So…a couple of days ago I got my revision notes from the agent I chose. I wasn’t shocked. I’m fortunate in that everyone who took time to give me suggestions told me about the same major shortcoming. My heroine is unlikable.

Still, though I wasn’t surprised, I can’t say I liked the revision notes. I didn’t. I thought I was done with the book or I wouldn’t have sent it out to agents. To now have to consider cutting scenes and moving scenes, makes me feel a little queasy.

But I’ve read the agent’s suggestions eighteen times, now, and I can see that some of them can be implemented. I can cut one scene and feed the needed information into an existing scene. Other scenes I don’t want to cut or move. I think they are too important to the plot and character development.

But there’s more than one way to cook a fish.

I’ve seen writers spend months revising for an agent or editor, only to be rejected in the end. It’s not that uncommon. One of the reasons the agents ask for revisions before offering to represent a writer is that they want to see if the writer can revise or not. It seems likely then, that many writers either can’t revise or won’t revise.

So I’ve been thinking about revisions and thinking about writers I’ve known who have made their books into unholy messes, when they’ve tried to revise and make their books fit someone else’s vision.

This book is my book.

Writers who slavishly take all the agent’s suggestions and try to cobble them into their existing manuscript, end up with a mess. This book can’t be my book and the editor’s book. No book can have two masters. (Unless, of course, it’s co-written, but that’s a different animal altogether. Co-written books still need to be guided by one vision.)

But saying that the book belongs to the writer does not mean that writers should refuse editing.

I see myself as the owner of the book and the one that knows it best. I know why I’m writing the book. I know what I want my character to learn and I know what I want my book to say about the difference between ambivalence and contentment and apathy and silent approval. I have spent several years thinking about this book and a whole year writing it and I have a deeper understanding of things than an editor who’s only just stumbled upon it.

I’m also blind to my book’s broken places, though. I have it all in my head so I fill in the holes as I read. I know the characters so I hear their tones and see their expressions when they speak. I need people who don’t know the characters and the setting and the theme, to tell me where I lose them. I need them to tell me where what’s in my head doesn’t come out on the page.

But while critics can tell you where a story is broken, they can’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.

Sometimes I’ll get a critique and I can immediately see that the critic is right. The way he rewords a sentence gives such clarity to a previously awkward construction.

Duh. Why didn’t I think of that.

Most times, though, I’ll get a critique and I’ll have to struggle, trying to figure out why the critic didn’t get something. I often have to let the critique sit for several days before I understand what the reader saw when he read the passage.

Usually, I find the reader is right. There is a problem. But the solution he offers is not the best solution. He doesn’t know the characters as well as I do. He doesn’t see the theme of the story as clearly as I do. Critique partners who read a chapter a week have even less understanding of where the book is going and who the characters are, but even people who have read the book in an afternoon are not going to see the theme as well as the author.

So what we need to do is look at every place the editor or critique partner tells us the story is broken. We need to know about every single place the reader is jerked out of the fictive dream. But we don’t necessarily do what the critic suggests when we try to fix the problem. We need to find a solution that works with our characters, our plot, and our theme.

That’s my plan, anyway. I’ll let you know in a few months if it worked or not.

Here is the brilliance of this novel: Anyone can read it and not be offended by the author’s personal beliefs. You will read it with your own pair of worldview glasses on and you will take from it what you want. But she has not failed in putting in wonderful pictures that will encourage the reader to ponder deep things as they read. She gives the reader the opportunity to think about God and sin and cults and sacrificial love in this book, and, yes, even about Jesus.

But the best thing about the book is that you don’t have to think about any of that as you read. There is no preaching in the book.

Why is that good? Some Christians may think the book falls short because it doesn’t preach. If books don’t preach loudly, how can we guarantee that the readers will understand the message? We need to spell out for the reader exactly what they are to take away from our books, many Christians believe.

Well, Jesus didn’t always preach the gospel in the stories he told. He spoke in parables and those that had ears heard the deeper meaning and acted on what they heard. Those that didn’t have ears sometimes heard the meaning and got angry and others didn’t even hear the message at all.

The writing lesson here is this: Whether you are Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Pagan…whatever, you should weave your worldview into you novel. Your beliefs about the big issues is what gives your novel depth and makes it worth reading. But when you weave in your worldview, you should do it in a way that makes it fresh. Don’t give us the same old tired clichés that make us feel preached at. If we’ve heard the story before and rejected it, your beating us over the head with it is not going to make us suddenly agree with you. Anyone see Avatar? Preachy movie full of clichés. No, it didn’t convert me.

So put your message in, for sure. It is message that gives your story depth. I don’t care if you don’t share my religious beliefs. I want to see message in your story because if you aren’t passionate about something, then I don’t want to waste my time reading you. If you aren’t going to give me any meaningful message I will forget your story five minutes after I read the last page and that means I’ve just wasted my time reading you. If you aren’t going to make me think and laugh and cry and ponder, then you aren’t worth my time. But don’t give me the same old tired message in the same old tired pictures.

OK that’s my writing tip for the week.

Now, if you want to see what pictures I, as a Christian reader, saw in Faery Rebels, read on. I saw a story I love, painted in new colors, and that’s what added so much depth to this enjoyable  faery action/adventure/romance. (In fact I can’t believe this is being marketed as a middle-grade novel. Yikes. This is one for mothers and daughters to share. This is one that even the men are liking, though they were not pleased with the cover. This is one of the fantasies that speaks to all ages and both genders.)

SPOILERS! IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK, DON’T READ BEYOND THIS POINT.

I MEAN IT!

I’M NOT KIDDING!

LAST CHANCE TO STOP!!!!

OK, for the rest of you, if you want to read the post, highlight the space below and the words will magically appear, because I have special faery dust. (I’m sorry. I just love to do cheesy stuff like this. I guess I really am a drama queen at heart.)

So here we go.

Ms. Anderson gives us a fallen race. The faeries have lost their magical powers. They are not what the Gardener created them to be. We aren’t sure at this point why they’ve fallen. We are not given a thinly veiled sermon on the federal headship of Adam. But when the author gives us a fallen race she adds depth to her book. We can recognize ourselves in the faeries. This is a fresh way of showing the human condition—fallen short of what God made us to be.

There are pictures of the weak shaming the strong–the Gardener uses Knife, not the Queen, to save the sick librarian. The queen isn’t necessarily evil–she does the wrong things for the right reasons. But she can’t save the hive. The faeries must be saved by a child who sees that their world has changed, has left the old paths, has struck off in a different direction and has cut itself off from the world. I wonder if at the end of the series, Knife will be seen as a John the Baptist figure. I doubt, seriously if the author painted her this way. But I still wonder if she will end up being a kind of forerunner of whoever is coming to save the faery folk.

The author then puts in a bit about how the creativity of the faeries has dwindled because they’ve cut themselves off from the outside world.

I suppose emergent church people could read that and think the author is saying that the church is outdated and irrelevant and we need to evolve and get rid of our Victorian understanding of scripture.

Is she encouraging the church to go whoring after the world? Is she one of THOSE kinds of Christians?

I read with my worldview glasses on and I think the author is saying, “If artists stay in their own little cloister, they will lose all their creativity. Creativity must be fed by new ideas that lead to personal growth, by truth, by knowledge. There’s a great big world out there, and artists (and Christians) need to go out and learn from it. They need to take the best of it and make it their own and give it back as something pure and holy. If you stay inside and only look at art that comes from people just like you, your creativity will die. You will become a little, bigoted, arrogant person with no room for truth offered by others who happen to be  created by the same Gardener you were created by.”

This is not to say that there are many roads to heaven. It is to say that there are cults in the world that cut themselves off from all others in a way the Bible does not command. Jesus left us IN the world and never gave us permission to hide from it. We are not to be monks in monasteries. That is nowhere taught  in the Bible.

Then there is a picture of a disabled human boy (which I loved since I was married to a quadriplegic for twenty years—the author nailed the depression of a fresh injury and the joy of discovering you can still be a whole person even though your body is paralyzed, I think. What a good job she did with that!)…anyway, back to the boy—he’s weak and he ends up being the Christ-figure in the book, I think.

The thing about Christ figures is they aren’t Christ. They need saving as much as anyone. Moses was a figure of Christ but he was a sinful man.

In the same way, this novel is full of pictures of Christ. So on page 318 Paul is the Christ figure and Knife is the person making the decision to follow him and to have no home but him. She has to give up her old self and become a new creature. She has to be conformed to his image. All of this is rich, rich, rich with meaning if you are a Christian and totally nonthreatening if you aren’t. It’s the best way to write, I think.

On that same page, Knife says, “I used to think I knew what freedom was. To do whatever I pleased, go wherever I chose, and not have to depend on anyone, But now… I know this won’t be easy. But I still want to do it.” That is a wonderful picture of a Christian counting the cost of being a disciple of Christ.

This is not straight theology. You cannot read fiction and hope to find absolute truth. But the pictures deepen the fiction and call to the reader to ponder these things. That’s what good fiction does.

And then on page 322, Knife is conformed to Paul’s likeness. She is naked and he covers her. And to do so, cost him a great price. He had to give up his wholeness, his healing, and suffer for her. Very Christlike, I think.

Finally he takes her home to his parents, dressed in his clothes.

No, Paul is not Jesus Christ. He doesn’t become a faery and die on a little faery cross to pay for their sins against the Gardener. But he is a Christ figure. There are pictures in his story that powerfully point to Jesus Christ.

And that’s what makes for great fiction. Putting your message in without making it so obvious that people groan because they already know the story. Again, Avatar is an example of bad fiction, and Feary Rebels is an example of good fiction.

Go and do likewise my writing pals.

A few posts that also dealt with the messages in the book:

• Becky Miller
• John Otte
• Fred Warren
• Amanda Barr

I want to see, hear, smell, feel, and maybe even taste the world I’m visiting in a book. But if you really want to put me there you need to be careful not to load me down with too many mundane details.

I critiqued one book where the author showed the food that was spread out on a table. His character entered a room and he saw a table loaded with ham, turkey, sweet potatoes, jello salads, apple pie, cherry pie, rhubarb pie, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, five bean salad, and on and on and on. My eyes glazed over. By the time the character saw his friend across the room I had to shake myself awake. There’s a character? Looking at all that food, I’d completely forgotten about the character and the story.

Then what did the author do? He immediately went into a discussion of what the friend across the room was wearing. Yellow shirt, green pants, soft leather boots….

ARGH!

When you bog a reader down with mundane details so that his eyes glaze over, instead of letting him see the room you see, you’ve made it so he can’t see anything. He starts skimming.

Instead of showing everything on the table, pick one or two things that show that table is richly laid.

The table was filled to overflowing with dishes—some steaming, some chilling in basins of ice. John, starting at one end, counted five varieties of soups. The soups gave way to meats, which yielded to salads, and finally, at the far end, were the desserts. And there, in the middle of the cookies and pies and fruity iced treats, was the one thing he’d been looking for. His birthday cake, a five layered affair, which stood three feet tall.

There is no need to mention ham and turkey and Brussels sprouts. When I wrote that bit above, I could see the steam rising and I imagined that there were roasts, swimming in gravy in those pans. When you read it, you might have imagined something totally different. You might have thought about hot, buttery vegetables in some of those dishes. Unless it’s important for me to say that it was a roast and not veggies, unless that roast plays some important role in the story, it is safe for me to allow you to dream of hot, steamed veggies on your table if you like.

By telling that there are five types of soup, and that there are more kinds of meats than just one, I’m telling you that the table is richly laid. And by setting the birthday cake apart, in the midst of lesser desserts, I’m telling the readers that 1) it’s the character’s birthday, and 2) someone rich is throwing him a big party. And, finally, by keeping John in the scene and having him move down the table, I’m keeping you connected to him and aware that this story is about him and we’re seeing through his eyes.

Why did I choose to show the variety of desserts?  The varieties  add some texture and color to the table, I think.

So what did I learn from this book that I can apply to my own writing?

Well, several things, but the one I want to highlight today is this: Yesterday when I was digging around Mr. Kuyper’s site and looking at all the lovely pictures, I clicked on on this page and saw that Kuyper manipulates his prints on the computer. I’m not a photographer or an artist so I’m not sure if I’m saying that right. But he explains on his site that he tries to restore to the prints the emotion and the power of the scene he originally shot. He’s an artist, and true artists capture and expose truth. But sometimes they do that by making stuff up, or manipulating facts. Or maybe by obeying what Jesus Christ called the spirit of the law (as opposed to the letter of the law).

I used to live on a lake in Alaska. I’d stand on my deck and click pictures of the lake in front of my house, with birch trees all around it and wild mountains behind it, and the pictures, once developed,  looked nothing like reality. The mountains in the pictures were flat, small, pedestrian things. They elicited no feelings of majesty, of wild, brutal power, or of the passion that the real mountains poured into me. So I am glad that Kuyper understands how to put back into his pictures the beauty and the personality that the camera strips from them 

I suspect that even as the camera strips truth from nature, so does the bustle of our world strip meaning from life. Novelists have an opportunity to encourage people to stop and listen and learn.

Our novels can’t be thinly disguised sermons, though. They should be parables. They should show the truth of the human condition, the truth about pain and love and joy and eternity. We should inject into our novels our worldview, sure. That’s what makes them uniquely ours. That’s what gives them voice and personality and makes them interesting. But the truth we project into our novels is hardly ever the harsh reality people see every day.

I once critiqued a novel in which the writer painted a brutal homosexual rape in excruciating detail. It was devastating and ugly, but worse than that, it was so brutal that it lost all power to move me emotionally. I shut down. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t connect.

I suggested that the scene would have been more powerful if she had shown the big boys moving in for the kill, and then cut-away, perhaps to focus on the flower crushed under the heel of one of the attackers, so as to allow the little boy to have some privacy and dignity, and then moved back in to show him lying in a wilted, little heap on the ground after the act was done.

Because what we are looking for is to elicit emotion so people will grow. People rarely grow when you bash them over the head with ugliness. They close their eyes.

On the other hand, the truth we put into our novels can’t be a picture of the wonderful eternity where every tear is wiped away that some of us look forward to. Our readers don’t live in heaven and we can’t paint heaven on earth and expect anyone to care about what we say. Readers are living in the land of brutal rapes. We can’t lie and pretend that stuff doesn’t happen.

People are not moved and they don’t grow when novelists preach at them. So we often hear, “Show, don’t tell,” and this is good. Telling is preaching. Showing is allowing a reader to draw his own conclusions. But I think we need to remember, as we show, that we want to not show life exactly as it appears to the lazy, busy reader as he rushes through his day. We want to show the underlying truth that we see in life, not the day to day dirt or the future glory. We want to show the true human condition and sometimes that means we speed life up for our characters or slow it down. Sometimes we focus on a minute detail and sometimes we flip open a curtain to give the reader a glimpse of the big picture.

You’re the artist. You need to play with the light in order to bring some things forward and push some things backward so that the reader will focus where you want him to focus and so see life as it really is and not as it is on the surface, which is all most of us usually see.

This week I want to talk about reading in genres you don’t usually write in. When I first started writing I wouldn’t read anything because I was afraid I might inadvertently copy something I read. I thought I had to invent my own world and story with no input from anyone else. I didn’t want to borrow from those who went before.

Then I learned how helpful it was to read books in my genre. When I read Shannon Hale’s wonderful fairytales, I learned to paint a rich world by making up metaphors that fit that made-up world. When I read Diana Wynne Jones’ books, I learned to add in religious beliefs and ceremonies to make the world real.

But what about reading in other genres? I was at the end of my last novel when I read Scott Westerfeld’s dystopian series about the uglies and the pretties and the specials. I really enjoyed those books and sighed over the fact that I’d never be able to write books like them—I’m just not cool enough. I will forever be stuck in low-tech worlds because I’m an old dinosaur.

What happened, though, as I read Scott’s books, was that I was amazed at the way his heroine had to fight so hard to win. She was in trouble and then more trouble and then more trouble. She went from action to higher action to higher action. She had to really fight hard and when she fought she won. No one came in and won for her.

I finished up my novel, which is nothing like Scott’s novels, and I realized that I’d punked out in the end. I’d let circumstances save my heroine instead of making her fight and win on her own. So I rewrote. I had her struggle and finally she overcame her foe on her own. By her own strength of will, by her own determination.

My novel is nowhere as action packed as The Uglies, but after reading that book I tried to give my character more power, more drive, more force of will. I tried to make her more determined and I made her fight her own battles. The ending now has a struggle I think is worth reading whereas before I built up to this big fight and then I let my heroine off the hook and never made her fight it. Now she fights and so it is much more satisfying to see her win.

So my advice today is two-fold. 1) Read in other genres. Rather than making you look like you’re copying your neighbor’s work, what you pick up from other genres may lend your work an air of freshness and originality within its genre. And 2) make your character fight her own battles.

Other good writing tips I’ve found around the Internet this week? Well, why not stay with the writers I’ve mentioned above, who taught me much through their novels?

1. Let’s lead off with Scott Westerfeld’s tip on finishing everything you start.
2. And I like Shannon Hale’s collected quotes on rewriting.
3. Finally, here’s Diana Wynne Jones; writing tips page.