I sent my second extract to Tim still bubbling with ideas from the first response. His first crit had been about general thoughts, so I was interested to see whether the second extract would cement his opinion on the piece.
I included in the package a chapter breakdown so that Tim could see where I was going with it.
This in itself proved to be a worthwhile exercise.
I had outlined the novel and it lived for a long time as a post-it montage on my office wall before I turned on the computer. I’ve also written a one page synopsis of the novel.
But it was interesting to break it up into chapter chunks in such an emotionless way. It felt very much like writing scene directions for a play and enabled me to look at the structure in a very dispassionate way.
For example-
Chapter 2. “Understanding”
(Grace POV, past tense)
Grace goes to work- she is a drug counsellor. She debates with Paul, a patient about the nature of responsibility. In her office after the session she reflects on how the problems began in her relationship with Stephen and his jealousy, and thinks back to the events that brought him into her life. While at university she moved in with Lucy and David and fell into a lifestyle of drug abuse. Lucy calling her mobile snaps her back into reality. Lucy explains that she has spoken off the record to her contact at the police and that Amanda Levy died by having her throat bitten out, not cut.
This contains none of the nuances of the scenes, says nothing about Grace’s relationship with Paul, but it does allow me to see how the story plays out.
Sorry, I digress. Extract 2.
I sent Tim the next chronological 10,000 words.
In many ways what he returned with expanded on his thoughts from his first extract. It is clear that there are a number of things that I need to look at.
Empathy is one. This is something that Henderson (Of Writing East Midlands fame) has said to me before as well. I have created a distance between Grace as a character and the reader, she comes across as cold and it may be hard to feel any empathy with her as a result.
Distance is something that I always admired in writers, I think Martin Amis and Ian McEwan are very skilled at creating distant characters. But, you can always relate to them in someway and I think this is the point.
Passivity is another. My storyline is complicated. It took a lot of planning and rejigging and checking to make it work. The side effect of this is that it has made Grace passive in the narrative. Things happen to her, not because of her.
In this instance I relate Empathy and Passivity strongly. If the character has no say in what happens to her, simply allows events to occur around her then how can we as readers relate to her?
Two points to come back to.
I’ve touched on overwriting. Well, he mentioned it in this extract as well, along with show v tell, so there are two big things for me to think about.
I carried out an exercise that Tim suggested- print the whole novel out and then taking 2 different coloured pens highlight every section that I tell rather than show.
It was quite enlightening. I cut nearly 10,000 words out of the book just doing this. Of course, I’m going to have to put them back in, but after that laborious exercise I’m going to make sure when they go back in they’re going to be 100% show.
