NON-FICTION: A SAMPLE REPORT
This memoir was by a talented writer with some great stories to tell of her life growing up in South Africa. The basic writing ability was certainly there, but the book lacked a clear story focus and wasn't yet doing enough to attract interest from a possible publisher. Our editor focused on clarifying the story elements in the book, before hammering away at the kind of stylistic and other issues which are key to impressing agents and publishers alike. The client is currently reworking the book. We expect great things ... |
 |
SummaryThis is a lively, entertaining, occasionally depressing and ultimately touching tale of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in small town South Africa during the 1980s and 90s, and then in sex, drugs and music-fuelled contemporary London. It is an intriguing tale of one girl’s haphazard wanderings through her own mixed-up adolescence … Generally the book is well written, full of vivid details that bring both the author and many of the other characters very much alive. There is some good characterisation: the cast is huge but we do get to know many of these people and come almost to feel they are our friends, enemies, and lovers too. We can clearly envisage the places where they live, what they look like, where they hang out. The author’s own motivations are honestly portrayed, and we come to sympathise with her and be firmly on her side. There is some good dialogue, and the tone is full of energy. The prose is readable, sprightly, and moves on all the time with rarely a dull moment.
Is it publishable?
Is yours an excellent book? Not yet. But with some work I think you could get it some way down the line. The work mainly involves some adding and subtracting of material, but none of it particularly difficult. What to do next The main problem with this book is that there is no real story here. Like all our lives, it is a succession of events that don’t lead anywhere, except to the present day. You could say that your book is a sequence of stories that lead through various rites of passage, beginning with a bad relationship (your parents’) and ending with a happy one (yours and Ed’s). But that is not enough for a book. As Gertrude Stein said of the American mid-west, ‘There’s no there there.’ There is plenty of good material there, but it lacks a core. At present it reads as if you have simply worked up your diaries. A book needs more than this. You need to transform the material in some way. At the moment it’s as if you have the ingredients for a meal, but you need to cook them up in an interesting way. Any book needs a purpose; even a memoir like this needs some sort of plot. In short, what is the point of this book, exactly? There are several ways of approaching this. The first is by writing a prologue or introductory chapter explaining why you have decided to write this book, and giving the reader some taste of what to expect. Tell us why you want to share these intimate experiences with the world, and what your aims are. Ask yourself why this book should interest anyone other than you and your friends. Why should I, for example, as an average reader, care enough about you to part with money to spend several days with you, immersed in your world, while reading your book? …
Is this also a morality tale intending to demonstrate the folly of wasting your youth, education and health on all the smoking, drinking and late nights? At present there are no such reflections in the book, but I think it would add to your prologue if you could draw some conclusions from the sum of your experiences. Do you have regrets? Was this the only way forward for you? Are you glad you have lived as you have, and grateful to have added to Life’s Rich Tapestry with all your experiences, good and bad? I suggest you think about this sort of thing and really question yourself as to why you have written this book, and what you hope to achieve. The next thing to do is heavily cut the book. At present it is far too long. The key stories are lost in the repetitive relationships and one-night stands. Many of these can be summarized, and condensed right down. There are also far too many different characters, whose personalities we quickly forget, and whose names blur with others. Many can be cut right out of the story. Remember: this is a book, not your diaries, and not a police report, so you have to be ruthless with what stays in and what goes. … Think about the main stories, and try to stick to them. In my view the main stories are:
… [Further discussion of possibilities for this material in fictional format] Prose Style Style-wise the book suffers from the use of exaggeration words, or hyperbole. For example, you frequently say that something was ‘completely’, or ‘extremely’ or ‘totally’ or ‘literally’ or ‘really’, or ‘absolutely’. These are often useless words that are current in colloquial speech, but add nothing to your text. There is also a recurrence of cliché. Remember that these are phrases which slip past unnoticed when you speak, but which are meaningless in print. They had meaning once, when they were first coined, but they have been so over-used that they have become devalued. Think of some new and different way of expressing yourself. I will point these out as we go through the book in more detail. There is also a lot of loose prose that can be tightened up by cutting unnecessary words where possible. Go through the manuscript and ask yourself if every word is necessary. Another problem with the book is that you occasionally move back and forth through time, and tell a story in retrospect. It’s more alive if you stick to real time, and tell a story as it occurred. On a more practical note, it helps if you have a list of chapters with appropriate page numbers.
Detailed Points I will now go through the manuscript in more detail. I will point out grammatical problems at the start of the book, and this will help you to go on through the rest of the manuscript to sort out these things for yourself. Page 3 para 3. Look at the construction of a sentence like the first one here. You say, ‘Three of the neighbourhood boys, a few years older than me, I was four at the time, caught me one day and threw me to the ground and pulled my panties down.’ Here is a prime example where you can tighten things up – and this is something you should think about throughout the text. You could say instead: ‘When I was four, three older boys caught me and threw me to the ground and pulled down my panties.’ This is not only tighter, it also flows more smoothly. By the simple reversal of ‘down’ and ‘panties’ you have a greater sense of drama: try to build up to the big word, the punch word (as opposed to the punch line). [...] [And so on and so on! A further 1000 words or so of detailed commentary follows.] |
||||
Memoirs of this sort are hugely popular at the moment, so in that sense this book is very timely. Publishers, it seems, can’t get enough of these true life stories, and yours being full of sex, and written by an apparently gorgeous young woman, might prove appealing. However, despite the current fashion for memoirs, I should warn you of what a competitive market it is for books at the moment. Supermarkets are selling thousands of copies of only a handful of titles, while some of the larger British chains such as Waterstone’s are reducing the number of titles they stock. If you don’t make it into a Three for Two deal, you basically don’t make it. Publishers have responded by publishing fewer books. None of this worries the bigger more established names – they will get shelf space come what may – but it makes it tough for first timers. Only excellent books will make the grade.
Several times while reading the manuscript I expected this to turn into a rags-to-riches story of how Miss South Africa started life, or how supermodel/pop star Alison Andrews rose to stardom. That would have given the book its core – if you like, its payoff. Of course that isn’t what happens. This is a more humdrum, and perhaps more human story than that. I suppose the real core of the book is that this is about a bad family that ultimately comes good. As such it does have a purpose, and a worthy if not very dramatic one. This is something you should discuss right at the start. 
Another more radical and possibly more exciting solution is to use this (trimmed) material but turn the book into fiction
