Today I had a conversation with a friend about her past experience with a manuscript consultant. “He gave some good advice,” she said. “But also a lot of bad suggestions.” At the time, she was still relatively new to novel writing, and didn’t know what to make of the reader’s comments. The wisdom in the good advice eluded her for years because it was buried under the bad.
The question is, how do you tell the difference?
Experience certainly counts for a lot. The more people you ask to read and critique your work, the better you will become at telling gold from brass. But if you’re just starting out, it’s helpful to know how to recognize red flags.
Red Flag #1: Runaway Ego. If you receive comments along the lines of, “Instead of having them get married at the end, she should murder him and hide his body in the freezer,” or “She would be sexier if she were a redhead” or “Turn the cat into an eight-year-old child,” that’s the reader’s ego talking. They’re trying to write your book for you, not helping you write the story you want to write.
Feedback of this kind must always be relevant to the story (so, no trying to rewrite the ending), free from the reader’s own biases (the redhead comment is just gross), and justified in context (how would a child serve the story better than a cat?) Generally speaking, if a reader encourages you to experiment with an idea, that idea should have originated in you, not them.
Red Flag #2: The Prophet of Doom. One particularly unhelpful piece of advice my friend received from her consultation was, “Cut the prologue – agents hate prologues.” Trusting that this advice came from a place of expert, insider knowledge, she followed it. A few years and many frustrating revisions down the road, she realized that what her book needed was a prologue – the same prologue that the consultant made her cut!
Literary types are often full of “insider knowledge” based on hearsay, or even from their own unique experiences in the I N D U S T R Y. But literary agents and editors are human. Some may indeed “hate” prologues, but others will like them. Most will have no opinion one way or another. If a reader tells you to change any major building-block of the story, make sure they can back this up with something other than, “the gods demand it so,” or “I heard it on Twitter.”
Red Flag #3: The Morality Police. “I don’t like the protagonist – make her ‘likeable.'” “I can’t stand this character.” “This character makes bad choices and I therefore can’t relate to them.” You have never made a bad choice in your life, have you? Sure, Jan.
Aside from the reductive insistence that protagonists must be “likeable” (barf), comments of this sort focus on the wrong problem and inevitably lead to confusion and frustration on the part of the writer. It’s never a reader’s place to declare whether they “like” a character or not, or agree with the character’s choices. Characters, like real people, will not get along with everybody. In fact, characters need to stand in opposition to something, make questionable choices, and occasionally stick their foot in it if they’re going to hold up a riveting plot. If a character is not coming across, the issue is never likeability or moral purity, but often a question of whether the character’s motivations are clear enough. A good reader will know where to put their focus.
Which brings me to Red Flag #4: No Further Questions. A reader with your best interests in mind should mostly ask questions, rather than make statements or offer suggestions. This has to do with the reader’s understanding of their role in the writing process: not to help the writer “finish the book,” but to inspire them to see it anew.
Often, we turn our writing over to a reader only once we’ve convinced ourselves it’s “perfect.” But really, the best time to seek feedback is when we’re at an impasse: we think we might be on to something, but we’re not sure; we tried something new but don’t know if it’s working; we like what we did, but will anyone else? Those who hand over monuments will receive piles of rubble. The trick is to treat your book like fertile ground.
Some of the most fruitful creative periods I’ve ever experienced directly followed feedback that made me ugly-cry. But this is the true test of good advice. Good advice should make you want to experiment, branch out, investigate. It should make your book feel alive, and full of possibility.
In my next post, I plan on talking more about how good advice actually works, using my own novel, Lightborne, as an example.
HESSE PHILLIPS 