The TLC just accidentally resent me the results of a read I asked for a couple of years ago for the first 100 pages of a previous manuscript of ‘Thirty Seconds Before Midnight’ (when it was still titled ‘Ode’). Although it’s now sort of irrelevant, it’s still an interesting read. Here it is:

“‘Ode’ by Helen J Beal

Report by Robert Collins

May 2007

Thank you for sending the first 100 pages of your manuscript to the Literary Consultancy. I thought there was a lot of good material here, and you have a fluid narrative voice which made these pages flow well.

I particularly liked your description on page 17 of Emmy’s mother when you write that “most of the time she was horizontal, sometimes slipping like camembert out from a chair, the floor calling”. This is a good, concise and visual image, one that’s matched a few pages later by your succulent description, on page 21, of the male form, and then by the way you describe Atlas and Emmy’s globe on pages 21 and 22. Here, again, you give the reader a really solid and tangible image (an object jammed with significance for the narrator) through which the reader can imagine the time and place you are evoking.

You showed real ambition, too, in trying to recreate the fluidity of memory and experience through your narrative structure: a young woman’s death (from drugs) seen through the eyes of her best friend, lover, and mother. I have to confess, though, that I often felt quite lost in your narrative. I think this was principally because of the three different narrative points of view which you use. It’s hard in any novel to maintain multiple and different narrative perspectives (most novels, if you think about it, are told from a single point of view) but it’s especially difficult to do if you render all of them in the first person. This makes the reader have to work out at the beginning of each chapter who exactly is speaking, and that can be more taxing for the reader than you might think.

All in all, I felt that you may have made your narrative more complex, more convoluted and more difficult to access than you necessarily had to. You mention in your covering letter that the original draft of this novel was more linear; I imagine that it told the story chronologically, perhaps, allowing the reader to engage with events as they unfolded. Perhaps that’s the right way to do things here. As it stands, I think this manuscript (in its opening 100 pages) is unclear: I felt lost too often by where we were and, critically, where it was going, to find myself sinking into the story.

Of course, I can understand absolutely why you wanted to give your novel a more complex structure. But (I think you’ll appreciate how subtle a matter this is) the structure really has to work for and with the narrative, not as a corrective to render it more elaborate or sophisticated.

I also don’t think (if I’ve intuited this correctly) that you should believe your manuscript is being rejected because of a lack of narrative or structural sophistication and complexity. For a start, getting a manuscript accepted (or even just looked at with interest and enthusiasm) is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off; almost invariably, it’s a matter of having the luck, endurance and assiduity to get it under the right person’s nose. Often, there’s just one agent out there, and perhaps even just a single editor, who might want to take on any given work. More frequently than one might imagine, it’s about personal taste. So researching one’s target well, and being persistent about those targets, is half the battle.

The other half of the battle, and the more important one, is that it’s not usually a lack of structural sophistication or complexity that gets a manuscript sent back. In fact, when agents are looking for manuscripts that ‘work’, they’ll more often than not plump for something that seems desperately ‘simple’: something that’s nailed its narrative voice, where the execution sits absolutely seamlessly with the story, and where the voice tells the story in a way that seems effortless.

Don’t let yourself be misled by thinking that agents and the publishing industry are always looking for dazzling feats of narrative prowess. Exceptionally, they may be (and only exceptionally will a novelist – any novelist – pull that off). It’s a dangerous and invariably thankless game to play: trying to do something impressive for the sake of it. What you really need to do is find a way to get your narrative voice working as simply, directly and effectively as possible. And I think that in this manuscript your easy writing style hasn’t been best served by the convoluted narrative structure, which I felt obscured rather than lit up the story you’re telling.

Structure, chronology, and the subject

Because your narrative is told by three different people, things are made even more complicated by the fact that you give the same name (Ella) to both Dee and Emmy’s daughters. As hard as I tried to keep up, I found myself getting lost as to which Ella was being talked about. This confusion links back to the problem of having to work out which voice is speaking in each chapter; it just increases the work for the reader.

I think that for the purposes of narrative clarity you could give Dee and Emmy’s daughters separate names. Of course, I understood absolutely your wish to have Emmy name her daughter after her best friend. That makes sense. But with your structure as it is, it only makes it more disorientating not to have ready certainty about which Ella is being talked about at any given time.

This segues into the issue of chronology, which you play with in your manuscript. You jump, quite deliberately, from one timeframe to another; partly, this has the effect of evoking how memory works – it goes round and round, revisiting past events, circling in an attempt to piece together a satisfying picture. But the problem is that having three different people doing this makes the narrative incredibly disorientating for the reader. Often, you circle back on the same theme or event, so that it feels repetitive and limping, rather than progressing and accumulative. And naturally, because you jump frequently from childhood to adulthood in your narrative, it makes the issue of the two Ellas even more perplexing: are we, at any given point, dealing with Ella the dead friend as a child, or with Emmy’s daughter Ella in the present as a child? That’s one of the ways in which the duplication of her name combines with the disjointed chronology to make the narrative confusing. Jumping around timeframes (and this is one of the hardest things to do narratively) needs to be done with extreme care, and with a huge amount of clarity, to make it work; otherwise the reader is just too easily lost.

I think that if you’re going to pull off this fragmented narrative using three different narrators, you’re going to have to be assiduous about making clear, from the off, what is going on: who is who, how they’re each related to their respective friend, lover and daughter, and what their roles in the story are. Only then will we be able to keep up with what parts they each play. You could do this, perhaps, by giving a ‘hook’ – a discernible trait or theme – to each of them, so that every time they reappear we can quickly and clearly re-engage with who they are.

Having said that, I think there’s still a case for dispensing with the split narrators altogether. Why not tell the story straight? Is it engaging enough on its own? If so, why obfuscate it with split narratives and shifting timeframes? Why not let us feel the tension of the narrative as it builds up, rather than swooping us back repeatedly into its fragmented components. Because of this circling effect, I found it hard to engage with the events towards which you were gradually leading the narrative. I found myself wanting to know at least a little, early on, of what really happened to Emmy, Ella and Ollie’s converging lives. Instead, I felt you were continually swooping around the issue without ever allowing us to land in it.

One of the causes of this problem, I felt, may be the fact that you concentrate a lot, particularly with Emmy, on the narrator’s personal feelings (and her past), rather than on channelling your narrative energies into setting up the scenes and the characters: the things the reader, in the end, needs above all else.

For example, when Emmy marries Rupert on pages 36 to 37, you allow him to barely exist as a character before Emmy has summarised the hideousness of her marriage to him and his ignoble intentions towards her. A similar thing happens soon afterwards on page 38 when Emmy’s brothers rub “their hands with glee as their greed was shortly to be satisfied by access to the estate”. This sounds like a clichéd, possibly unrealistic assessment of how two men would really respond to their father’s death. By skimming over the characters of Rupert and Emmy’s two brothers, you risk reducing them to caricatures and the effect, paradoxically, is to make us care less about Emmy, not more: because we don’t quite believe the source of her self-pity (Rupert, her brothers) we find it harder to engage with  her outrage.

What we need, as readers, is to feel (alongside Emmy, in Emmy’s place: through her very experience, not simply through her opinion) how terrible, insensitive and deceiving Rupert has been, for example, and how self-serving and self-interested her brothers are. To do that, you have to draw these people properly as characters; and to do that you have to establish your scenes properly, rather than summarising them in Emmy’s strictly internal, personalised point of view. This, again, is why I think there’s an argument for telling your narrative ‘straight’, and perhaps in chronological order.

In addition, by using three different first-person perspectives and breaking up the chronology of your story, I feel that what you’ve done is to create a confessional, rather than an engaging, compelling narrative. This is one of the effects of basing your text, almost consistently, on the ever-fluid divagations of memory. It makes it very internalised, rather than objective. The constant rendering of memory tends, in the end, to distance the reader, rather than draw them in; because instead of simply giving us your story, you’re giving us what it’s like for your narrator to remember the story; a story from which we, for the moment, are in danger of feeling excluded.

That’s why straight, third-person narrations make it so much easier for the reader to engage with any narrative, because the reader doesn’t have to get through the narrator’s own diversions to get to the story. As I mentioned earlier, this also has the effect of giving us a dizzy sense of déjà vu rather than a bold sense of progress and development, because your characters return again and again to themes you have already introduced, for example when Emmy returns to the theme of her marriage and subsequent pregnancy repeat on pages 58-9. By going over this again, I felt, you simply reinforced Emmy’s own personal opinions, rather than using her memory to contribute to the overall construction of the story: what happened to Emmy, how did she get there, why did what happened to her happen. Instead, what we get a lot of is how Emmy and Ollie and Dee feel – not what the person they’re all centrally concerned with went through. Perhaps you could bring Ella more visibly and physically into the central focus of the three narratives? You could allow us to feel her existing much closer to us; she is, after all, the focus of the story.

I wondered, by the way, if this material was very close to you. Has much of it happened to you personally? I mention this only because if it has, you would almost definitely be better served by dealing with subjects that you haven’t directly experienced yourself, perhaps. Yes, I know – ‘write what you know’. But there’s a careful balance to this. Obviously, you have to have an insight into what you’re writing about; that’s crucial. But sometimes if the story is just too close to you, it’s hard to get the perspective and distance that’s absolutely essential to making something alive and objective for the reader. You have to have a distance from it yourself, to be able to see it as the reader will need to see it: fresh, and carefully laid out, not over-weighted by its import for the narrators themselves. I wonder if the closeness of this material to you (if that’s the case) has given your manuscript its generally confessional tone. It’s just a thought.

Overview

I hope that the advice and pointers I’ve given will help you and that they don’t feel too harsh. I also hope that you don’t feel I’m suggesting you ‘dumb down’ your manuscript simply to make it more accessible, mainstream, unchallenging, etc. I’ve just tried to describe how simplifying your structure, at this early stage of your career, might simply help to get you closer to the stage of making a novel really work. Sometimes, especially in our early work, we need to do things simply, so that we can get that right, before building the confidence to do things more complexly.

You obviously have a natural voice that wants to get out, and there are real flashes of your natural gifts in this manuscript. But, for the reasons I’ve tried to set out, I feel you’re still hamstrung in allowing that voice to express itself in a suitable narrative structure. In a nutshell, I think you need to go and focus rigorously on the two cornerstones of the novel – story, characters – and forget about getting up to too many antics with over-elaborate structure. Your writing is good; at this stage, when you’re trying to pin down the difficult, elusive art of getting together a successful novel, I think you can afford to make things as focussed and simple as possible – devote everything you have to making the plot, the tension, and the characters work – so that your writing can do the job that it will, of its own accord, achieve on its own.”