A Curious Personage, by Sarah Judge
Comments by 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
This is an outstanding novel and you are an outstanding writer.
Personage is a magnificently well-written book. There aren't, in my view, many writers on the scene at present who can touch you for the sheer quality of your prose, which is poetic, varied, inventive and subtle. The last time I had this much sheer delight in the language of any novel was when I read Annie Proulx's Shipping News; and that was a few years ago now. All in all, a joy to read.
In
addition, Personage is a wonderfully grown-up
book. It assumes culture and intelligence on the part
of its reader, and supplies both qualities in full measure
itself. While in some ways, the novel's virtues are
those of an earlier age, it manages to strike a thoroughly
contemporary posture as well. All in all, a terrific
achievement.
Which brings me to the question: Why on earth are you paying good money to be told all this? I assume that it's not in order to be told that the novel is good. You've heard that from others, and you can hardly be unaware of it yourself. Instead, therefore, I assume your concern is over marketability. The novel has been in the hands of an agent and failed to find an audience. This is a rare event if the agent is any good. (As an indication, my own agent, who has many years' experience, has only once failed to place a book that she had taken on.) What's more, though the market does make mistakes, it doesn't usually. I take it, in short, that you worry that, though your novel is good, it may be missing something to cut it commercially.
And you're right. There is a commercial problem with your book, and it's this: Personage is a wonderfully grown-up novel. It assumes culture and intelligence on the part of its reader - and I'm afraid it assumes too much. To put the same thing in a less flattering way, Personage relies too heavily on its beauty and its ideas to hold the reader's attention. This isn't enough. You won't find many readers who delight in good prose more than me, but even so I found my attention wandering, especially in the second half. I think this spells commercial death. If you want to sell your novel, it will need to grab and hold your reader's attention. It doesn't yet do this.
[Deletion covers more discussion of marketability, publication requirements, and how to generate tension.]
DETAILED COMMENTS
Opening
This didn't work for me. It's a rule of commercial fiction that a book needs to make a promise, make it early, and then deliver. For instance: a corpse is found on page one, and it's clear that the story is going to be about locating the murderer. That's the promise.
In a more sophisticated way, literary novels need to do the same thing. You're fully aware of this, and you set out your promise early. Roughly speaking, your first page and a half promises us that the book is going to uncover and tell the story of an unexpected / unusual relationship between Dave Rolls (an ordinary sort of bloke) and Edward Royston (a vastly superior personage). For a literary novel, that's a perfectly acceptable promise. But your book doesn't really deliver until far too late. The D.R. theme isn't picked up until page 145, and not really until page 178 - which is just about halfway into the book. That's not good enough, I'm afraid. You confuse the reader as to why he's reading this story and, by confusing him, you allow tension to drain away.
You have two options, either of which are fine. They are:
- Rejig the premise, so that the promise of the book becomes more to do with Dave Rolls' journey of self-discovery - roughly: 'And the end of all [his] exploring / Will be to arrive where [he] started / And know the place for the first time.' If you choose to do this, then make it clear and make sure that the force of that promise is apparent in every chapter of the book. Again, in commercial fiction, any page spent away from the major promise (or closely linked secondary themes) is a page of evaporating tension. You need to play by and obey the same rules; the only difference is that your promise to the reader doesn't need to involve a corpse.
- Bring the Edward Royston issue into the book much earlier and hold it there. Make sure that the ER story is broad enough to encompass all the other themes you want to bring in. But again, every chapter has to advance the ER story (if only by creating obstacles to its resolution). Also, if you choose to have the ER story as your central theme, then you can't afford to be quite so indirect about its climax and resolution. At the moment, the key scenes in the second half of the book pass with too much dreaminess. Make them more direct, more punchy. They'll work much harder for you then.
Whatever you choose, the point is the same. Decide what you're going to do, then do it. At the moment (as I think you know), you're cheating a little. If you want to know what I'd do in your position, then I'd go with the first of these. Your book is about Dave's circular journey more intrinsically than it's about ER. I think you'll find the required rewrites flow more easily and naturally as a result.
Dead sisters; dying fathers
For my money, you haven't quite done enough with Dave's past and his present relationship to it.
The human is a family sort of monkey. Any reader who hears about a sister's suicide and a father's serious illness will assume that those concerns will be at the heart of Dave's story. If they're not, Dave will come over as a cold fish and the reader will lose empathy. What's more, I think most readers will assume that those issues are at the heart of the book (or at the very least: are closely interwoven with the main issue). If they're not, he'll be confused as to what the novel is really about. And such confusion is deadly as far as readability is concerned.
Now I know that there is an important Dave / Maria scene which delves into that past, but (1) it's hardly terribly direct, and (2) there's nothing in part three which deals squarely with it. I'm afraid you can't get away with that. If you introduce really significant family events then they have to be properly dealt with. That means addressing them in terms your audience is really going to understand, and it also means that your resolution of those issues has to be an intrinsic part of the fabric of your climax (Part Three, in effect). The sort of thing I have in mind might run, for example, as follows
[Deletion covers further discussion of these issues]
Risk and Disequilibrium
Just below plot on the Richter scale of readability, you have risk and disequilibrium as they affect your central character. In a 'plot-lite' book like yours, I think you need to compensate by making sure the reader is always concerned about what happens next to Dave. Roughly speaking, you need to knock him off-balance right away; then keep him off-balance until your climax. The scale of risk that he faces should increase through the book. For instance, he starts off by losing a job (a financial risk), but he should approach the climax at risk of everything: relationships, identity, moral centre - everything. This is the technique that I employ as a commercial novelist. The same rules, I believe apply to you too, the only difference being that you can deal with moral and emotional risk instead of more obvious physical dangers.
On this theme, it's instructive to compare the first part of the book with the last. Chapter 1 establishes Dave as a loser (specifically a job-loser). Chapter 2 introduces a note of caution into the Dave-Larissa relationship. Chapter 3 has him kicked out. Chapters 4 and 5 drop Dave into a new flat, and with the change in his living arrangements a potentially unlimited change in his life. All this is excellent. There's a very clear dramatic purpose to each chapter, and an equally clear increase in the amount of risk (and potential life-change) that Dave is shouldering as the story proceeds. This opening sequence is a model for what every chapter in the book needs to do.
Later on, things become more blurred. Chapter 20 has Dave encountering Maria for the first time. How does this chapter increase the risk that Dave is in? If it doesn't increase risk, how does it alter the pre-existing balance of risk, as perceived by the reader? Ask yourself the same questions about Chapters 21, 22, 23, and 24.
[Deletion covers a lot more on these lines, with suggestions for ways forwards.]
Loops and Lists
A feature of your prose and of your narrative structure is a looping, recursive, repetitive style. Themes recur throughout the book (Corfu; the sky; crescendos of sound; alcohol). Words and phrases are picked up and repeated. You make long lists of things, then pick the same lists up again pages later. Even your narrative moves in circles. DR has frequent shifts of abode. The same group of characters is re-encountered in different lights. The train crash is presented first only via its effects (the cause at that point is unknown), then re-encountered in memory.
Now all this circularity and repetition is core to your artistic enterprise. After all, the novel ends up with DR back where he started: utterly the same and utterly different too. Jolly good.
But you do run the risk of losing your reader. As I say, I'm a big fan of terrific prose and I personally can sacrifice plenty of narrative momentum in exchange. But even so, I found my attention wandering at times - and if that's true of me, then I think many readers may simply give up half way. This section offers a few of my thoughts.
- Lists. Always tough for a reader to handle. There's an almost inevitable tendency for the eye to stray forwards to find the full stop. I don't say you should eliminate your lists, but I do think you should scrutinise them hard and ditch the ones that don't really punch their weight. I think you'll feel the manuscript lightening and breathing more as soon as you do this.
- Description. Your descriptive prose is wonderful. It does something that's very hard and seldom done successfully: it takes ordinary street or country scenes and finds something fresh and even revelatory in them. But readers can't handle too much of it, and I think at the moment your manuscript is overloaded. Take your chapter 23, pages 241-245. This is essentially all description. Too much! The description actually continues on into the start of the next chapter. Much too much! Try slashing this hard and see if you like the results. I think you will. In general, in fact, I think your manuscript could be a lot shorter - at least 10,000 words shorter, but don't worry if it turns out to be more. [.]
- Sentence length. OK, I know your readers aren't morons, but even if you do everything I suggest in these notes, you will still be demanding plenty from them. At times, your sentences become long and complex. You generally handle them beautifully and I would never suggest that you cut them out entirely . but all the same, the longer and more complex your grammar, the more of a challenge you set your reader. I think you could usefully set the hurdles lower. One example: The last sentence on page 264, which runs on into page 265. It's over 100 words long [.]
- Repetitions. Again, I don't want to suggest your manuscript should lose its loops and repetitions. But I would advocate making those repetitions crisper and clearer. That way the reader will be alerted to the fact that Dave's been in a certain situation before (dazed and confused, say), without getting tired. Here, as with a number of other suggestions, I think your manuscript may improve artistically as well as commercially if you tighten up.
[Deletion on sections dealing with humour and period detail.]
Conclusion
That's it. You're a terrific writer who should unquestionably be published. I think the choice for you lies between finding a small and enthusiastic publisher now and hoping that good reviews and word-of-mouth will get you noticed and re-writing the book to appeal to a more commercial (but still thoroughly literary) audience.
If I were you, I'd go for the second option - but then again, I'm a commercial novelist who lives or dies by readability, so perhaps I over-emphasise the point. Whatever you decide, I look forward to seeing you in print - and to seeing you on the shortlist for a literary prize or two.
[.]
