May You Write Interesting Books — 9

Waiter, There’s Soup In My Novel

Yes, it is possible to write an interesting – even riveting – book and make it feel boring or at least “blah” when you reach the end.

The most difficult of these to cure is when you turn your book into soup.

What do I mean by soup?  I mean you throw everything in but the kitchen sink and that only because it’s attached and you can’t find the crow bar.  It starts out to be a book about gnomes, but by the time you’re done you’ve got the entire fairy kingdom in there, and dragons, and spaceships, and aliens, and perhaps a three-legged hedgehog.  I’d call it stew, except that this “adding on” effect actually dilutes the result, so it’s more like soup.

This is a bad tendency of mine.  It started, I think, from my being young and an idiot and wanting to make books “real” by throwing in elements that weren’t directly related to the plot.  I learned the folly of that, but I’ve never lost the tendency to overcomplicate things.  It might be innate.  Look, I used to fail the easy tests because I thought “It can’t be that simple” and then credited my teachers with far more cunning than they ever had.

So I have trouble keeping books simple.  In fact, the longer I spend working at a novel, the more complex it becomes.  If I do more than three revisions, you can guarantee it will be soup.

How do you fix that?

The way I use most often is the “run to the finish.”  If I leave myself very little time, I can’t throw in everything.  The faster my books are written, the cleaner they feel.

But you already wrote the book, and there’s ham and beets and a bit of radish floating in it, and none of it works together.  Well, you’re in luck.  A book is only like soup to a point.  If you haven’t put it out yet, it’s not “cooked” and you can remove elements the readers will NEVER know about.

My suggestion is that you start by deciding what the dish – er – novel is.  If you have time, set it aside and let it rest, then come back at it in a month or three.  You’ll be amazed how the original plan stands out clear and the rest as accretions.  It’s then very easy to prune.

Failing that, decide what the novel will be about.  You’re either writing beets or radishes.  Make a decision and stick to it, then carefully and rationally remove everything that sticks out.  The result won’t be heart’s blood, but it will coherent.

The more difficult part of this is “How To Finish With A Bang” which I’ll do tomorrow, because it requires more concentration than I can muster on the last day of vacation.

I’m going to write a bit, put up a few stories, then go for a walk.  Hopefully I finish this series tomorrow and can then edit it, convert it, and put it somewhere for ya’ll to download.