Does Your Healing-Themed Fiction Lack Energy? Here’s the Jolt It Needs
I see many novels about healing that are heavy on dialogue and backstory. These kinds of books risk becoming never-ending falling action. Invigorate them with present-day tension.
—Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
Healing is one of the most common topics of novels submitted to our critique service and our North Street Book Prize. Authors who have been through difficult times want their novels to help readers process and heal, and backstory and dialogue seem like the natural tools to reach for. But these kinds of books can sometimes bring hidden obstacles to creating tension.
A fairly large part of my life as a book critiquer and literary contest judge has to do with books like this:
Traumatized characters have arrived at a time in their lives when they can begin to process those traumas and reach for healing. By talking with each other and/or with a therapist, they begin to understand what happened and how it impacted their ability to live and love.
So many authors are writing books like these. But for some reason, the manuscripts seem to have trouble getting off the ground. Agents request the full MS but don't call back after reading. Sales of self-published editions are slow.
Sometimes, these books end up in our critique service for a troubleshooting session, and I have the opportunity to listen to the authors' frustrations. Here's what I've heard:
"The characters are fully fleshed out, and there are interesting plotlines, but something still feels wrong."
"It feels hard to build tension, but all the material feels good, so it's tough to know what to change."
"I sense I'm not creating that 'real book feeling', even though I write well and know this material like the back of my hand."
"I've created an interesting puzzle about the past for readers to solve, but they don't seem interested."
"My book tells the truth about _______. Why isn't it catching on?"
"It's hard to know 'why' any one thing belongs in the book. What should stay in and what should go out? It all feels too subjective."
"I feel like something is off, but my writer's group and beta readers aren’t picking up on any big problems with the storytelling."
If these complaints sound familiar, and you have found yourself frustrated with your project for reasons unclear, read on.
These books all have craft characteristics in common
The "past-looking, working-through-issues" book, as I think of it, seeks to do the following:
* Portray characters who are coming to understand their pasts and trying to find peace in their present
* Have a narrative thrust that's essentially backward-looking: what happens in the present is there to set up revelations about the past
* Offer support and relatability to readers who have gone through similar issues
Such books often have similar traits in their craft execution that can make it hard to raise tension, negotiate tension, and control readers' emotional experience. Do any of the following characteristics sound familiar?
* Nothing bad happens to the main character(s) in the present-day layer of the story. They talk about past traumatic events, tension, and stress, and they may see other characters going through hard times, but the hardships are behind and around them.
* These books tend to have a wide scope. The span of time and past events covered is extensive, with a wide cast of characters and numerous plotlines.
* Narrative emphasis is more or less equal on everything, so although we know the book is about "healing", other than that, it's hard to tell. Who are the main characters, and who are secondary? Which plots are "A" plots, and which "B"? What are the central themes, and what the supporting?
* A high reliance on dialogue and internal monologue as storytelling techniques causes a "metronome" feeling in the pacing, with multiple bad effects: 1) the lack of change in the pacing makes the book monotonous, 2) book-wide pacing cannot expand or contract in the way that readers intuitively anticipate, and 3) scenes have no internal expansion or contraction, and therefore no arc, and arc-less scenes feel unnatural to readers.
* The premise is tensionless. If I ask an author of this kind of book what their premise is, the response is most often a theme or condition rather than a true premise:
"A young woman in Idaho falls in love with an older man. Together, they work to heal from their pasts."
"Lying and keeping secrets can take one far from one's real path in life and replace happiness and truth with fear and remorse."
"The family and friends of an addict often experience havoc at the hands of their loved one, but they also have their own dysfunctions. We all have to seek our own paths to recovery."
"This book follows Anita and Jackson as they learn that healing is like water, which finds a different way around every unique obstacle."
These statements are general, static, and don't carry information about specific challenges or stakes. It's hard to edit a book when the premise itself is tensionless. Interesting ideas that could have added tension as scenes or motifs are raced by, skipped over, and compressed to the point of blandness because the book incorporates them as anecdotes in dialogue or internal monologue. The guiding storytelling principle is to communicate things clearly to readers instead of raising curiosity with the way things are told.
Underlying misconceptions from authors
I have come to discover that authors writing this kind of book, and who are facing these problems, might be working from certain assumptions that aren't always productive in raising tension and emotional impact. Their submission notes tell me things like:
"I don't often see books with such a strong focus on backstory. It's a gap in the market my book can fill."
"The characters' pasts are like a puzzle for the reader to put together."
"I'm proud of the way dialogue allows my story to explore the backstory."
Red flag, red flag! Backstory, dialogue, and puzzles can all be good if there's enough tension developed in the present-day layer of the story. But books that go all-in on dialogue and past-oriented exposition run the risk of not being fully-fledged stories from exposition to climax to conclusion. They become never-ending sections of falling action/resolution.
In my critiques for "past-looking, working-through-issues" books, I try to communicate the following to authors:
* Don't be afraid to stress the reader. If you follow up with release, they'll thank you for the experience! Literary tension (aka page-turning energy) is a form of stress, but authors who want to heal readers and support them through hard times might be reluctant to cause them stress. However, stress is what creates an enjoyable reading experience. Without tension, there can't be release. And if there's no tension and release, there's no book.
* Give your characters challenges to face in the here-and-now, and ratchet up those stakes! Authors of these books are often reluctant to cause their characters harm. But if a book is going to have tension, readers need characters to be threatened and go through difficult problems right there on the page, and not only talk about the problems after the fact. Readers expect in their gut that they'll be going through a rising action and a climax, and that means characters being in trouble in the present-day layer of the story.
* If the reader wants to do a puzzle, they'll go do a puzzle. Give them tension and release, instead. Some authors believe that creating a puzzle in the backstory for the reader to solve is what will give the reader pleasure. However, someone who picks up a book might not have known they were signing up to put pieces together themselves. Instead of a puzzle experience, many readers want to have a literary experience: to be given concrete questions to be curious about, feel their curiosity build as the questions are developed, and then receive pleasure when their curiosity is gratified.
* Narrow the scope of your book. The author believes that a wide cast, multiple plotlines, and multiple points of view will make a book feel more unique and increase reader interest. In reality, such a wide scope risks leaving readers overwhelmed unless there's a strong plan in place to keep the page-turning tension flowing.
* Emphasize some things and deemphasize or cut out others. Authors sometimes ask me, "Is the problem that my book is unclear or confusing?" On the contrary. Everything is crystal clear, and that's the issue: there's an overwhelming amount of information that's all being given more or less the same level of narrative priority. Develop a premise that's precise about the main character(s), challenge, and stakes, and use it to decide what feeds your emphasis, and what saps it.
* Give readers information, but in a way that raises curiosity. Authors want to "tell the truth". But simply laying things out for readers up front kills tension. Add a little twist to your wording to raise curiosity. For example, if you say, "Gary was bothered by his sister-in-law because she always brought brownies with nuts in them, even though he was deathly allergic," everything is clear. There's no tension. Put it a different way, and it raises curiosity: "Gary patted his pocket again. He could feel the solid cylinder of the EpiPen through the denim. Only half an hour until the family would arrive." We'll learn the specifics eventually, but for now, the narrative builds curiosity so that we value the specifics when we get them—and the release they bring with them.
Conclusion
Focusing on people, processing the past, and trying to support and connect with others are three very human, and very good, goals. And sometimes, they can lead to very literary results. Yet I find that authors, especially emerging authors, might gravitate towards these three things because they are much like other, non-literary forms of expression that authors do every day. As people, we're always talking, processing, working things out, trying to prevent others from feeling the same pain we have. Dialogue, backstory, and social support are the tools authors reach for first because they're close to hand in the months and years when beginner authors are still acquiring the literary tools that they'll use for their later books.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with what I'm describing. It's totally natural. But if you're feeling frustrated with your tension and pacing, it might be worth looking into what effect the character-oriented, past-oriented, support-oriented approach might be having on your manuscript on a developmental level. One step to take might be to journal/brainstorm on the bullet points in this article that vibe the most. Many authors I've worked with have found that they felt freer to move forward on their books once they'd identified and come to terms with their underlying motivations, intentions, and beliefs around novel writing.
Categories: Advice for Writers, Annie in the Middle
