The Weekend Writer: Make Sure Everything In Your Book Supports Your Story

I keep mentioning that I worked reading into some of my goals and objectives for this year. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Even during stressful, demanding times, there's always room for reading, right?

Well, one of my objectives for Goal 2 Work on YA Thriller is Read YA Thrillers. Sounds great, doesn't it? Recently I started what I thought was a YA thriller as well as a YA thriller-ish piece of science fiction. I didn't finish either one of them. I was always having to stop to read material that didn't seem to have anything to do with the story I believed I was reading. I just couldn't maintain interest.

What, Exactly, Do You Mean, Gail?

For a story to work, everything in it must support it in some way. At the very least, if something appears in a story, it needs to support character, theme, or plot. If it doesn't, it stops the forward momentum of the story. Readers have to pause to take in this new material that doesn't relate to anything they've read before and, they may find, won't relate to much they're going to read.

For instance, eight or ten years ago, the YA blogosphere got hopped up because an agent, whose name I really don't know, went on record as saying that YA needed romance. Indeed, there is a lot of romance, or at least romantic entanglements, in YA across the board. But if the romance doesn't support the story, the writer has to stop the story to talk about young love.

Okay, the first book I quit reading involved a murder and potential victims getting weird murder-connected communications a year later. I thought that sounded thrilling. I thought that was the basic story, these young women getting messages and perhaps being targeted. I may have been wrong, though. The story may have been about something else, something deep and not thrilling. Especially since there was a lot of love interest going on in the first more than third of the book. There was a torn-between-two-lovers situation and another couple. I read quite a bit, wasn't clear on what these romances had to do with the story I thought I was going to read, and if the story was something else, I never figured out what it was. I may have got almost to the mid-way point on this one.

The second book I quit reading involved four young people fighting a terrorist group plotting attacks in the future. Thrilling! And sci-fi, which is good for me to read because I have an adult sci-fi project to shop around at some point. But the action kept stopping so characters could talk about how one of them was bi-sexual, one was gay, and one was transgender. We also had to pause for the hints that some of these characters were attracted to one another. It wasn't clear to me how this supported the terrorist story or how it was going to. So I gave up on that one, too.

All the romantic and quasi-romantic diversions in these books kept slowing the story down because they didn't seem to be about the story. Especially with the science fiction book, I felt as if I was sometimes reading filler.

An Example Of Romance Serving Story

Before some of you write me off as not appreciating romance, consider a book in which I think it works very well, because it is definitely part of the plot of in a story.

I happen to have just finished the adult novel My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. In this book the narrator and her sister are both attracted to the same man who is only attracted to one of them. A twist on the torn-between-two-lovers scenario that is so popular in YA. In this case, this romantic entanglement absolutely supports the plot, which is all about how the narrator will deal with her murderous sister. It creates tension. It definitely makes readers want to move on. It made this reader, anyway.

It's not just romance that can stop a story. Humor writers have to be careful to note use random jokes. If material doesn't support character, theme, or plot, it doesn't matter how funny it is, it will distract readers and discourage them from continuing reading.


This explains why a couple of days ago I edited out a lengthy HGTV joke in Chapter 17 of a new project. It didn't do anything and would have left readers wondering what it was doing there and if they needed to remember it going forth.

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Four: Older Characters And Ignoring Beta Readers

Kathy, my editor, said she didn't think she'd ever seen older characters like Walt and Nora in a children's book. I wanted to create characters with powerful personalities who had interests with which they were totally engaged. At the same time, I wanted to be clear that these were not young people. Nora's hair has faded and her face is lined. Walt is balding, has a bad eye, and is losing muscle tone.

Michael has to see both those aspects of Walt and Nora, that they are aging but that that doesn't change their commitment to and interest in the world. That is the point of the following excerpt.

    Spandex girlie things on an old lady, Michael thought. Oh, jeez.
    He supposed that for a woman of her advanced years Nora looked pretty good in her skimpy workout wear. Her upper arms, Michael couldn't help noticing, were in much better shape than his own, and there was nothing hanging over the top of the little panty/shorts/whatever she was wearing. That was as much as he could take in before his vision began to blur.
    I'm being struck blind, he thought hysterically. Thank God.
    "… and lifting weights maintains bone density," Nora concluded as she switched to bicep curls. "If you can maintain bone density, you can eliminate a lot of health problems that require prescription drugs. If you can stay off prescription drugs, you can avoid supporting the pharmaceutical industry, which is making a fortune off our medications. We did an article on that in The Earth's Wife, oh, just last year. Honestly, who really wants to support the pharmaceutical industry?"
    Michael—who was quite certain that if he made it into some third-tier college, his mother's investments in pharmaceutical stock would be paying his tuition—smiled and nodded without committing himself to anything.

I had three teenage boys read Saving the Planet & Stuff before publication. At least two of them insisted this scene had to go. One of them was very insistent. He was kind of horrified, to be honest.

Do other writers ignore their beta readers the way I ignored mine?

The Weekend Writer: Revision Means Getting Rid Of What You Don't Need

I'm in the midst of a big revision right now, and I'm doing things a little differently. I had two influences.

The Plot Whisperer

In The Plot Whisperer Martha Alderson writes about making sure that scenes include dramatic action, character development, and thematic significance. I'm working with a chart to keep track of those three elements in each chapter. What about material that doesn't relate to any of those things?

Some Disappointing Reading

For several years, one of my sons and I have been slowly making our way through a beloved fantasy series. I gave him the next volume last year for Christmas. He passed it on to me earlier this year with the comment, "It's not very good."

I finally started reading it a few weeks ago, and I have to agree with my offspring's assessment. Right away I could tell what was bothering me about the book. There was lots of clever, even amusing, material that didn't relate to any story. It didn't deal with the dramatic action and character development Alderson wrote about, and that early into the story I had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with thematic significance. This somewhat random wordiness made the book  slow reading. It was difficult to tell just what the narrative line was, so I had little desire to follow it. In fact, I've put the book aside.

What Does This Mean For My Project?

Taking the two influences together--Alderson's contention that dramatic action, character development, and thematic significance be included in every scene and my reading of a book with scenes that included a lot of material that didn't relate to any of those things--led me to become hyperaware of material in my manuscript that had nothing to do with action, character, or theme. What I'm finding is that a lot of that material no longer seems necessary. It drags down my reading. So it's being cut.

Right now I'm not missing it.

The Weekend Writer: Hunting For Your Story With Characters

Okay, so, if all you have for an idea is a situation or scene, how do you get to a real story idea, one in which something happens to somebody and so what? Well, remember the elements of fiction, the basic parts of a story? I mean the most basic parts that you may have studied in middle or high school, not more involved, elaborate ones from college or graduate school or...you know...somebody's blog? I'm talking character, setting, point of view, theme, and plot.  Every story has these elements/parts, and sometimes if you can work on developing those, you can use the material you generate to get to what happens to someone and why anyone would care.

Character--Try working on some characters, particularly the one who might end up being your protagonist. You can end up changing your mind about this. You can find various charts to help you do this. Some people suggest that these charts go over the top. How much does anyone need to know  about another human being, especially one who only exists in your mind and who you might end up deep-sixing before you start the writing? There's also the possibility of overwhelming yourself with detail. I used character charts for a couple of books, but  quite honestly, I haven't sold them. But beyond that, yes, working on characters can help you determine what these people have to do with your original situation or scene.

Some things to consider: How this character may change because of the scene, it's impact on him or her. Also, you can't go wrong dwelling on the classic journalistic questions of Who, What, When, Where, Why in relation to this character, not the story as a whole. Who is this person, of course, but additionally what is she doing in the scene/situation, when is this scene/situation going down, where, and, most importantly in my humble opinion, why.

This should give you some material that will intersect with the other elements when you start working with them. More on that next weekend.