Writing for a Present Reader 🕸 Issue #2
My most recent self-editing experience taught me to go beyond making sure a reader knows the story, but to ensure also that they feel present within it as it's happening.
I spent the better part of July 2021 trying to turn one of my manuscripts into something that didn't make me want to puke. I realized, as I was re-reading my own work, that in some parts, I was able to flow with my own story like water… And in other parts, my narrative bored me enough that I was craving the distraction of Twitter every five minutes.
At first, I couldn't figure out what was making such a striking difference in the various parts of the story. But the answer eventually came when I remembered—of all things—an observation I had made months earlier about another author's writing. It's funny because in an interview sometime back, I was asked how reviewing books aids the writing process. My answer was some variation of "immensely," and this is one of those ways.
For those who don't know, I have an Instagram account dedicated mostly to books and reading: @spiderkidreads. When I can be bothered, I post book reviews on my grid, and live updates of my reading journey and anticipated book news on my stories.
One of the books I read and reviewed this year was His Only Wife, by Peace Adzo Medie. Here's an excerpt of what I posted about it:
"I didn’t feel enough emotions from reading it. And this may in fact have had more to do with the way the story was told, than the story itself. Too much of the story, I feel, was told to me second-hand. I was never allowed to see, in real-time, how much grievance the Liberian woman caused the Ganyos. I didn’t experience the slow-building sexual or romantic tension between Eli and Afi. In fact, if you asked me how and why Afi came to fall so deeply in love with Eli, I couldn’t possibly tell you—much less how Eli supposedly came to love Afi back. Chronological time passed too fast, and a lot of page time was dedicated to Afi's internal landscape—mostly in the form of rhetorical questions—as opposed to describing real-time developments as they occurred. The second-handedness of it all was what kept me from full enjoyment."
Imagine me making these observations, only for me, months later, to realize that I had fallen into the same writing trap. The portions of my narrative that dragged were the very same portions where I condensed so many plot developments into past-tense recollections. They read something like this: Over the next few weeks, A happened, and B happened, and C felt such-and-such when they did. Meanwhile, the portions of my narrative that banged were the ones where the narrator was at the scene when events happened, watching them unfold, reacting with everyone else, and telling the reader about them in real-time, allowing the reader to follow along with essentially the same sense of anticipation and emotional trajectory as the narrator.
It was like the difference between a narrator-led documentary, and a TV series. In the former, someone is telling you what people did and said, after those things have already been said and done. In the latter, the relevant parties are doing and saying things right in front of you (in a manner of speaking). The trick is knowing when to give a plot point its own scene; when it's not enough to say "I knew from having been a guest on his wedding day that his ex was a bit on the wild side," but to go ahead and write that wedding day into the story, in a scene where his ex crashes through the ceiling of the cathedral on the day he's re-marrying, with heels of steel and otherwise dressed as the Devil's personal consort, wings made of raven feathers attached to her hellish dress and all. (Just to be clear, this is not at all what my manuscript is like.)
Once I had figured out where and why I was bored, it was a matter of restructuring my chronology and rewriting a few scenes so that I could tell the story in "present tense," so to speak, rather than "past tense." I was able to try and make it more like the reader was walking through the story, rather than looking back at it from an epilogue's point of view. Of course, doing this for every single event would probably have been impractical and made the story drag in a different sort of way—but doing it only where it mattered, or at least trying to, made the reading experience better.
And that wraps it up for the insights of Issue #2 of The Spinneret!
Until next time,
The Spider Kid. 🕸