A Book Is What Is on the Page
Are your intentions embodied by what's down in black and white? Or are you relying a little too much on reader ESP?
—Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
I'm reading a manuscript, a bitter social satire with body horror elements. The language is dark, the imagery intense, and there's a cruel poltergeist causing misery.
A week later, I'm on a video call with the author. She's shocked that I think the book has horror elements. To her, this is a feel-good book club romance with a comforting speculative subplot.
Once again, I need to have the conversation: a book is what is on the page.
For early-career authors, intention can be a blinding force. Authors feel the content so hard. In a way, they are the content. It can be almost impossible for them to separate what they're projecting onto the book from what's actually there in black and white.
The thing is, readers don't have that extra layer in their minds while reading the book. All we have are the words we're reading. The author's intention doesn't count unless it's embodied in the story and technique.
Intentionality...about what?
Early-career authors can be so wrapped up in character and plot that they forget to make conscious choices about foundational things like genre, atmosphere, target audience, style, and more. But if those things are left to chance, or switch around too much during the book, they can end up working against what an author is trying to accomplish on the character and plot level.
Certain composition problems seem to crop up especially often when authors' intentions are different from what's on the page. Watch for issues like the following:
Inside-out content ratios
A self-published book is marketed as a Christian Romance. However, in the first 200 pages of the book, the romance only contributes 7% of the word count. Jesus is not mentioned outside of occasional interjections and jokes. Most of the word count is dedicated to a noir-style mystery. The Christian Romance content that defines the category is simply not there.
Boosting the percentage of the content devoted to the couple's romance, a hefty portion of which might be a subplot about their evolving relationship with Jesus, could help reflect the author's original intention for the book's identity.
Overgrown B plots
A memoirist's critique submission notes say that his 120,000-word manuscript is about his experiences as a surfer in Hawaii. However, it's hard to find the surfing material among extensive B plots about his struggle to earn a PhD, his work to unseat a corrupt local politician, and his sister's life in Alaska. The surfing content is there, but it's buried.
Pruning back the B plots to just what supports the surfing A plot could get the word count within a salable range and make good on the author's intention to have the book read as a surf memoir.
Mismatched plot additions
An author tells me she's been shopping around a cozy mystery but no agents are interested. It turns out the plot involves child abuse and the investigator and her boyfriend kill a criminal and never atone. Is the entire book a crime novel? Yes, but the choice of plot points means that not all of it is cozy.
Choosing plot points that work with the book's other goals can be an important part of making your intention felt on the page.
An overly wide scope (how much "stuff" a book includes)
A sci-fi novel manuscript is ostensibly a character-driven tale about a woman enslaved by aliens, but the majority of the word count is taken up by an escape plot involving two other characters, a backstory about a conspiracy to kill the main alien, and enslavement stories from one-off characters based on real-life people and unrelated to the main character's psychological development or the plot points. The draft I see is not clearly character-driven and it's also hard to identify a main plotline of any kind.
Beefing up the main psychological arc and reducing plot development, backstory, and contextual material from IRL could make the book truly character-driven as the author intends.
Patchy genre expression
A North Street Book Prize submission introduces a lawyer who becomes a witch, and the blurb casts the genre as courtroom drama/modern magic. Great! However, the genre expression deviates from place to place, feeling at times like contemporary fiction/domestic drama, courtroom drama, romance, and adventure/Egyptology. Readers who came for the legal proceedings mixed with magic might feel misled by the marketing.
Deliberately keeping genre expression within a certain range can help books make good on the author's intention for their awesome premise.
Inconsistent atmosphere
A romance submission has three hardcore erotic scenes, but outside the sex itself, the rest of the book has no heat, yearning, or intense emotions of any kind. Romance readers read for sustained tension, and erotic readers read for eroticism. This wouldn't be a romance novel for them if the whole thing isn't, well, romantic.
Committing to an atmosphere and carrying it through the entire book helps authors embody their intentions for their story and genre choices.
Misleading style
Returning to the book from the beginning of this post, one of the reasons I got horror vibes was the prose style. Word choice favored dark, cold, lonely language that created impressions of alienation and eeriness. I remember a scene in which a scared and angry child demands that her mother and a threatening ghost both leave her bedroom. The author later told me the scene was intended to be playful, warm, and comforting. It would have been easier for that content to come across the way she intended if the language had been warm and comforting, too.
When you're revising, the line-editing stage is a good time to examine the feelings created by word choice and sentence structure. Is the language reflecting your intentions for the reader's experience?
Don't take my word for it—check your bookshelf
Agents and publishers reward authors who make conscious decisions about the underlying conditions of their stories. An agent should be able to flip to multiple random pages of your book and see consistency in:
- The book's genre
- The atmosphere
- Plot emphasis
- At least some of the book's sources of tension
- The target audience: age group, gender, level of education, nationality, political/social leanings
- Whether the book is plot-, character-, or theme-centered: which one of the three is the primary layer, and which are supporting
- The book's main ideas
- The difference between the characters' perceptions and the book's perceptions, if any
I've had authors dismiss this list. "If I put that level of intentionality into my book, it won't be mine anymore. It won't be authentic."
The truth is, though, that the level of intentionality I'm describing is exactly what goes into a "real book".
Go to your bookshelf and pick out any traditionally published long-form narrative, fiction or nonfiction. Open it to a random spot. What's there on the page should give you a decent guess at each of the bullet points above.
Now open to another random spot. Are the answers you're getting from that page similar to, or different from, what you gathered in the first spot? If they're significantly different, please email me the book title and page numbers. I'd love to take a look.
Readers won't reject more intentional writing as "too easy"
Besides the author objection that "too much intentionality will mean the book is not truly 'mine'", I also hear concern that "readers will be bored if my intentions are too clear". Really, though, that perception is backwards. What puts readers off is too little consistency in underlying choices like premise, genre identity, plot emphasis, scope, atmosphere, and style. When these things are left to chance or allowed to shift without rhyme or reason, readers have little to hold onto and lose investment.
A strong, intentional foundation helps authors build curiosity, immersion, and other forms of page-turning energy at the level of plot, character, and theme.
How about your work in progress? Are your intentions making it to the page?
Categories: Advice for Writers, Annie in the Middle
