When You’re Good Enough to be Used as an Example

Writing is a lonely profession, where perseverance in the face of the world’s absolute indifference to your drive, talent and goals is essential.

So when a professional like my book coach Jennie compliments my work, I’m buoyed.

But when a professional like my book coach Jennie compliments my work on her own blog, to her own readers, I’m jazzed. 🙂

Here’s an excerpt from her most recent blog. (By the way, I’m Writer A… 🙂 )

Writer A came to me with a finished novel – sci fi YA – which she hoped to polish up before submission. She had been working on it for a long time and felt relatively confident in her effort – among other reasons because she is a creative writing teacher at a high school and knows her stuff.  But I asked her a few basic questions about the point of the book, the desire of the characters – and she couldn’t answer. She had a super cool scenario, but had not done any of the deep work that would make the narrative hold together over the course of a whole book. I also looked at her first chapter and there were glaring errors in the first pages that would make any agent say no and any reader pick up another book. Those errors were info dumps and head-hopping (moving from one character’s head to another within the same paragraph or scene.) These are extremely common problems.

(Ok, that’s not the compliment part…)
 
The amazing thing was that this writer was really talented in all other writerly ways.

(Here’s the compliment.)

She just hadn’t done the deep story work she needed to do, and she had few bad habits she simply could not see. “I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles,I wasn’t writing info dumps,” she later said to me. And yet she was…
 
We worked together for four weeks to nail down the internal logic of her story, and then she re-wrote those opening pages four times. I made her go back four times to the same five pages. I kept marking the info dumps and the head-hopping until she could see them herself, and avoid them. Then we followed the logic we had hammered out, and she wrote forward from there, revising her story as we went.

(Here was the hard, frustrating work.)
 
She is almost finished with a revised draft of her novel. There are no info dumps anywhere in sight and the POV problems are completely gone.  The narrative is seamless and riveting. I am not exaggerating when I say that her work has brought tears to my eyes.

(If that isn’t a compliment… )

It’s SO good.

(That, too.)

It’s a thousand times better than it was before. It has a thousand times better chance of finding an audience.

(I hope she’s right!)
 

(http://jennienash.com/how-to-write-a-book-blog/2017/8/3/what-does-a-book-coach-do-part-4-the-dangers-of-diybook-writing)