps you need to work on authenticity in your voice.

Anyone could write a book about my grandmother. And they could probably find out a heck of a lot more about her life than I know through research.

That doesn't mean they knew her.

That's not authenticity.

It is factual; it is not authentic.

Authenticity is heart. 

I've written before that voice is the aspect of the novel that lets the reader forget about the writer. It's what makes characters real. It has perspective, a unique way of thinking about and looking at things based on where he/she is from and the experiences he/she has had.

If you were to ask me to describe my grandma, I would smile and laugh a little as I reflect and begin to speak. Why? What prompts that emotional reaction? Authentically writing about my grandma is evoking in the reader that same reaction - allowing them to feel my perspective.

A writer's craft is in figuring out what tools to use and how to do this; showcasing memories? Using key words (for example, notice I immediately switched to "grandma" instead of "grandmother" when I started writing about her)?

My point of view is one of the more intimate; it is not the only point of view or the whole story or even perhaps the most accurate. But it is authentic because it is based on experience. It is perfectly possible to portray her in a different way based on a different authentic point of view because mine is not the only experience with her.

Heart comes from an original experience.

So here's the challenge: a writer, who has never met my grandma, needs to figure out first, what an authentic point of view would be, and second, how to accurately evoke the emotional response in the reader to convey that POV

The farther the writer's intimacy with that point of view, the harder it will be to accomplish.

And it's not just research that will do that.

It takes a lot more introspection and dissecting. It takes a full understanding of the limitations the writer may have to understand that point of view.

The problem I often see is that a lot of writers confuse this work (creating authenticity) with research, or presenting facts.

An exercise in authenticity:

1. Tell me about your grandma.
2. What emotional reaction did you have as you began to reflect and think about what to say? (This is your authentic point of view).
3. How (and what) do you write to evoke that same emotional reaction in the reader as they are given the information? (This is writing an authentic point of view).

I hope that you find this exercise challenging; it should be! It is the effort any of your characters' voices should be given. Find the heart!

YA vs. Adult: what's so different, anyway?

One of my biggest pet peeves about submissions is reading queries from authors who are clearly trend-chasers.

Currently, the biggest offender: adult writers who call their novels YA.

Copyright 2013 stockimages

To start, let me quote Flux, the YA imprint of Lywellyn’s tagline: “Where young adult is a point of view, not a reading level.”

Obviously, I can’t speak on the actual definition from Flux, but for the purposes of the blog post: Just what does this mean?

Well, first, it means that AGE is not the determining factor of a YA.


Case in point:

Below are two passages. Both characters speaking are 17 years old:

I’m sitting in Grandma Meagram’s room, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with her. It’s a bright cool April morning and I can see red tulips whipping in the wind in the garden. Mama is down there planting something small and white over by the forsythia. Her hat is almost blowing off and she keeps clapping her hand to her head and finally takes the hat off and set her work basket on it.

I haven’t seen Henry in almost two months; the next date on the List is three weeks away. We are approaching the time when I don’t see him for more than two years. I used to be so casual about Henry, when I was little; seeing Henry…


VS.

It was easy enough to sneak out of school. I knew that from experience. This time, all I had to do was wait until Mrs. Higgins had led everyone onto the outdoor track and then slip behind the bleachers and walk down to the other opening in the chain-link fence.
Sneaking back in, though…that would be a bitch. But I’d just have to deal with that when I got back. Like always.I shivered in the cool morning breeze. It was 7:00 a.m., or a little past, on the first day in May, and it wasn’t nearly warm enough to be out walking around in the stupid thin T-shirt and short shorts they made us wear for gym.


In case you didn’t guess, the first passage is adult, from The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the second is YA, from The Ghost and the Goth*. Clearly, the age of these characters did NOT determine if these were adult or YA books (though as a general rule, no, there aren’t any adult POVs in YA). Neither did the tense, or the point of view.

And that means: you CAN’T just find and replace all mentions of “twenty-three” with “seventeen” and slap YA on the cover page of your manuscript.


What determines YA is VOICE.
There a sophistication and maturity in adult books, no matter the age of the character, that shines through in the voice. To try and break down some elements of what this sophistication and maturity consists of:


1. The language (or word choice) is different.


2. The descriptive nature of the narrative is told in a different way.

Take how Clare tells us about the springtime: “It’s a bright cool April morning and I can see red tulips whipping in the wind in the garden.” Lovely. Gives us a wonderful sense of the world and a clear picture of this day. WE can feel it without her having to tell us how it feels to her; the I is barely present.

Now look at how Alona describes it: “I shivered in the cool morning breeze. It was 7:00 a.m., or a little past, on the first day in May, and it wasn’t nearly warm enough to be out walking around in the stupid thin T-shirt and short shorts they made us wear for gym.” This also gives us a very clear image of what this morning is like, but we experience it THROUGH HER eyes. We are COMPLETELY focused on HER world, HER experiences, how SHE is letting us see this.


In other words:


3. YA voices are very ego-centric.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit; these are definitely fine lines to walk on. More commercial genres of adult have voices that can sound very close to YA. Take Janet Evanovich; her writing is as sarcastic and “I” centered as any teen novel. What sets these apart are the mature situations -- not to say that YA books don’t, or can’t, deal with mature situations, but HOW the characters confront them is very different.


For example:

Mom starts on beer number six. It’s the one I call the Talking Beer….That’s why we’re here at the cemetery, after all. To mourn another lost boyfriend. To add another name to the Men Who Ditched Leona Fitch list.
“I thought he was going to be the one,” she continues. “He was so thoughtful.”
She’s right. Kyle was thoughtful. He gave me a brown bobble-head dog the first time Mom brought him home to meet me. And he earned bonus points for the fact that—in the six weeks he dated Mom—I never once caught him staring at my rolls of fat or my massive chest.

–Blue Plate Special* (YA)

This is sarcastic, but it’s also painful. A tough situation sparks sarcasm, but also injury to the teen soul. Stephanie Plum wouldn’t be so bitter about her mom’s drinking; it doesn’t have to affect her anymore. The character here, on the other hand, completely internalizes this situation, and when prompted to think of a moment of thoughtfulness in relation to her mother’s boyfriends, relates it back to herself to understand, for us to understand.

We are only capable of feeling her pain through her view of the world, no matter what the situation, or how sarcastic her voice.

I suppose you can think of it like a maturity thing; not that all adults are mature, but rather, YA voice vs. adult voice is certainly going to be less self-assured, less reflective of the world/life, less put into perspective. An adult may not have thought, above, that her mother's boyfriend was thoughtful because he wasn't caught staring at her fat rolls, but rather because he was kind to her mother, remembered her mother's birthday once when no one else did.

This is part of the reason YA novels can be so much more drama-tastic and angsty; the reader experiences the young adult perspective (ego-centric and not quite "worldly" just yet).


4. YA novels are experienced more than watched

What I mean by this is that YA voice is directly relatable; the reader feels like he or she is in the character's shoes. An adult novel, on the other hand, is enjoyed like one enjoys a movie - just as swept up and emotional as YA, but more in the style of watching the characters playing out the scenes, rather than feeling that emotional tug as if YOU are the character, playing out the scene. A virtual reality game (YA) vs. watching a movie (adult).

It's part of the reason, I think, that first person is so popular in YA; it's more directly relatable, and offers less distance to a reader. It allows the reader to directly put him or herself in the character's shoes more easily.

It makes sense, in terms of demographic; don't quote me on this, but 47% of 18-24 year olds read YA, whereas only 25% of 25 and up do. Maybe this is because the younger readers can remember and tap into the young adult emotions more readily, and so more easily put on the YA voice helmet and step into the YA characters' shoes?


(sometimes) 5. Sentence structure is different

YA tends to be shorter, snapier, less complex; less of my favorite little ; and more .


In all of this, I'm not trying to say that there is only ONE YA voice; there are a myriad of voices, just as there are people. But, the voices have elements of what I mentioned above; voice is defined by experience, by perspective, and so how COULD a YA voice EVER sound like an adult? It wouldn't be true, or realistic, to the age group.

I know my examples probably aren’t the most brilliant, but hopefully it at least clears up a few things on YA vs. adult – and why ADULT authors can’t just “become” YA.

And for reference: here is some further reading, on MG vs. YA
Is it MG or YA? on Kidlit.com
The Difference between MG and YA by Laura Backes, Children's Book Insider