Good Advice

Anyone who has done it will tell you that few activities are as lonely as writing a novel. The thing exists only in your head, and you have to coax it onto the page or, if you’re lucky, enable it to burst onto the page by its own inexorable force.  Either way, you spend a lot of time entirely alone, resisting friends, loved ones, and collection agents, sometimes rather brutally.

But one can get a special kind of help if one choses helpers well. Last night I sat down with two such friends who write novels themselves. I call them my readers. We regularly exchange manuscripts for constructive comment by trying to provide a practiced eye that sees what the author misses.  Last night they told me I needed better balance between the historic and the personal drivers of my plot and characters—more personal, less historical. It also would help, they said, to trim some of that detail I turned up in research. Just because I love historical detail does not mean that everyone will.  Too many names, especially hard-to-pronounce foreign ones, are hard to remember. If they’re not scheduled for a reappearance, don’t use them. It was all good advice. Today I’ll be hitting the delete key.