This is nagging me. I have found it v. useful to post extracts on this site, I feel I have learned a lot about what works & what doesn't in each chunk and this has helped to inspire me to re-write (again).

What posting doesn't give you is any sense of how the thing works (or doesn't) as a continuous body of work. If I think about how I operate as a reader I find I tend to think about the book as a whole. Occasionally odd passages might stay with me but not so much in isolation, more in connection with other parts of the novel. So for example, the picture that builds up is stitched together from lots of little incidents, some of which are consistent and other which appear contradictory - it often shifts slightly as you read it and that is a big part of the pleasure of the book.

The thing is, with my own work I find it impossible to get enough distance to give me an overview. I have read it far too often and too closely (I fiddle about with it every time I open a page, I can't help it).

I'm not talking about the mechanics of story-arc or whatever but more basically, how do you all judge whether your work is coming together as a novel rather than a load of prose chunks?

Like you, I find this very difficult. When I had finished my novel I gave it to my other half to read, with instructions not to critique, but merely to tell me if it hung together. He pointed out certain things which didn't make sense, and it helped a lot.

I don't know if there is any other way to do it - I find that I'm so close to the story in my head that I forget whether I've written it down or not!

SG

The only way I know - and, yes, it's very hard - is to print it out and put the damn thing away, for as long as possible. A month, at least. Writing something else in that month helps. Then I get it out and sit somewhere other than where I write - armchair, bed, anything to make me feel more like a reader and less like a writer.

It's a bit of an 'if I were you I wouldn't start from here,' thing to say, but one of the reasons I try to write first drafts as fast and furiously as possible is all about this: the closer my writing experience is to a reader's experience, the better the chances are that I'll get the weight and pace and balance of the beast - the sense of how things all knit up together - right first go. It's a bit like what my photography tutor used to say - the better you get the negative, the less you have to do in the darkroom.

If you're really not sure, sending it to an editorial service can be a very good though expensive way of getting someone to give you a real overview.

Emma

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Then I get it out and sit somewhere other than where I write - armchair, bed, anything to make me feel more like a reader and less like a writer - and read it fairly briskly, just scribbling the odd note on the MS. Things like 'going on too long' or 'but it can't be Tuesday', not re-writing at all, because that slows down the reading.

You could try writing scene summaries, explaining to yourself why they are there/how they move the story on. It may show if anything looks a bit under- or over-done, especially if several scenes have very similar summaries. (Also very useful for when it comes to writing the synopsis).


- NaomiM

This is a very tough one I think. Maybe don't show any of your novel to a couple of people whose opinion you respect until you are at the stage where there is nothing more you can do to improve it yourself and then get them to talk about it and give you their instinctive reactions? It can be harder to get that 'overall approach' you mention if you've been showing them bits along the way.

Thanks for all your suggestions. I don't show my work to anyone I know so unfortunately I can't act on some of your ideas. However, I may try the scene summaries idea Naomi as it might give me a completely different perspective and take me away from the detail.

I also like your idea Emma although I don't know if I could leave it alone for a month, I'm completely in the grip of tinker-mania at the moment & need to wait for it to pass I think.

Thanks everyone,

Saturday

It's true, Saturday, that this is the one thing that having detailed crits on here, howvere individually useful, doesn't give you. The Big Picture. I'm with Emma that trying to read 'as a reader' is one way. But I don't think that can only be done after a gap - or even at the end of the first draft. (For me that's too late as my first draft is the same thing as my final draft, in most cases.) I usually try to sit down and re-read from the start - resisting with all my might the urge to tinker, not to look at the technical stuff, and just forcing myself to read - about once a month or so while I'm writing, right back to the beginning and up to where I've got to, as it reminds me of direction and also of the overall flavour and balance of what I have so far. It also refreshes all the characters and their speech patterns in my head, in case I'm drifting off course with that those 'micro' things, too.

But it is hard, I agree. One of the scariest things. And I can never 'judge' my work, either.

Rosy

Structure is one of the hardest and most important things about writing, IMO, and you're quite right, it's one of the things that crits on here and similar places just can't help with. There are so many writers who can 'write' well, in that they can create a nice description or paragraph, their prose reads easily etc, but the stories and books as a whole don't work because they don't understand structure.

And as Emma said, it's very difficult to learn it through writing a novel. You get so close to it, you lose perspective etc. I think story outlines are really important for this. Not hugely detailed ones with every little scene, necessarily, but say 10 pages for a full length novel. You can work through the major plot points, see where characters are heading, where they fade into the background too much maybe, fiddle with logistical issues or problems without having to rearrange the whole book around it. Sometimes you know where you want to end up, or what effect you want to achieve, but you're not sure exactly how this is going to happen. Outlines can really help here. They enable you to see the flow and pace of the story, they highlight fuzzy areas of plotting and they make you think about story - which is again, something that alot of people seem to ignore. They're also very good practice for writing a synopsis when you're ready to send your work out...

I think the synopsis and outline group could be used more with this in mind, actually.

As a slight aside, I learnt a load about structure from writing and studying screenplays - some of the screenwriting books are excellent on this stuff.

Sorry RT, but I have to agree with Emma.
Putting the thing in a drawer and forgetting about it completely IS the best way to approach your work with a truly untinged viewpoint that will tell you the truth about your MS.
The longer you can leave it, the better.
I gave up on my first novel and boxed the MS up and put it away. There were agents still looking at it, but I had almost given up on it and started on a new project.
When an agent came back to me with some revision suggestions, I was forced to excavate the bones from the cupboard and read through from scratch. WOW! I was amazed (in a nice way) by some elements, and utterly bemused by the clumsiness of others.
If you want to see how your book really comes together (or doesn't) I suggest you try it.

This is always the tough one.
I regularly meet two other authors and we crit each others' work but it's in descreet packages and often we hop scenes to stuff we specifically need help with.
The question of whether the whole works as a book is the ultimate one and the hardest.
I'm currently editing my latest novel which is due to go to my editor at the beginning of March and I know it's an exciting subject, I know there are some great sub plots, I'm even happy that my MC is as rich and textured as she can be ...but...
Does it work as a novel? I don't have the confidence in my own abilities to make this judgement for myself so...
Husband Who Lives In Hope has four very long plane journeys next week so I'm going to ask him to read it for me. Fortunately, or not, depending on your view, he is my fiercest critic. No 'ooh that's lovely' for him. He reads for pure pleasure and casts no writerly eye over my work but I've got my authors group for that and of course my agent and editor.
The problem of course arises that if he declares it pants I've only got two weeks to fix it!
HB x

Reading novels similar to yours is also a very good way (essential, really) of seeing how to structure a story.

- NaomiM

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I believe it was GP Taylor who admitted he copied the structure of JK Rowling's early HP books when he came to write his bestseller Shadowmancer

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And it is the structure of The Da Vinci Code that keeps people reading, rather than the prose (I could probably say the same for Pullman's Northern Lights).

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Actually what annoys me most about Pullman's book is his unashamed used of plot devices to drive the story forward, eg, witches: Need to get into a locked store room to release the daemons? then just have a witches daemon land next to the mc and use a spot of magic. Oh, how covenient.

LOL, Naomi.
I have to agree with Emma, 100% - this is what works for me. You need to be able to read the book as if you didn't write it. This takes a lot of time away from it.

Saturday,
Thank you for posting this, all the replies have been really helpful as I am thinking along the same lines as you right now.
Tracy

This is a fascinating thread.

If you're stuck, I agree with those who say a detailed outline can identify whether the structure holds.

Just spent all day writing one to discover the overall story was not half as clear or well paced as it was in my head. And that the structural faults are almost identical to those of the last book, which was structurally insoluable. At least by doing this early on there's a chance to solve the problems before they get entrenched in hundreds of hours and pages of work.

They probably don't work for everyone, but as someone who is not a natural plotter, I find they help a lot.

I have an idea. Seeing as we don't really know each other, in the proper sense of the word, why don't we read each other's books? The whole thing, cover to cover. I'm game if you are. Mine will be fully rewritten in about a fortnight, if you can wait that long. My potential agent is willing to wait a bit, how about yours?
Amy