Give the story what it's asking for, not what you think it needs

We've all heard the old writing advice, "Murder your darlings." It's one that many of us are not too comfortable with. We spend months, sometimes years, developing the perfect scene, the wittiest lines of banter, lining up plot points, and we're so proud at the end of it all. We did it. We wrote the novel. We become a part of that exclusive, proverbial 3% of people who started a novel and finished it.

But then we send it to a developmental editor, and it's like they throw a grenade into a lake. The dead fish start popping up. The plot holes. Inconsistencies. The drag. The info dumps. The paragraphs of unnecessary exposition.

The chapter that doesn't fit. The POV that doesn't move the story along. The storyline that convolutes.

You kind of wish you could look away. Try to think up ways you might navigate your way around all the dead fish. Maybe if you squint at it from a distance. Or if you plug your nose. Or if you tell yourself all the floating dead fish give the lake character. What's the right kind of twist you can give this so that you can make it work with minimal effort? Without having to take down, brick-by-brick, the thing that took you so long to build.

You'll likely enter the five stages of grief. And this is totally normal. In fact, it's healthy. If you can make it all the way to acceptance, then you can rest assured that you've grown as a writer. You can move on stronger, wiser, ready to dismantle your novel and build something stronger.

The issue lies when we get stuck cycling the first four stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression).

But let me just say that that's also totally valid. As a writer—who just received her developmental edits back—I totally get it. That feeling of desperation, of grappling at straws to make a beloved scene still work. The stomach-falling-out-of-your-butt feeling when you realize that to cut a scene means that that plot point of so much significance won't work anymore. It won't resonate the same again. You're pulling at threads, and each one is giving way to something else on the other end that will make the whole thing unravel.

While I was pleased with the results of my developmental edit, about a week after receiving it, as I began to put ideas down, I came upon issues just like the ones described above. I had this suffocating feeling, for a moment, that I wouldn't be able to pull off a better version of what I already had.

The one thought I clung to was this: whatever the story became, it wasn't good as it was. My novel had issues, and I was keenly aware of them. Whatever the future held for my novel, I knew that the current version was not one that I could move forward with. So, for what it was worth, I had to try to make the changes suggested by my editor.

As writers, we can get stuck in that thought loop: how am I supposed to come up with something better? I want this scene to show this thing, and I need this character to say this line, and I need this chapter because it shows this moment, or I need it to be third person for this reason, or it needs to be in the present tense because that's how books are written now.

But you need to give the story what it's asking for, not what you think it needs.

Yeah, it's kind of weird to think of your novel as some entity that can think or feel for itself. I mean, it isn't. And yet, I know something in you knows that on a different plane...it kind of is.

It's hard to explain. But I like to think of creation in terms of the Fibonacci sequence. It's a theory that's found everywhere in nature. The most beautiful, coherent, composite parts of nature follow a certain pattern. And so do the things we create as humans.

When we talk about following a story arc—whether we're working with Freitag's Pyramid or Save the Cat beat sheets—the patterns we follow here are no different than the patterns nature uses to grow a sunflower. There's a recipe, secret or not. It's simply in its DNA.

Our stories, just like sunflowers, have a nature to them, a sort of coding, and when we follow that natural pattern, we get the most cohesive form of that story. If we try to deviate from it, we could end up with something irregular.

Yes, you always have to start with a messy first draft. A messy second. A messy third, etc. But as a writer, it's your job to listen along the way for what the novel is asking for.

It can be tempting to want to force your story's hand, so to speak. To try and lead it down a path it doesn't naturally want to go on. After all, this is the way you imagined it. You are the creator. So wtf??

And while, yes, there will be scenes and other specifics that will lend themselves to your tweaking, the keyword here is "lend." It lends because it works within the story. But if it doesn't, you will find out. Beta readers will tell you. Editors will tell you. And if you ignore all of these, your future readers will tell you.

Please note that this is different than when you're trying to bring something into the world that's considered "off the beaten path." This isn't that. This isn't about innovative ideas. Because even those will lend themselves to their creator's imagination. I'm talking specifically about trying to force ideas into a story that don't help it any.

A sculptor sculpting the human body doesn't redesign it. He finds it. He sharpens it. A sculptor sculpting an abstract form will still have a distinct idea of what he's trying to pull through. And he will also see when that shape is starting to turn wonky and he'll recalibrate. He'll look for the bit that doesn't fit it. He listens.

When a scene is dragging because two characters are having an irrelevant exchange about the weather and during revisions you suddenly realize this could probably be cut and reworked as one line that says, "They discussed the weather as if a rainy day in Scotland were an anomaly." That's you listening. That's you giving the story what it needs.

Sometimes, we just need to do that on a bigger scale. Sometimes we have to cut more than just the irrelevant conversation about rain. Sometimes it's a whole scene. Or a character. Maybe it's a whole POV (ask me how I know). But if you allow yourself to at least test out this adjustment to your vision, I think you'll be surprised to find that things work out a lot more smoothly than you expected.

Trust yourself as the creator. Trust that your story knows where to go.

So keep this advice in mind, from your humble editor who is slowly trudging through her first novel post developmental edits. Be kind to your story. The keyboard is not a place for tyranny. Allow it the space it needs to breathe, to expand, to grow within its own unique design.

And listen.