The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [53]
In such circumstances, you may solve some of your "cast of thousands" problems by being alert to how you may be able to use one character to handle several minor missions. For example, is it possible that that doorman could take over the work you assigned to the cabdriver and the yard man? Could the TV reporter from chapter three also provide the information you gave to the policeman in chapter seven—and maybe also make the needed telephone call you handed to a convenience store clerk in chapter twelve?
Often the manipulation of plot to accomplish such telescoping of roles is far simpler than you might think. It simplifies your storytelling. And the side advantage you sometimes encounter is that the doorman—now slated to be onstage in nine chapters—can be developed into an interesting character in his own right, vastly enriching your novel!
Pleasant surprises abound for the novelist who looks for new and unanticipated ways to make more and better use of existing plot developments or characters. Try it.
35. DON'T STOP TOO SOON
WRITING A STORY—ANY STORY—can be a fatiguing process. if your project has been a complex short story or—harder—a novel, you will probably come to the end of your first or second draft in a state not only of weariness, but also of a certain amount of anxiety. You want to be done with this arduous task—to have it finished and sent out somewhere, so you can at least relax a bit... and perhaps begin to think of some new project.
At such a time, when your enthusiasm for your current story is perhaps at an all-time low, and you ache both literally and figuratively, you run the grave risk of stopping a bit too soon—of failing to take one more critical look at what you planned to do, what you've ended up doing, and how well the job was done.
Good stories result from the writer's taking a few days off to rest, then returning to the fray to take one more cautious and caring look at the "finished" work.
Revise, revise and be ready to revise again. After all the work you've done, it would be tragic, wouldn't it, if you stopped a day or a month away from making those final adjustments which could make all the difference in the products acceptability?
Now, it is possible to revise too often, too long. There are a few writers out there, I'm sure, who have worked and reworked the same dog-eared pages for many years or even decades when they would be far better off to let the story go, and get on with a new project on which they can use all they have learned. A part of wisdom is knowing when to let go like this, when to move ahead to the new.
A far more common error, however, lies in quitting just one read-through... one small set of changes... short of the ultimate goal: the best work you can do. You must beware the temptation to stop short just because you're tired and even discouraged. You must not stop on a project too soon.
What do you do if you decide to go through your present "finished" manuscript yet another time? No revision checklist can suggest everything you might look at. Your own awareness of your personal strengths and weaknesses as a writer, together with some idea of the kind of writer you want to become, will dictate some of the things high on your own checklist. What follows, however, is a suggestive list you might consider using as a basis for your own expanded one—things to do, questions to consider, things to check. Many of the questions assume you are to revise a novel-length manuscript, but most are equally applicable to a shorter tale.
1. Give yourself a brief break. After finishing—you think—the story, it's imperative that you give yourself a few days off away from it so you can rest a bit and allow your mind to clear. It may be months or years before you could hope to read your own story truly "cold," as if it were someone else's work, with any genuine objectivity. But even a week or two away from the project can provide you with some artistic distance, some perspective.
In the time off, you should not look at the manuscript. You should try not even to think