Three Bits of Advice from a Pro

The opening chapters of The Remaking needed something. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but they weren’t ready to send out to agents. The best thing for me to do when I get stuck like this is talk to another writer, so I invited Kris out for a lunch of gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches. We watched the weather do what it always does in Portland in late May—dither about raining and then raining. We also talked about my manuscript. Because she is my friend as well as an English teacher and a writer, she listened to me as I drowned my sorrows in Coke and cholesterol and rambled on about the plot’s back-story. When I was all done she said:

 You need to include more of that back story right up front so I have a better understanding of your character.

By golly, I thought, she’s right.

Figuring out how much back-story to include is tricky. The reader doesn’t want to wade through massive information dumps, but he still needs to be able to follow the plot and know enough about the main character’s history and personality so that he actually cares whether she makes it through the next few chapters. I had told the reader that Molly was depressed and that her parents were dead, but this wasn’t enough. He needed to know that she’d been having nightmares about falling to her death for the past year and that when her parents died in a plane crash, not only did she have to deal with grief and loss, but also with guilt. If she had just told them about her dream, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten on that plane and died. I also needed to include the tantalizing fact that Molly’s grandmother had warned her father not to take that flight. Now the reader has questions he wants answered and much more sympathy for Molly.

Kris also said:

 Select the Edit-Find function on the tool bar of you computer and have it find all the was-es and were-s and see if you can replace them with more interesting verbs.
 Keep an eye on your sentence structure. It’s usually best to vary it.