How To Read For Research

I am a firm believer in research when it comes to writing a novel. Now, when I am talking about research, this is not about the content you put in your novel, but studying the "whys" and "hows" of a story. This is when you break out your skills you learned in college literature courses about literary analysis.

If you remember in those literature classes, you spent the time trying to figure out what makes a story "tick". Why is it that Ernest Hemingway was successful writing in a way that would make most English 101 instructors cringe. How does Poe creating a rhyme pattern in Annabelle Lee to move the reader through the poem and his personal journey. It was all about trying to get into the heads of the authors we read. We didn't just sit in class and talk about how we thought the love affair between the two characters was "totally cute and hot." We objectively dissected the story.

One of the workshops I like to teach is one I launched at an RWA National Convention called Dissecting the Novel. The workshop focused on how to read a story, not so much for enjoyment, but to learn why the author chose that approach. It is this approach I take when I read novels that people are raving about to determine what it is that is bringing people back to that story.

When we study this, we focus on some small basic elements. We look at Characters, Setting, Plot, Dialogue and Narration. We look at the Conflicts, both internal and external. When we study these, we look to see how each of these are interacting with one another, and the strategies the author is using. We stop and explore why the author chose that approach when he or she could have taken a lot of other approaches. 

Let me give you one example. When I look at stories that people are loving, especially those summer reads, one of the first things I look for is the pacing of the story. This is entirely controlled at the sentence level. What you will notice is the author has chosen to use more dialogue and less narration. What you will also see is that the sentences are often shorter in word count. You won't see the compound, complex sentence structures you would normally see in the novels that would be considered literary fiction. 

Here is another example. One of my authors called me one day to ask why one book was supposedly getting great reviews, and yet, when she read it, as well as several of her other friends, they all hated the book. She had noted that the premise of the story should have worked and the set up in the beginning was amazing. But then the book just plummeted into a downward spiral. Here is what I found. Sure enough, the writing was amazing in the beginning, but then the author, and yes, the editor must have thought the story was moving to slow, shifted to short, choppy dialogue and sentences. The depth the author had taken to immerse the reader into the world of the characters completely disappeared. The author now focused on a structure you often see junior high students using when they have to write a short story. All telling, No Showing. And dialogue tags that were repetitive and boring: "he said", "she said."

Recently, I have been scanning the "reviews" on TikTok. Yes, I put reviews in quotes because these people are not reviewing, but just saying they like or hate something. When I say this, it should tell you a lot of what type of stories they liked and hated. 

• They hated books that had plots with depth. They hated books with sub-plots. They hated books that were part of a series. In other words, these books required them to use brain cells to read.
• They loved books with overly simple plots. They loved stories that were almost all dialogue because when reading the stories, it was more like binge watching a Netflix movie. The loved stories that were not part of a series since they did not have to commit to the reading. 

As authors, it is important to read and study novels if you want to be successful. It is even more important to know and understand the publishers you want to work with. Each publisher has a unique voice and style. If you want to be published there, you have to make your writing sound like it fits. To do so requires that level of study.