Don't Be Episodic

I am seeing a real big trend in this type of thinking from writers, and yes, readers as well. It might be due to the amount of time people spend on social media and "sweeping" through information on their phones. I really started digging into this when one of my client's reached out and asked me to read a novel. She was really wondering what it was that people were so excited about. Why was it that this book was "so amazing." Now, before I go any further, let me just say, publishing is subjective. What works for one person is not going to work for someone else. Still, I gave it a shot. 

This particular book was being hyped up for how witty the entire novel was. It was claimed to be over the top funny. OK., that should be easy to spot. But what a careful read showed is that it had "moments" of funny. Digging further, when you read the reviews, the only scenes they mentioned were those "moments" I spotted. That does not make the entire novel funny. 

You see this as well with all of the posts on TikTok and Instagram. Posters will spend hours just talking about single scenes. You never hear them talking about the whole book. If they try to, the post still turns into just talking about those single episodes.

This same thinking is now getting down to the writers. Often, writers will have a single scene they have drafted in their head. This, unfortunately turns into "this will make a great book." The reality is, that was just a scene. 

This comes across when people pitch stories to me or write query letters. They will often hype up a part of the book, making it larger than life, when in reality, it was still, just a scene. This also happens when people try to justify their genre of their book. I had an author recently pitch a story to me. When I responded that it didn't fall into the category of a romance, his answer was, "they were married and romantically attracted to each other." In another case, an author tried to push the novel as a "thriller" but in reality, there was only one part in the end where there was a tense moment. The rest of the book was beyond amazingly tame.

When I teach editing, I always remind the writers that there are pages "off the screen" on their computer both above and beyond the page they are reading. I stress this with critique groups when they want to make a change on one paragraph, failing to see or think about what happened in the previous paragraphs or chapters, or what is going to happen in those later pages.

I am not saying to not focus on stories at a smaller level. This is great for fine-tuning a story. However, you have to still look at the big picture. 

And for those of you doing reviews, look at the WHOLE story. Don't focus in on one thing and ignore the rest.