Getting out of the way of the story
I have just finished the draft of a novel. I shall ask a couple of people to read it – a fellow novelist with whom I've swapped work since we were both beginning our first books ten years ago, and a nonfiction writer I can trust to be honest about her response. Meanwhile I'm making my own list of improvements and corrections. Whatever these two readers say, I don't expect to make radical changes at this late stage – not because it's faultless, but because its minor faults won't take long to fix and its major faults are probably written into its DNA. Right now I happen to think it's the best thing I've ever written, but I'd be a peculiar kind of writer if I didn't think that. Realistically, if I've allowed it to become its best self, that's as much as I can hope for.
My simple ambition for this book was to tell a story. That isn't as obvious as it might seem – novels arise from many different impulses. Fulfilling that ambition meant first discovering what story was struggling to emerge, then preventing my own bad habits and insecurities from getting in the way. Trying too hard can be as much of a problem as laziness. The easy slide into cliché is one danger, but the desperate tap-dance to avoid cliché can be just as derailing.
The dangers are different for different writers. Here's my personal list. (1) False climaxes and other moments of cranked-up drama. These often emerge from a fear of not sufficiently exciting the reader's interest. (2) Comic twists and amusing bits of dialogue that don't lead anywhere. However funny, jokes are too costly if they reduce the tension, soften the focus, or weaken the reader's sense of a character. (3) Writing that draws too much attention to itself. One of the reasons I like using a first-person voice is that, at every point, it simplifies the question of what to describe and how, because the answer is governed by the personality and mood of the narrator. (4) Explanations either of plot or motivation. I recently heard a journalist say, 'in politics, if you're explaining you're losing'. I think the same is true in my line of work. If you don't understand why my character is making an unexpected decision to complicate his life, a paragraph of convoluted psychological analysis isn't going to help. (5) More plot than the story needs. Though my American writer friend (mentioned here before) thinks we should liberate ourselves altogether from the mechanisms of plot, I still like the frame a plot provides. But it should be just enough to the carry the story's weight, or the book will be all head and no heart.
Of course, these are the faults I've been conscious of trying to avoid. What about the ones I haven't even thought of that I'll find in this book when it's already too late? I suppose they'll just have to provide the impetus for my next one.
Joe Treasure is the author of two novels and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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