I got my horror novel back from the editor. It comes with a lot of good news (there’s nothing wrong with my writing, I have a definite style, my characterizations are solid, dialogue is on target, and storytelling is compelling) and a suggestion on how to fix the one thing that’s wrong with it: story structure. As individuals, we may prefer not to believe in things like the four act structure but, as the editor commented, we actually crave it. Surprise me, yes, but do so in a form I can comprehend.

I understand this very well through the revulsion I feel for wandering, slice-of-life films from directors like Robert Altman and Jim Jaramusch. Now, before anyone gets mad at me, that’s my reaction to those films not an objective judgment. At the end of Nashville or Broken Flowers, I scratch my head and wonder why I invested all that time and money for a story with no payoff.

Also, I was well aware I had structural problems with this book which is why I paid the editor to help me smooth them out. You see, the way it was written, it would have been a perfect project for Altman or Jaramusch.

The key takeaway was that it doesn’t appear to be any one character’s story. My first defensive thought was to bring up The Stand by Stephen King which appears to be the story of a whole bunch of diverse characters. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, no, it’s Stu Redman’s story. And if you stretch it a bit, it could even be the love story between Stu and Franny.

The book is also too long. The original draft came in at 150,000 words, very much a Stephen King sized tome. But you don’t get permission to publish a book that long until after you’ve achieved his status. Extra length is often a sign of amateurishness because coming up with the idea isn’t the hard part, and writing the book isn’t the hard part, rewriting the book is the hard part.

For instance, I need to cut 35,000 words from this story. That’s close to 20% of the total. I’ve been banging my head against a wall for a year trying to figure out how to cut that much without making the story unreadable. Deciding whose story it is opened the way for those cuts because it reduces the burden of the other characters to carry the story. When you have two primary characters (or in my case four) each one has to act like a primary character and that takes words, lots of words. When they get demoted to supporting character, that burden is lifted.

The other part of “structure” is the ending. One thing that hits me wrong about Altman and Jaramusch films is the way that they just tend to stop. Some people love this and that’s fine, but it’s not for me and it’s not the kind of story I feel comfortable telling. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of ending I had come up with for this book.

Part of that was thinking ahead to the next book in the series. That’s a big mistake. Focus on getting book one published or there will never be a need for book two. The other part of the problem goes back to that central question: whose story is this?

Now that I’ve answered that question, I know how a satisfying ending would look and I can now work toward that in the rewrite.

Acting is reacting. Writing is rewriting. It’s the hard work that often goes unremarked upon that makes the shiny product everyone loves in the end.