Are you writing a novel?

I’m always astonished by the number of people who are writing novels. And the ages, too! After speaking in a church a few weeks ago, I had three teens talk to me about the books they were writing, and a mother talk to me about her teenage daughter’s writing.

There seems to be a strong need for people to tell the stories they have running around in their heads - whether they are true or fiction.Of course, I’ve long believed that it can be easier to tell the truth through fiction than through nonfiction!

This year, I was one of the fiction judges for The Word Guild’s Best New Canadian Author contest. That meant I had 21 manuscript to read and judge. Plus, since there’s a critique option, and 16 of the people had paid for the critique, I had to do a lot more than think about whether this manuscript was better than that one: I had to decide why this one worked and that one didn’t, or why this one worked but that one worked a little better.

I had a checklist to put down marks. On a scale of 1 to 10, how good was this plot? Out of five, how did this dialogue work? But even that wasn’t quite enough for me. What does a 5 like look compared to a 6? Why does this get a 7 and not an 8? I realized that I needed some kind of system that would allow me to measure the manuscript, not against itself or the others that had been entered, but against the best - the books I consider great. I eventually came up with a system where I started with some great books and figured out what a 10 or a 5 meant in light of then. Once I had my “standards” in place, it was much easier to read the manuscripts and allocate marks.

Why am I telling you this? Because for the next few weeks I’m going to share my system with you in the hopes that it might give you some ideas as you write or edit your fiction.