One blog that I’ve been enjoying reading recently is Subjective Soup. It is written by a recently retired teacher and is one of the more thought out and better written blogs I visit. The other day, Patricia wrote a blog post Fellow Writers, Where Do I Go From Here?, about her first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) effort.

I started to write a comment for her blog post, but it turned out to be pretty long, so I’m posting it as a blog post here.

In 2006, my daughter Miranda Hynes, wrote her first novel, Subtle Differences as part of NaNoWriMo. She was thirteen at the time, and the novel was amazingly good. I encourage friends to go out and get a copy and read it. As she wrote it, she pondered what she would do with it after she finished it. I encouraged her to check into various publishing possibilities, and in the end, encouraged her to publish it at Lulu. Lulu is one of the top publish on demand presses and is a favorite of NaNoWriMo writers.

So, my first recommendation, think seriously about self-publishing via Lulu.

Whether you decided to self publish, or revise it for resubmission to the publisher you contacted, you need to look at revision. The three recommendations seem pretty straight forward, but I do have comments on the recommendations.

First, don’t be too quick to reduce your parentheses. Yes, they might slow down the reader, and that might not fit the market that the publisher you contacted is interested in. However, I’m a reader that likes to read slowly. I like complicated sentences with lots of parentheses and sub-clauses. This may be just a stylistic consideration and you need to find the style that works best for you. Before you take the words of a publisher’s review too seriously, read many of the famous author’s rejection letters.

NPR had a great story on this a couple years ago, Famous Authors' Rejection Letters Surface.

The second comment about having shopping telling what is happening, instead of showing it goes back to perhaps the oldest recommendation to creative writers, “Show, don’t tell”. I haven’t read your novel, so I can’t comment on where you are telling instead of showing, but that is a key thing to work on.

Back to my own experience: After my daughter wrote her novel in 2006, I did NaNaWriMo in 2007. I finished my novel and it is sitting, somewhat edited on my hard disk somewhere. I may get around to going back and revising it someday, or it may just stay where it is. However, one thing that I did do was to share it with people that I trusted as I was writing it. I received lots of feedback. Much of it was useful, but I needed to filter out what was useful and what wasn’t.

I’m on a mailing list of group psychotherapists, and several of them read the novel and gave me incredibly helpful feedback. I believe that my characters are much richer because of their feedback. For each character, spend time trying to think about everything about them. Why are they acting a particular way? What happened in their childhood that shaped them to be the way they are? Where is the complexity and ambiguity that they face? Most importantly, and this is perhaps where I have the most problems, how are the experiences in the novel changing them? If you look at any character, can you tell me who they are at the beginning? How they are at the end, and how the story changed them? You don’t need to put the early family history of each character in the novel, but you need to know what it is. If it isn’t clear to you, it won’t be to your readers and the characters will tend to feel more stereotypical.

So, find some people that you really trust. Get them to read your novel and help you grapple with these aspects. Don’t worry about the parentheses so much as about how you show people what is happening and how you show people the complexities of your characters.

I hope this is helpful. I look forward to reading what happens next.