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Welcome to Revision, Week 4. Today we are going to talk about Reading Your Book as a Stranger/ Storyteller.
I call the two parts of me that collaborate, often contentiously, on my writing “the storyteller” and “the brain.” The storyteller is the part of me that dreams. I mean that literally. When you go to sleep, you tell yourself stories for much of the night. Without the brain to tell you that you’ve never been somewhere or met someone or experienced something, your storyteller creates worlds and people and events willy-nilly. You don’t need to make a plan first, do research or keep a “To Dream” list by your bed. You don’t need to be in the mood, to feel inspired, or even to be on a comfortable mattress. You don’t even need to be 100% asleep. Have you ever had that experience where you are halfway asleep and things begin to shift, or you hear dialog that the person with you is not actually producing? As soon as the brain takes a snooze, the storyteller comes out to play.
The brain, on the other hand, likes a plan. The brain likes to be in control and wants things to make sense. Natalie Goldberg and others talk about the editor and the writer, but the brain can write, too, and truthfully, if you’ll let her, the storyteller can edit. They have different strengths and characteristics, rather than different jurisdictions.
I make use of this distinction in editing, then, as well as in writing. Although I work as an editor, tackling everything from line-editing to structural issues, I always approach every project as a reader first. Too often, editors and critics forget that a book is made for a reader. A reader is someone looking to get lost in the pages of a book, not someone looking for mistakes and problems. When an editor hunts for mistakes and problems, often the ones he or she finds are not actually problems in the context of the work itself. They are likely generic “problems” identified by M.F.A. workshops and books about writing. While it can be helpful to understand generic problems in general, what you want right now is information about the experience of reading your book. In a way, this is reading as your storyteller, rather than as your brain. You may consider your brain to be your secretary here, recording the impressions and questions that arise for your storyteller.
Ask yourself the following four questions as you read.
1) What throws the reader out of the story? Where do you get bored, upset or just plain stumped? You might even get thrown out of the book by a passage that is particularly fine; this is why brilliant writers such as Faulkner and Woolf made themselves kill their darlings. You can go ahead and let your brain mark everything you notice–from the minute typo to the inconsistent character. But don’t worry about this if you find it distracting—in a way, it’s just a tick to quiet the brain and let the storyteller keep reading the story. Do note anything that truly throws your storyteller-reader out of the story.
2) What raises questions in the reader? You want the reader to have questions. Questions pull the reader through the book. Too often, critics mistake questions for problems. In a workshop environment, a writer can ruin a book by going back and answering all the questions raised by chapter one in chapter one. In real life, those critics would have continued reading in order to answer their own questions, and the writer would have been left out of it altogether. On the other hand, if the reader is passionately pursuing the answers to questions you don’t tackle in the book that will be a problem. So you want to know what questions your reader has; only you can decide if these are the questions you want your reader to ask while reading your book. Reading as a stranger/ storyteller means noticing the questions that arise as you read, and making note of them. Later, when you have your writing hat on, you can consider which ones work and which ones don’t.
3) What does the reader know and when? You may have had a lot of the story in your head (via imagination or memory) over a long period of time. In the middle of the writing process, it can get hard to keep track of what the reader knows or doesn’t know about the character, the situation, and so forth. Reading as a stranger/ storyteller, you try to remove yourself as much as possible from the context in your own mind and instead see what is actually on the page. Is there something that is obvious to you but not actually in the book? Conversely, some writers give an excess of information in early drafts, presenting a character’s whole history and physical appearance when that is not needed for the reader to stay engaged in the story. Reading as a stranger/ storyteller, you notice when something feels more like a detour or a distraction than a necessary part of the whole. With your fresh eyes, you will also notice unintentional repetition of information or scene, threads that get dropped, or contradictions and changes. Make note of these.
4) What isn’t there? This is the one area where I encourage you to be willing to take up your writer’s hat if the inspiration, momentum or even trickle of an idea hits you. Often, in the depths of reading, a missing scene or whole plot strand or character or some such will become clear to you. These tend to feel so obvious that you know that by making a little note in the margin, you will later be able to come back and unfold this new vision that is currently shining in your mind’s eye. Do not wait! Write as much as you can in that moment. It may be skeletal, bad or very partial. That’s great. Anything you can give yourself now, while you are brimming with ideas and insight, will help when you are revising at a remove from that energy.
In general, be generous with your notes–including praise. As you are reading, there will be places you are sucked in, places that make you laugh or tear up, places that you love. Try to let this sink in, and even put check marks, stars, smiley faces or whatever works for you in those places to remind yourself. When your writer self goes back in to make changes, you will need help remember what worked, too!