THREE COMMON MANUSCRIPT MISTAKES
Both as a writing instructor and a freelance manuscript consultant, I have advised on scores of writing projects, from short stories and novels to personal essays and book-length memoirs. Despite the variety in genres, certain pitfalls appear again and again. The issue is rarely a weak story. Most of the time I am sent the most enthralling stories—heartbreaking memoirs, historical novels jam-packed with plot turns, complex family sagas—but the same three shortcomings prevent the reader from feeling their full drama:
1. THROAT CLEARING or I was staring out the window
I stared out the window at the sea of buildings—all those other windows reminding me that my opinion was just one of too many to maybe matter. I felt uneasy, because today I had to write a blog about revision, and I wasn’t sure where to begin. A bird swept past the window, and I remembered the black birds that used to sit on the telephone wire that crossed my childhood backyard. Then I remembered this science-fiction manuscript I had received recently, where an alien ship landed in a young boy’s backyard and how that manuscript had the same problems as that brutal divorce memoir…
Would you still be reading this blog if I had started that way? And yet, a staggering proportion of the manuscripts I receive begin with a man or woman staring out the window, often thinking about how to tell their story. Not only does all this contemplative window gazing seem unnatural—especially in an age when a character is more likely to hold a smartphone than a cigarette—but it’s just not a dynamic beginning likely to hook a reader.
Sometimes when the manuscript starts this way, the reader is actually witnessing the writer figuring out her story. But more commonly the writer knows her story; she’s just having a hard time getting into it. And that’s understandable. Whether it’s a personal essay or a trilogy of doorstoppers, it’s scary to start a story, to commit to revealing your inner thoughts and quirks of imagination—and on top of that to imply that other people should be interested in them. In writing theory, these window-staring pages are called “throat clearing,” because that’s what people do before saying the difficult thing.
Luckily the fix is often easy. After several paragraphs or pages by the window there suddenly comes a statement like “And then, one day, everything changed…” or “The real problem began when…” And we’re off! A story has begun, and I go from bored to captivated. I hit “insert comment” to type that dreaded three-letter feedback word: CUT. Just as a newscaster’s throat clearing is cut before going to air, so should yours.
2. THE INFO DUMP or First, here’s what you need to know
Sometimes the story opens not with protagonist staring out the window, but at the ceiling while lying in bed. Though, sadly, this seems more believable, why begin with such inertia? If the reason isn’t throat clearing, it’s often this: the writer wants to get all the exposition out of the way—all the background information—before beginning the story.
Jessamyn woke up and lay staring at the ceiling, feeling nostalgic about her tiny apartment in Boston’s South End, where she lived for two years while her husband did a post-doc at MIT and she taught creative writing at GrubStreet, a nationally-renowned writing institution. Now she was back in New York City, and four years had passed since she taught the writers behind ActsofRevision.com, a website dedicated to the writing life. When her former students asked her to be a guest writer, she was happy to do it, because she missed them and was proud of their continued dedication to writing.
That is the background behind my writing this blog post. Did you need to know all that? Maybe. Did you need to know it all before I launched into the meat of the blog? Definitely not. And, again, if I had begun that way, you might well be reading something else right now.
Ideally, background information will be revealed organically through the story—or at least the writer should make it appear organic. Instead of beginning with the dry statement, “Jessamyn was a writing teacher who lived in Boston,” those facts could be embedded in the tale: “Jessamyn sauntered into the classroom and proceeded to teach ‘Common Manuscript Mistakes’ with her usual smile, looking well-rested, hair blow-dried into place, while Sandra, her star pupil, sat sweating in the back, having not slept a wink since helping Jessamyn chop up her husband’s body and discard it in a South End dumpster. What if all the damning stories about her husband had been lies? Maybe his post-doc wasn’t the real reason for fleeing New York. Suddenly the truth was as clear to Sandra as the morning sky: Jessamyn was a psychopath.”
3. FALSE SUSPENSE or If only you knew!
The term false suspense has competing definitions in story theory, but I’m using it to mean the following: when the suspense comes not from the story itself but from the writer merely withholding information.
He walked down the hallway, afraid by the time he reached his destination the sweat would be blooming through the armpits of his shirt. He was scared to do this, but under the circumstances, he had to at least try. What was the worst that could happen? Well, he could imagine the worst, actually, and it was really bad. He knocked on the door.
Often the writer thinks that by withholding information, he increases the suspense. He imagines the reader asking, “Who is this guy? Where is this hallway? Why is he so nervous? What’s he up to?” But these questions, born of confusion, quickly become annoying, because we know the author could just tell us. And what if the author did?
Mark walked down the hallway, afraid by the time he reached his boss’s office the sweat would be blooming through the armpits of his shirt. He was scared to ask for an advance on half a year’s salary—it was outrageous—but without it, he didn’t see how they could afford his wife’s stem-cell therapy. This new treatment had actually eradicated some people’s tumors. Lifted their death sentences. But no matter how many hours he spent on the phone with Blue Guard, they refused to cover what they called an “unproven procedure.” And so he had to at least try this. What was the worst that could happen? Just the ending of his wife’s last source of hope. He knocked on the door.
With false suspense, the reader asks, “What is going on?”; with real suspense they ask specific questions with known stakes, in this case: “Will Mark get the money to maybe save his wife’s life?” If the question raised by your story isn’t more interesting than “What the hell is going on here?”, it’s possible you don’t have a compelling story.
But what about the element of surprise? Often writers withhold information thinking the reveal at the end of the scene will make the confusion all worth it. The man swings open the door and cries, “I need an advance or my wife will die.” They worry that if they let you know what’s at stake the whole time, the scene won’t end with an emotional punch. To argue against this, I leave you with Hitchcock’s famous explanation, given in an interview with Francois Truffaut, about the difference between suspense and surprise:
“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock, and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!’ In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.”
And those are three of the most common “mistakes.” Of course, in literature, as in life, there are no rules that shouldn’t sometimes be broken. Withholding is used to great effect in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. And one of my all-time favorite novels, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, begins with an unnamed man waking up and staring at the ceiling. But on the whole, the above three choices are likely to undermine your story, because they all keep the reader from feeling its full tension as quickly and deeply as possible.
Jessamyn Hope is an award-winning novelist and memoirist. Learn more at jessamynhope.com.
