09 Jan Problem-Solving: ‘It’s Not Singing off the Page’

This is a concern I hear a lot from writers, sometimes passed on from their beta readers or would-be publishers. It can be tricky when you’ve worked hard on a piece of writing but it still comes over as flat. A second pair of editorial eyes often helps, but here’s advice on questions to ask yourself.

1. Who is telling the story – is it written in third, second or first person? This is often where the problem lies and the first thing to try changing – usually rewriting only a chapter is enough to tell you whether this is going to work or not.
2. How much interiority – what’s going on inside your character’s head – is going on in the work? If we don’t care about the characters, it’s hard to engage, and one way to make us care is to show us a character’s thoughts and emotions and ensure we’re aware of what the stakes in a situation are. What they’re up against, in other words, and what it means to them. Without getting into their heads – the novel being the only format in which you can truly do this, so it’s worth making the most of its USP – we don’t fully understand, and consequently, care.
3. Is there enough dialogue? Interaction between characters is important. You might not have a huge amount in a short piece such as a novel opening, but there should be more than a couple of lines. A short story needs dialogue too for it to truly sing, and of course a full novel should contain a lot – the more commercial the novel, the more dialogue, is a (very) general guideline.
4. Or do you have too much dialogue and not enough action or emotional beats? This is something I increasingly see in work submitted for critique or editing, and always makes me wonder if the author is actually trying to write a screenplay instead. Without action and emotional beats you’re not exploring the full potential of the novel format, so it’s unlikely it will match up well compared to other writers who are doing exactly that.
5. Is the tense wrong for the story? Beware of trying to force your novel or story into a particular tense because you think that’s a good/on-trend/attention-grabbing thing to do, and then spending more time working on consistency than on elements such as plot and characterisation.
6. Is the style you’re writing in wrong for the story – or for you as a novelist? This is a hard question and the answer tends to be intuitive. However, it can be a long way down the line before it occurs to you to ask it when things aren’t quite right but you can’t put your finger on it. But with this prompt, maybe you can save yourself some time and even wasted effort. If you get so far as to ask yourself the question, you’ll usually be fairly sure if the answer is yes or no.
7. Finishing where we started: is the right character telling the story? This question is a staple of writing workshops and therefore can be thought of as hackneyed, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. And together with Question 1, it’s the question that in my experience most often leads to resolution of the ‘not singing from the page’ problem. So think about who is telling the story and why, and how another character might bring a perspective that gives the writing more energy. Perhaps try writing a chapter from another character’s point of view to see if that gives your writing the melody you and your readers are looking for.