When your writing lacks life

I don’t mean that it wasn’t grammatically correct or it didn’t evoke some spontaneous laughter. Rather the writer behind the words on the page was distant. As a reader I couldn’t sense her emotions; the story never went beyond the safe boundaries of expression. To put it another way, there was nothing at stake for the writer – she wasn’t taking any risks. And therefore I as a reader was likely to put the manuscript down.

How does material end up lifeless?

• First, it has likely been overworked too many times in a short period of time. The writer is going over the text word by word, and such constant editing can squeeze out vivid language or hamper forward momentum in the manuscript. The best remedy for this is to leave the text alone for a period; sometimes a few days or even a few months. Coming back to it with a fresh mind will help eliminate some of the punitive eye.
• The second most common difficulty is that the writer is afraid of taking risks either because of political, religious, or social boundaries they are unwilling to cross, or because of the pressure of putting one’s name next to a text which will live in perpetuity. The simple fact is, the stories that resonate with us are those which take us to places we have not yet been. Think of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which traced so much within the course of the main character’s coming of age and discovery of family secrets.

Now you don’t have to give your main character such complexity in order to take a few risks in your manuscript. It can be as simple as giving him/her a secret that no one else knows but you as the author. This will colour dramatic moments in a way that they may be currently lacking.

Another simple technique is to ask yourself in each scene what is at stake for the various characters involved. If there is no great danger: either of someone’s long buried secret being revealed, or fortune, life, or honour being lost, then there is little motivation for the reader to keep on.

Ask yourself: What is at risk? And then when you are ready, what else?

The most effective stories have something everyone can lose. I discovered this the hard way in writing my own first novel. In early drafts the story revolved around the break-up of the main character with her college boyfriend.

While people praised the writing, one very helpful reader early on said, ‘It doesn’t feel like it goes far enough.’ I put the manuscript away for eight months because it was more than I could bear to think of reworking it. But this spring when I dusted it off, those words reverberated with me. So I introduced another character, a second boyfriend. But he wasn’t the right one either, I discovered. Now the central character goes through three romances, one conversion, and then – oh wait, I shouldn’t tell you – the fun really begins.

Mohana Rajakumar

(writer & publishing director for a new Bloomsbury venture)