After the Bloom Comes Revision

Postponement is not suspense in a novel’s beginning

It’s widely recognized that writing the ‘sagging’ middle of a novel is hard, but landing the beginning is the biggest stumbling block for writers I know.

 Over the last decade, I’ve participated in writing workshops with many talented novelists. I’ve loved their characters, their settings, their dialogue, their themes, their writing style. But very often, it takes a while to be interested in the story because the story takes too long to get started.

Of course, this is a pacing problem, but why does this problem occur so frequently?

Postponement is Not Suspense

My experience is that writers often mistake postponement for suspense. That is, they purposefully put off what’s engaging so that they can spring some juicy stuff on the reader several chapters into the book. It’s as if the first pages are simply repeating “Wait for it, wait for it …”

Wait for what? 

This is a mistake I have tried to correct in my WIP. Here’s my quick pitch:

Two women, molested by the same predator as children, take divergent paths in healing that will pit them against one another in a battle over community morals. When high school teacher Margaret O’Rourke helps the lesbian daughter of a prominent conservative Christian, there’s hell to pay.

In early drafts of my WIP, I had the antagonist—an evangelical pastor’s wife who will work to ban books at the protagonist’s high school—removing something from the protagonist’s desk in the first chapter. It’s an argumentative essay written by a sophomore stating that masturbation is healthy for teens. But I didn’t show her taking it. It was a surprise, for much later.

Bad idea.

Revising My Antagonist into a Villain

That a student is allowed to select such a topic is the thing that makes the antagonist suspicious of the protagonist’s classroom materials. I revised that first chapter and the next several to be more specific. To show what the antagonist does in each step of violating the privacy and personal space of others.  But in the latest—and what I thought was the final—edit, my antagonist appears too much like the villain in a morality play. And I didn’t know how to make her seem otherwise. She is, afterall, someone who doesn’t respect boundaries and believes all her actions are morally justified.

About the time I felt too tired to revise further, I saw an ad for a novel writing workshop from A Public Space Magazine. I figured what the hell. I signed up. Right now, my fellow novelists and I are halfway through the twelve-week workshop. We’ve been discussing the first half of each writer’s novel. After a little break, we’ll discuss the second halves. This is a great way to look at works in progress because the reader can get a sense of the pacing and storyline. 

In the introductory phase of the workshop, I told my cohort that an editor had said my antagonist was an awful person and that was annoying. (He told me he reads manuscripts looking for what will annoy him, so maybe that ‘s just his vocabulary to describe what he doesn’t like, but, yeah, the conversation was a bit weird.) 

Adding Depth to My Antagonist by Changing POVs

My workshop fellows had an interesting take. The antagonist is a POV character, but does she deserve a point of view? Afterall, she is very much the type of person who tries to remove books from schools without reading them, one who invites others to her church because it has all the answers. She is always in the moral right. 

Who in my novel deserves a POV? There are several characters whose minds we are in, and I have to cut at least one of those minds out for ease of reading.

As a group, we thought the antagonist should be seen through her daughter’s eyes. I love this idea because it will allow more depth. And I like teen voices. But the daughter is not a POV character, so that’s only one problem solved. I picked another character’s POV, that of the protagonist’s lifelong friend, to cut. 

So, correcting my postponement of the action and trying to create suspense from the beginning didn’t entirely fix my problem. But now, with the help of others’ insight, I have the energy to begin solving the next problem.

Onward and upward.

What I’m Reading

I recently finished two books I had checked out from the library and had to renew twice. Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Bond with the Natural World by Karen Armstrong was a fast enough read about how peoples of all religions should care for nature, heed warnings about climate change and become part of the solution. But Edge of the World: was a slog. I was reading it for ideas about what the Vikings did in Ireland while invading and pillaging. But there wasn’t a lot there that will help me with ideas for my next book. There were some interesting chapters on the Black Plague.

Books I’m Listening To

I’ve been on a lot of walks these past two weeks with just the dogs, so I am making my way through some audiobooks. I listened to Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which I really loved. I also loved Meryl Streep’s narration although the fact that an absolutely top superstar was narrating a book about the protagonist finding her best life by leaving acting made me laugh. I also listened to The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai. I’d recently read two of Makkai’s novels (I Have Some Questions for You and The Great Believers) and loved them, so I wanted to continue with her work. And just yesterday, I started a nonfiction book Unheard Witness: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman by Jo Scott Coe. Kathy was the wife of Charles Whitman, the ‘ ‘tower’ mass shooter at the University of Texas at  Austin in 1966. It’s a great dive into the life of an abused wife at a time when that was accepted and kept quiet. I’m just through the first few chapters, so more on this one later.