writermag.com • The Writer | 17This thorough analysis revealed the
draft’s hidden problems. Getting down
to the fundamental fictional elements
and reviewing the whole novel in
terms of their complex interrelation-
ships really paid off, Leavitt says. And
as with her pre-draft work, Leavitt’s
problem-solving method is largely rea-
soned, or analytical.
A second problem can be a protago-
nist who just doesn’t seem to work.
“My most difficult novel was Private
Life, which I wrote in the first person,”
says Smiley. The book follows the
character of Margaret Mayfield over
nearly six decades from childhood to
her long marriage to a scientist with a
checkered past. “My editor could not
understand the inner life of my protag-
onist, so I put it in the third person, to
see if I could set the protagonist in
context,” Smiley says.
Still, for a long time, she couldn’t
seem to make her “‘good wife’ protago-
nist work,” only to eventually discover
that it was the “crackpot husband that
wasn’t working.” She realized at this
point that she had overloaded the dice
in her protagonist’s favor and against her
antagonist. “I then tried to be a little
more sympathetic toward him and to
come up with a reason that she didn’t get
away from him. Eventually, it was well
reviewed and reasonably successful.”
A third problem can be a protago-
nist who lacks sufficient depth, which
is something Sullivan has experienced:
“Early in my career, when I was writ-
ing The Purification Ceremony, there
was a point where a giant part of that
suspense novel was down on paper and
wasn’t going to change in any radical
way.” There was a problem, though,
and that was a married couple, “a rich
husband and trophy wife who bickered
a lot” whom, after multiple drafts, the
author couldn’t seem to develop to his
satisfaction. His editor and publisher
were both pleased with the book. But,
says Sullivan, “I felt I still had to ‘core
in’ on those two characters in a way I
had not yet. I really had to figure out
who they were at a much deeper level
than I’d attempted.”
He ultimately discovered “they were
both suffering, lonely people, who’d
nurtured a show relationship based on
desire and fear rather than a sharing of
hearts and love...Once I got that
straight, I was able to go through the
manuscript and surgically rewrite their
dialogue and some of their actions in a
way that brought them to life.”Still another problem can be char-
acters who do not draw empathy from
readers. Mejia revised her debut novel,
The Dragon Keeper, twice before que-
rying agents. “I’d gotten feedback from
many peers and mentors in my MFA
program during the initial drafts and
had thought the book was as polished
as I could make it. When the rejections
started coming in, though, I noticed a
pattern in the feedback.”
Several agents were having trouble
empathizing with the characters. This
meant going back to the drawing
board: “I sat down with all my pri-
mary and secondary characters and
analyzed their desires, flaws, and arcs
within the narratives, then looked for
moments where I could make each
character shine – reaching their high-
est potential – and fall – becoming
their absolute worst selves.”
Soon, for Mejia, it was no longer a
question of reader sympathy – she had
gone beyond that concern: “Showing
the full range of the characters through
the lens of their individual motivations
made them compelling, regardless of
whether they were ‘likable’ or tradition-
ally sympathetic.” She was then able to
finish the novel to her satisfaction.In some cases, there isn’t an over-
arching problem at all, but rather a hole
of one kind or another that prevents the
novel from actualizing its full potential.
“With my novel The Rocks,” says Nich-
ols, “one reader of a nearly finished draft
told me he found that the thread involv-
ing two of my characters, who were in a
tormented relationship, needed one
more ‘beat,’ one more unhappy episode,
to push them where I wanted them, to
add to the baggage between them.” This
became a typical show-versus-tell situa-
tion. “It wasn’t enough to say they were
estranged; I had to show how they got
to that last point of unhappiness and
estrangement.”
Nichols notes that certain episodes
you include might also amount to
excess, however: “In another instance
in that book, my wonderful editor,
Sarah McGrath at Riverhead, pointed
to an episode that I loved writing that
was fun and well-written, and said, ‘Do
we really need this?’ And I saw we
didn’t. It was more of the same: Bloat.
And I cut it. And the book was better. I
still remember, fondly, the loving detail
of that episode, how I loved writing it,
but the book didn’t need it.”Some final thoughts
It’s hard to begin a novel, but it’s even
harder to finish one. Everything has to
come together: characters, plot, set-
ting, style – all the fictional elements.
It’s not easy to navigate through all this
and know when you’re actually done,
when everything is just right. The criti-
cal question writers must ask them-
selves is this: What is essential to this
story, and what isn’t? You might
depend on rational analysis, the way
some writers do, or intuition, as others
do. But no matter your approach, you
should also read a lot of novels. Ask
yourself: What is your “reader brain,”
to borrow Smiley’s term, telling you?Jack Smith is the author of four novels, three
books of nonfiction, and numerous reviews,
articles, and interviews. His collection of arti-
cles on fiction writing, Inventing the World, was
recently published by Serving House Books.It’s hard to begin
a novel, but it’s
even harder to
finish one.