Black Sun , By Jermaine Aliyah

Comments for the Writers' Workshop

This is a sample based on a recent original report. Names, places and themes have been altered to protect the author's privacy. Large sections of the report have been deleted to keep the length manageable. Deletions are indicated by square brackets in the text below.

Summary

Congratulations! You're very close. I'd say your novel isn't marketable yet, but it's not far away. Given how far you've already got, I'd guess that you have what it takes to complete this undertaking.

First off a review of the good points:

You are absolutely convincing on drugs, drug-dealing and drug-smuggling. You are also convincing on the messed up relationships (friends, lovers and business partners) which litter the course of the book. All this is absolutely essential to the success of your novel and you pull it off flawlessly. Well done!

Your settings are novel; an important selling point for publishers. In particular, I loved the whole Caribbean medley - the international meeting point for drug-dealers from across the world. This is a while new way to look at these islands, and again I thought your performance was excellent.

You have found a voice which works well for you. I found it almost completely convincing and well suited to the flavour of your narrative. Your settings are often light on conventional scene setting, but I think you have found ways to compensate that are right for you and your story. More on this later.

You don't have anything that really amounts to plot, but you do, at your best, have considerable forwards momentum through the narrative. This is good, though I think could be better still - watch for further comments on this below.

There are really only three areas which need improvement, I think.

There are times when your story drags. To put it bluntly, there are too many places where I'd have skipped pages or put the book down if I weren't being paid to read this. We need to eliminate these areas completely . This is an absolute imperative. You will not sell the novel until you do this.

The novel lacks a proper climax. In particular, there needs to be a real change of tone in the penultimate chapter where we see the narrator facing up to the worst of his past and battling his demons. This is the place where instead of a long chain of drug-fuelled adventure we get a more meditative and slower-paced take on things. If you want your resolution to be plausible, then you must have a credible turning point. At the moment you don't.

The key emotional relationship in the book is between the narrator and his mother. This MUST be further developed. It doesn't need a whole lot of work, but it does require more colour - a few more sentences here and there - throughout the book. In particular, you have to give some life to the narrator's father, otherwise his mother seems only half-alive.

The comments that follow dig deep into the could-do-better side of the ledger. Obviously, that's not a fair reflection of my overall take on the book, but it's what you most need to know. I normally arrange my comments thematically, but because you're so close to being done, I think it'll be more helpful to have them by chapter, as follows.

Chapter by chapter comments

My biggest point by far has to do with your story. It's sometimes a bit boring and that's lethal in any book. But in your case, there's so much good stuff, it should be easy to fix. And before I get into the nuts and bolts, one further word of advice: cut your book as freely as you want. Don't worry if it gets a lot shorter. I'd say you need to lose at least 10,000 words, but if you lose 20,000 or more, you've no need to worry. A really powerful short book will be more saleable than a so-so middling one. And you do have plenty of power in your story, you just need to release it.

Chapter One: Just delete this. It's possible that you added it following your musings about the helpfulness of a flash-forward. But whatever your reasons, it doesn't work. You've mixed up the present (Jamaica), the long-ago past (the fishing trip), and the recent formative past (rehab and therapy). This is deeply confusing and confusion always means that momentum (and readers) are lost. As I say, I think the solution is delightfully simple: just delete the entire chapter. Bingo! The opening to Chapter Two already reads like the start of a novel. It brings the reader straight into the present, gives plenty of indications about the type of novel that's about to ensue, and offers some fine dramatic snippets to really give your book some punch.

Chapter Two. Good. There's strong momentum here, in taking your narrator from schoolkid to drug-dealer. I think you could usefully add some background on his family relationships here - and I've suggested a few places with notes on the manuscript where this background would fit in naturally. Don't overdo it. Your narrator is not very introspective and he's too self-absorbed to be very observant of others. But a few really sharp and to-the-point sentences will do a lot for you. A couple of other thoughts. Your narrator is still a kid. I think you could just emphasise this a little more. Does he look young? What are people's reactions to buying from such a youngster? These details will help give your narrative some sense of movement through time, which at present it slightly lacks. Also, maybe a little more on his early relationships here. You have a catch-up period later in the book, where you review his past relationships with girls. I want you to delete all the catch-up stuff, and absorb it into the narrative proper.

[The report continues in this way up to the vital penultimate chapter .]

Chapter Fourteen. (Rehab.) This needs some work.

You're probably just about OK for length - though I'd still be inclined to shorten it. But your reader has had as much drug adventure as he or she is likely to be able to handle by now. The only questions remaining in your book are 'Is rehab going to stick?', 'Will this boy recover or not?'. If you want to make the point that rehab is failing, then one or two short, sharp, nasty anecdotes will do the trick. I guarantee that your reader will get the point speedily enough. Also (a key point) your writing has to change when it hits rehab. This is a new world. The world of therapy, introspection, order, understanding. I know your character has an ambivalent relationship to those things, and he's still got a head full of demons to struggle with, but the pace needs to quieten, the mood needs to be more reflective, you need to give yourself time for emotional journeys into the past. At the moment, your writing is just too close in tone to all the rest of it. Try rewriting the chapter so that it addresses all of the following questions:

When does the narrator first look inside himself and really think: this is it, this is my rock bottom? How does he feel about that realisation?

When does he have his first unmanipulative, non-co-dependent relationship (or even just physical interaction) with a girl? What is it like? How does he feel about it? Even more important, how does he review his past from his new perspective?

Describe his first moment of real calm. (Not something we've ever had during the book; not once). Again, how does he feel about this? Does he feel different inside his body? Is the moment frightening for him at all?

Try giving him a movie moment, akin to those you've had in the past. Not a Schwarzenegger moment, but something really unexpected, like a weepy chick-flick that he really connects with. Maybe he sees something like Making an American Quilt and he cries and cries and cries.

Obviously the addiction is still there. It's not a habit he's kicked. But his slant on it must surely be different. Give yourself space to explore those differences.

Don't worry if this seems daunting at the moment. You've got the resources to do all this. Can I suggest that you rewrite at least a few pages as I've suggested, then we can look at the revised text when we meet? It's so important to get this passage right, and at the moment you haven't yet hit quite the right notes here.

[Some more comments on the final chapter and the epilogue .]

Political Collapse

The first half of the book makes excellent play with the impending political collapse and the role of the US drug enforcement people in making a complicated situation even more complex still. This is all good stuff, but then when the whole political situation alters about halfway through the book, the subject seems to have been dropped. At the moment, this doesn't yet work.

I've got some ideas for dealing with this, which we can talk about in due course. Perhaps you've got some thoughts of your own?