Here's a list of things I slowly absorbed over the past year, though they were all told to me in one 20-minute conference with novelist Joyce Magnin last March.
1) Don't try to be too mysterious in your novel's opening. I've read in other places too that your reader should know what the character is privy to. (Well, I see some exceptions to that, but in general I'm beginning to get the overall principle.) I was sooo guilty of this. I didn't want to name Maizy's husband/the baby's father mentioned in the prologue's first paragraph. What the reader got was a lot of confusing "he" pronouns--some referring to the father, some a newborn baby. I had this hangup about not naming the man in the prologue because the first chapter went back in time to when Maizy was with a different man, and if I named the man in the prologue, the reader would instantly know that relationship in chapter one was doomed. I thought by not naming the man in the prologue, the reader would be able to meet the rest of the story with the ability to wonder which man she'll pick. It sounded good to me, for years, but now I get that frustrating ambiguity doesn't serve much but to add confusion. Besides, my prologue carries enough ambiguity--the point is to make you wonder what happens to the baby and what she did that she feels so much guilt--those are the hooks my novel needs.
2) Don't dump a lot of back story in the your novel's beginning. Save as much back story as you can for later, sprinkled in bits and pieces as you weave the rest of the forward-moving story. My prologue had once been 30 pages--all from a short story that I wanted to keep in tact. A lot of it was back story. I cut it down to 9 for this conference and felt quite accomplished. But in the conference, I remember feeling like I was back in school, at the desk of an English teacher with a red pen, as Joyce sliced through paragraph after paragraph with a pen: "We don't need to know this yet." Slash. "Not needed." Red slash. "Not needed." Ouch. But a year has gone by, and I see she was right. There was actually very little that the reader needed in that introduction. The reader didn't need to know how Maizy got where she was--yet.
3) The reader doesn't need to know how your character got where she got--yet--but he/she does need to know where she is now! My opening was scant on setting the scene and developing atmosphere. Joyce said I needed to spend more time on world building. Up to that point, I'd been so focused on following earlier advice to shorten my prologue that I'd been cutting, painfully cutting, to shorten the word count. But I'd been cutting the wrong things and preserving things that were better sprinkled throughout the rest of the novel.
4) De-clutter dialogue. Especially in the opening, my dialogue was cluttered with all the details I was trying to squeeze in--characters' appearances, mannerisms, emotions, etc. It was so full of information, the conversation moved very slowly, the reader constantly asked to process new information and yet not lose the momentum of the conversations. Joyce also took her pen and slashed through my synonyms for "said." I've read it in books before: "forget what your high school creative teacher taught you." Writing declared, retorted, implored, reported, spat, enunciated, replied, etc., should be rare. "The reader doesn't really notice 'said,' but the other words slow her down," Joyce said. Dialogue should move, not bog down, generally.
5) Simplify sentence structure. I'm super good at writing very complex sentences, with proper punctuation and everything. But what's good for poetry and academic writing is not necessarily good for contemporary fiction. Sentence variety, yes. But I was really burdening my prose with over-long sentences. Maybe Twain is noted for it, and countless writers before have had paragraph-long sentences, but it's hard to pull that off in today's publishing world.
Joyce ended my conference saying, "I do think you do have a story here," like she was generously searching for a diamond in the rough. "But you have to learn the basics of fiction writing."
(As an aside, I should tell you I think that was the worst reception of my writing I've ever experienced. I was that kind of student in high school and college who always excelled, whom professors asked to stand and read her writing for the whole class, even when I was a sophomore among senior English majors. To find that my skills didn't seamlessly translate to the world of contemporary fiction was a bit...deflating. But necessary.)
To follow what kind of feedback I got on my revisions a year later, in conferences last week, follow to the blog post "A Year Comparison: Shopping My Novel's Opening at Writers' Conferences."
Articles I've written:
What is a Disposable Diaper Made of Anyway?
Are Schools Expecting Our Kids to Read Too Early?
Hormone-free Milk: Dairy Companies Pledging Not to Use Artificial Bovine Growth Hormone
Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression Incorrect; Antidepressants Ineffective
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