On writing gush-free reviews

I was recently reading a first novel by someone I won’t name. The cover carried a quote from a fellow YA writer which suggested that the novel was utterly marvellous and gripping. Inside were a dozen more such quotes from well-known writers. Now of course, I understand that writers want to support other writers they know, and it’s also possible that these writers share an agent or a publisher who asked them to read and quote. But can you trust these quotes? Probably not. All that gush strikes me as so much luvvy back-patting. (Though I will say that I did enjoy the book.)

Sticking to the plan

Amongst writers of fiction, there are two distinct camps: those who plan a book down to the finest detail before they start (the plotters) and those who start with the first line of page one and fly by the seat of their pants until they see where it takes them (the pantsers).

Of course, not everyone fits into one category or the other, and, of the people I’ve discussed this question with, the majority come down at some point in the middle, although most seem more inclined to the plotter end than the pantser. At the very least, they are likely to have some idea of the beginning and end of the novel they’re working on, even if they are not entirely sure what is going to happen in the middle.

WHICH WAY TO GO?

The advantages of intense plotting before you start are obvious: if you have a careful plan, you will never be stuck wondering what to do with your characters next and you shouldn’t end up with a manuscript full of holes and inconsistencies. You can work in all that stuff writing courses and manuals talk about: narrative arc, point of no return, hero’s journey … You can make sure your subplot doesn’t take over and that you never put a gun on the mantelpiece and don’t fire it.

The disadvantages are just as clear: if it’s all mapped out before you put hand to keyboard, isn’t the actual writing going to be tedious writing-by-numbers? Certainly that’s how the arch-pantser sees it. For them, the joy of writing is waiting for the muse to strike, the penny to drop, the lightbulb to appear above their head.

POST-ITS AND GRAPHS

Have you seen those walls covered in post-its that some writers use to work out their plots? Those terrify me. What is on each of those tiny bits of paper? How do you remember if you’ve worked each one into your novel? And the graphs with the lines that build up and plummet and build up again. 

What does that mean? When I started using the trial version of Scrivener, the writing program, it just confused me. I need to make a page (card? panel?) for each character? And for each setting? I suppose it makes sense, but, I thought either it’s all there in my head, or else it’s not but it’ll come out when it’s needed, no need to spend an age working out what some minor character’s mother’s called, not if it’s not important.

The trouble with going for the plotter approach is that plotting is a lot like doing exam revision. You may know that once you do it, you’ll be able to achieve your best work. But there’s always something more exciting to do than revision, and people keep telling you so many different ways of going about your revision that you get confused and then you’re completely turned off the whole thing, and, you know, what the hell, it doesn’t matter that much, you’re clever, you’ll manage perfectly well without bothering.

JUMPING RIGHT IN

In my writing to date, I have generally started with a setting and an idea where I’m going, plus a few of the stops along the way, I might even have a couple of pages of planning. But it’s only when I’ve finished that I review how the plot has worked – or how it hasn’t. As I do my first edit, I make a spreadsheet of what happens in each chapter, what the timescale is, the setting, the word count and notes about what needs fixing. I suppose, in essence, it’s what serious plotters do before they start.

With my first book, I worked this way because I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, or whether I’d ever even finish the book. Now that I know a bit more – from talking and reading and thinking about writing as well as quite a few years of practice – I’m beginning to acknowledge that this is an approach that wastes a lot of time. As I write, I’m concentrating too much on where what I’m writing is going and not enough on the fine detail of the scene I’m currently working on. And when I reach the end, I have no easy way to judge whether what I’ve written really works. I rely instead on instinct, which is, I suspect, skewed by the fact that this is my new baby. Putting the manuscript away for a while works, but adds yet more time to the process and means I have to keep coming back to a previous story when my head’s already moved on to the next thing.

COMING ROUND

Recently I’ve been struggling with an unruly plot that seems to be taking far too many words to get to where I’m headed. I’m on the brink of finishing – I’ve written the end – but I know there’s something wrong with it. I feel unable to stop and take stock until I’m certain that I’ve supplied whatever it is that’s missing. I’m perfectly well aware that some of what I’m writing is going to have to go, but I can’t see a sensible way to pull out of the story without making it harder to sort out.

I’ve also been reading The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne and my dog-walk listening of choice is the Story Grid podcast. The Story Grid is a system for planning and editing your writing. It’s intense and precise and requires a lot of work beyond actually putting words on screen, both before you start and once you’ve finished. Gradually all that stuff about points-of-no-return and inciting incidents and rising and releasing of tension is coming into focus for me. It’s not that I didn’t understand those things before; I just thought they’d come naturally as I wrote, the same way spelling and punctuation do.

I was just starting to come round to the idea that serious plotting before I start to write is a good idea. I like to experiment with my writing method. (I may even write by hand one day – but probably not; imagine all the crossing out.) I’ve been asking all the writers I know about their writing methods, and one of them mentioned that she’d spent six weeks at the end of last year doing intense plotting. My first thought was, “Six weeks? That’s way too long. What a waste of writing time.” But then she told me how much quicker writing the actual book was when she’d done the plotting first. And not just quicker, but also more immersive. She started each writing session already deep in her characters’ world and didn’t leave it until she stopped.

That’s the thing that’s sold plotting to me: the idea that you can step so lightly into the world you’ve created.

So, I’m considering working out my next book to a scene-by-scene level before writing a word. I’m planning a series of four so I suppose I’ll have to give due consideration to what happens in the sequels too.

Though I have to admit, I haven’t been able to stop myself from writing a few scenes already...

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Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults. Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French? You can read the first chapter here.

A foot in both camps

I have a head full of YA at the moment. That's Young Adult for the uninitiated who might stumble upon this blog. There's the YA novel I've just published, What they don't tell you about love in the movies (you can read a sample here), and the big wide world of YA on the internet that becomes your constant companion when you are looking for a YA readership, joyful, moaning, opinionated, passionate, open to new ideas, just like the houseful of teenage (and nearly teenage) daughters I have around me.

There's so much YA around now. There's plenty of its younger sibling, Teen, too. But there wasn't any such thing when I was a teenager. A couple of publishers brought out imprints for older readers, but nothing really stuck around for long, and booksellers and librarians mixed these books in with the children's books anyway. Penguin had Peacock; I know my Little Women and I Capture the Castle were Peacock. Then later on they had Puffin Plus. So I was wondering was what I read when I was a Young Adult. Some of it is, of course, lost to me. I used to read all the time. I read books I borrowed from the library. I reread books I already owned. I read other people's books. I didn't buy all that many books because I didn't have the money and, being in boarding school most of the time, I didn't have the opportunity. So all I've really got to go on is the handful of books still on my shelf that I've written the date in.

Step into 1979 with me. The year I was 14. Here we go.

Here are some of the books I bought that I suppose might be labelled YA these days.

Or maybe Teen because they’re less edgy than a lot of YA. There’s no sex here, no teen ‘issues’. What makes them YA is that they’re about people on the cusp between childhood and adulthood. Other books in these series are about adults. Thinking about it, publishers might struggle to place these books now. Today’s YA characters are pretty much always teens. You could think of these as crossover I suppose, because they start with teen characters and lead them into the adult world, like Little Women, like Jane Eyre, though no one classed those children’s books when they were published.

Interesting that so many of the books I’ve kept are series. Series fiction, ever a favourite with publishers, is the mainstay of YA. Catch your audience once, and you can sell them a whole lot more of the same. No, not necessarily the same, that’s not fair, but you know what I mean. The difference with Flambards and the Earthsea books and Barbara Willard’s Mantelmas books is that each book can stand alone. I’ve wittered on endlessly in my blogs about my feeling that books should have proper endings, but I’ll just say it again because I can’t help myself: books should have proper endings! You should be able to read them in any order!

But look! I was buying children’s books too!

And I was definitely rereading all the children’s books on my shelves already (not in public though, not at school). I would have bought The Growing Summer because I already loved Noel Stretfeild. I expect I bought The Didakoi because I saw it on TV. There was a lot of good children’s drama on TV in the 1970s.

And at the other end of the scale, I dabbled in adult books. I wasn’t buying many of them yet. There were too many adult books on the shelves in a bookshop. I didn’t know where to start. I read them at school because that’s all there were in our school library. And I edged my way into adult books, picking up things my mother had borrowed from the library, looking at other people’s shelves, searching for adult books by children’s authors I already knew, reading stuff that had been on TV. Funny though, I can’t imagine my 14-year old daughter finding The Happy Prisoner appealing.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the other hand, is your ultimate crossover novel. Me and one of my friends loved it so much that, when called upon to create a magazine to sell for charity at school, we put nothing on the front cover but the word ‘PANIC’ in large letters in homage to Douglas Adams’ genius.





 
What do I take from this survey of my 14-year old reading? That I’m glad there’s YA today for my kids because it’s much easier to find something you want to read when it’s out there with a label on it. But I wonder if today’s YA needs to burst out of its teen bubble and allow some of its characters to grow up. And if it did, maybe some of these books might reach a wider audience. I read that KM Peyton didn’t think Flambards was a children’s books when she wrote it. I’m sure the TV series, which was primetime rather than in a children’s spot (such things used to exist, dear younger readers…) enlarged her audience, but if not for that, would it ever have reached an adult readership? The trouble with labels is that although they make it easier to find things, they also restrict.

Don't mention the ending!

Here’s the thing. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately with the intention of reviewing them. Obviously knowing that you’re going to write about a book is going to influence the way you read it to some extent. It’s hard to avoid a little distance, the sense of a checklist (good characterisation, tick, realistic but unexpected plot turns, tick). You know you’re onto a winner when you lift your head from the book and realise you haven’t been paying attention to your checklist. That’s what makes reviewing a book you love so much harder than reviewing one you haven’t enjoyed so much.

So there you are, you sit down to write a review. You do a bit of plot summary, you talk about the characters, the style, the mesmerising parts, the shaky areas. But what you can’t talk about, not really, is the end. Spoilers are a no-no in reviews. I get that. It makes sense. If you know what happens in the end, it can colour your reading of the whole book.

But what if you need to talk about the ending? What if your opinion of the book hangs on the ending? There’s that thing, isn’t there, when someone is reading something you’ve already read and they ask you what you thought of it, and you want to say, ‘yeah, I loved it, but the ending was terrible,’ only you can’t because they haven’t finished it yet. I wonder if that’s why book clubs are so popular, because you know everyone you’re talking to has got to the end of the same book as you, so you don’t have to worry.

Many of the books I’ve read, and particularly those aimed at Young Adult readers would be fabulous reads if it were not for the ending. My pet hate is the series thing, when you approach the last pages of the book, expecting the whole thing to reach some kind of satisfying conclusion, only to end up with a cliff-hanger which won’t be picked up until the next book. Puh-lease! Have some respect for your readers, authors. OK, I get the need to tempt the reader into reading the next volume, but what I want at the end of a book is a sense that in some way the story which started on the first page has reached a conclusion, even if only partly, by the last page.

The other thing I expect from an ending – and this may sound like a contradiction – is a sense that the story goes on. For me, this is the one thing that makes a story seem true. At the end, even if the main character dies or the world is destroyed or the enemy defeated or the school year is over, there ought to be a sense that the world the author has created can exist beyond the story. We don’t need to be told any more, but it’s still there. Think of it like this: J K Rowling could have kept writing books about Hogwarts and all that forever. People would have bought them. There are plenty of stories she could have told. She stopped, but Hogwarts is so real in people’s minds that it doesn’t matter. It’s real now. It has a life beyond the books.

And I know there are people who will disagree with me, but what I expect from the ending of a children’s book or a YA book in particular is a sense of hope. (Adult books are different, but I still prefer ones that end with hope.) There’s a place for bleak in children’s fiction, but somewhere in it there needs to be something slightly uplifting. At the end of The Fault in Our Stars, Augustus is dead and Hazel is going to die, but Hazel is ready and she knows her parents are going to be OK. (Oops! But surely you’ve read it, or seen the movie …) You’ll rarely come across a sad book with a better ending than Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls. Read it, honestly. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and, at the end, you’ll get that sigh you get when something’s just perfectly right.

So what I’m wondering is when I review, should I mark a book down if the end doesn’t do it for me? But that’s not really fair, because I might have really enjoyed the rest of it and if I can't talk about the ending, the reader might think I had a problem with the whole book. Or should I ignore the ending, since I can’t actually talk about it, and mark the book based on the rest? Maybe I need a special ‘unsatisfying ending’ icon. Hmm. But that would give it away, wouldn’t it?