Beware the bland book on the back of the door! 😱

The book on the back of the door!

This takes me back, all the way to 2018, when I had what I was sure was the final iteration of my outline. 🤣🤣🤣 To paraphrase Leslie Knope: Kerry, you beautiful tropical fish.

No one gets it 100% right the first time. Writing a novel is a process, not an event.

What I really had, I know now, was a bunch of plot points. Their only connection was that they tracked the events of my protagonist’s life. There was no real meaning, nothing juicy–just the dreaded ‘and then this happened’. And, friends, I wrote 145K words worth of ‘and this this happened’. Blerg.

Flash-forward 6 years and the book that I am working on now wouldn’t recognize the book on the back of the door. Sure, there are some superficial similarities–the cast of characters, the overall timeline, the settings. But there is depth, emotional connection, and a clear arc of change that was missing before. I’m much closer to achieving my goal of, as my coach Dani would say, my book having heart.

Honestly, it is much easier to recognize this–or its lack–in other people’s work. A writer is almost always too close to see a big hole in their own work, which is why it is so important to get outside feedback in some capacity. This can be a critique partner, a writing group, a class, or yes of course, a coach!

(An aside: See Kate McKean of Agents + Writers’s great post on how to also keep compliments in their place.)

But what I really want to share with you is how to avoid going to that bloated, ‘everything is happening but nothing really matters’ place with your first (or any) draft. 

Know Your Why
I’ve gone over this a bit in other posts so I won’t belabor the point here, but this truly is a key thing. Writers who finish books know why they are making the effort, because it is NOT easy, quick, or fun (at least, not all of the time). Something is driving us to do this hard thing when there are a million other, easier, less demanding things we could be doing. 

Identify this thing, this reason. Claim it. Post it somewhere you can see it.

(If you haven’t gotten your free “Know Your Why” workbook, email me or join my list via my website!)

Know Your Point
This, along with your ‘why’, is your North Star throughout the writing process. When you struggle or get stuck, you can return to your point to help make decisions about plot twists, character arcs, subplots/themes, and more. 

And, especially when you’re planning, don’t get hung up on making this perfect or feeling like it is carved in stone. Drafting = discovery. You’ll learn so much about your book along the way! 

As with everything here, what you’re doing is defining a route from start to finish. There is nothing that says that you can’t take an unplanned side trip, explore the back roads, or even change your destination if you get there and decide it is NOT what you expected. You haven’t failed - you’re learning!

Know Your Audience
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Put another way, if you write for everyone, you’ll please no one. 

By getting specific about who your book is for, you’re starting to see your book out in the world, in conversation with other books. (Hello, comp titles!!) You start to understand how the story you want to tell relates to specific people in the world and their stories.

Know Your Protagonist
This is probably the most obvious, because, duh, of course you need to know who your main character is. 

What knowing your protagonist means, though, is not identifying their favorite breakfast cereal or the name of their childhood best friend (assuming these are incidental things and not pivotal to their arc).

Don’t waste your time, especially as you are getting started, mapping out the nitty-gritty details of your character’s persona and life. Dig into the juicy stuff that is really going to get you miles ahead of the game as you start drafting.

• What does your character want more than anything in the world?

• Why do they want this thing?

• What is stopping them from getting it?

• What do they think getting this thing will do for them? How will it change them or their life?

• Do they get this thing? Why or why not?

• What happens when they do? Was it what they expected? 

Do you see what you have done if you can answer these questions? You have basically mapped your character’s arc. Amazing!

It may be that you can’t answer all of these questions, especially the last few, when you are starting out. That’s okay; as your character starts moving through the world via the plot events (e.g., the obstacles you set out for them that they have to overcome), it will become apparent which way you want to take them.

Know Your Logic
When I first started grappling with the meaning of this, I wasn’t so sure I believed in it. The premise is that humans behave logically, therefore the decisions they make must be reasonable and believable.

I don’t know about you all, but accepting that humans behave logically? 🤣🤣🤣 Good one.

But it’s actually not about logical behavior in an absolute sense–meaning, that we think a decision was the correct one, what we would have done, or is ‘understandable’’ on a rational level. What it means is that it makes sense for the character. 

If your protagonist is a shy, self-conscious introvert with social anxiety, and they are all of a sudden chatting up everyone they meet in their daily life and forcing themselves to be the life of the party, there had better be a darn good explanation that I as a reader can understand for this change. There has to be some logic behind it; otherwise, all your hard work will end up as the dreaded book thrown across the room.

Know Your Cause and Effect
This last item is central to how I ended up with a boatload of words that didn’t say much. It may be the hardest item on this list and requires you, at every stage, to have some really honest conversations with yourself. This is where ‘killing your darlings’ comes into play.

You can have the coolest, most interesting plot in the world. If all your book is, however, is a bunch of plot points strung together–a bunch of stuff happening to your protagonist–no one is going to care.

Characters make decisions–often, bad ones (see above). Whatever happens, plot-wise, it needs to be as a result of the previous decision(s) your character has made. 

Let’s take an example from the book on the back of the door.

• Plot point: Mary joins the army and learns to fight.

• Plot point: Mary meets Willem.

In terms of the plot of the book, which is based on the life of a real person, these are the two big things that happened in her life at this time. But so what? What meaning do they have to the story that I’m trying to tell? How are these things that happen related to choices that she has made?

When I step back and evaluate through that lens (armed also with my point), I can see that having a whole scene or chapter about Mary joining the army and learning to fight isn’t necessary. Yes, it’s important that my reader know these facts about her (that she is a soldier who knows how to defend herself and others), but that can be handled with a little bit of narrative summary and some key setting details.

Mary meeting her eventual husband, on the other hand, is important, because this meeting represents a major shift in her worldview, which was that she’d never marry, and ties back to a major desire (wanting to be loved) and misbelief (believing that she’s not worthy of love).

So now I know why this scene is important, what it needs to convey to the reader, and it also sets up the questions and answers Mary is going to have to grapple with and resolve…which will lead into the next scene. (Namely, will she allow herself to fall for Willem or deny herself? And the answer to that question leads to the next scene…and so on.)

Checking the cause-and-effect trajectory of your scenes ensures that they build on each other and form a cohesive whole that is telling a meaningful story.

Putting It All Together
So how, knowing these things, did I end up so far down the rabbit hole? Because I didn’t know, not at the time. I learned them the hard way, knowing that my book wasn’t ‘right’ yet and seeking out the knowledge of how to make it better.

You best believe that when I’m ready to start my next book, I will have these things locked down before I get rolling.

If you want some help answering these questions, reach out to me about 1:1 coaching. Let’s chat about your idea and make sure you get off to a strong start!

Cheers,

Kerry