I think it might be interesting to know what my feedback on a piece of writing might look like. As I work up an estimate, I often make notes about the patterns I see that will need to be revised. These might function as a guide for the writer to edit their piece before I sink my teeth into it, or they may be the beginning of a conversation with the writer about what I intend to do as I edit.
So this is the first of actual emails I have sent to clients. The writer is Lebanese teaching English in Dubai. His premise is excellent – three sisters who end up in different countries after the partition of the Middle East after WWII.
In general, there is lack of balance – too much setting and not enough action or tension. When the action happens, the reader is not engaged, so the action feels merely like a fact (like Flora leaving). The characters are not well enough introduced and defined as people with distinctive personalities and histories. The town, the orchard, the mountain, the village, the individual people – they feel like an assemblage of objects that have no mass, so there is no gravitational pull into relationship. For the readers whom I think you want to reach, their interest will be in the emotional reality of separation due to political isolation. There is a lot of naming of these objects, but no atmosphere is invoked. No flavor.
F. is rash and her sister P. cares about her, but you haven’t made me (the reader) interested enough in her to care. When F. elopes, we have only been seeing P’s view and hearing her opinion. That’s not enough for us to have any emotional relationship with her.
What about beginning with the elopement and what the villagers have to say as they next gather at church. That will have more drama. You can use the dialog of the villagers to invoke the period, the political changes, the relationship of daughters to mother, the place of this family in the village, the death of the father, the influence of the French soldiers in their lives. Using dialog gives immediacy, which is what draws the reader in.
Can you write the story in the first person from P’s view? Or through each of the girls? (A successful use of story telling through the experiences of two characters in alternating chapters is Chitra Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart.) Then the “chorus” of the villagers would serve to contextualize and generate atmosphere.
[We had had an early correspondence about a young woman sitting on the stump of a fig tree which had been cut down ten years earlier. My understanding is that fig trees will sprout up again from their roots, as redwoods do. Or would have rotted away over that time. If indeed a fig trunk would be big enough for a young woman’s tush to be comfortable, since figs tend to be shrubby. The writer’s response was “poetic license.” He teaches literature, after all.]
I have been contemplating your use of “poetic license” about the fig stump. Here’s my perspective: It’s great for poetry and 19th century novels. But contemporary readers are on the internet a lot (restaurant menus, electronic IRS payments, and every topic on Wikipedia). They care about accuracy. They have read broadly and possibly know more than a lay writer would about a subject. I suspect if you are inaccurate, no matter how artistic, they will not accept your authority to tell them your story – that they’ll close the book and put it back on the shelf (imagine the “shelves” at Amazon: you can “Look Inside,” read a few pages, and skip on to another title if don’t trust what the author has said).
Until next time, delight in the process.
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Download PDF: DCC Feedback from Editor to Writer #1