Step 3: The Post-It Post-Analysis

OMG! Why is writing a novel such a slog?! Commiserate with me here…I had finished my first draft and sent it out to eight beta readers. (Should one have so many beta readers? That’s a topic for another blog.) I had carefully considered all their feedback and decided what to take on and what to ignore (about a 70:30 split). I had paid special attention to contradictory feedback where my readers broke into two camps. (These were landmarks: points where I could shade the novel this way or that.) I’d made all these decisions, implemented all these edits, celebrated getting to the end of my second draft, and put my feet up with the manuscript and some champagne. I was going to do just one more read-through for typos and inconsistencies. And then. And then, half way through I realized I wasn’t liking the read. My novel was like Snow White in her glass coffin. Beautiful, if I say so myself. Nothing obviously missing—arms, legs, body, head, all were there. But lifeless. Something was desperately, maybe even fatally, wrong and I had no idea what it was.

May I break away here and say that there are some unexpected advantages to being a writing coach and a tiger editor. The first is that unless you are comfortable with hypocrisy, you can’t let yourself off the hook. With a groan like the Kraken calling its mate, I had to pull myself off that couch to wrestle with the novel. There was only one thing for it: the dev editor’s high-power dissection microscope—the post-it post-analysis. Knowing that such a thing existed is the other writing coach/editor’s advantage.

The idea behind the post-it post-analysis is simple. But its implementation can look like this, and this photo was taken when I was only a quarter of the way through:

Basically you decide at what depth, at what granularity, you’d like to look at your novel—at the level of the chapter? The scene? The paragraph? I chose to look at my novel by scene. You start with a nice large blank wall (see nails where a painting was removed) and for each scene you put up a post-it with a descriptor—just something that lets you identify that scene. (See pale yellow post-its. I had 108.)

As I went, I graded each scene based on how well written it was (green dots; full is good, half is go polish) and for emotion/drama (orange dots; full is high, half is some, and none is resting).

Next, for each scene you ask three basic questions—or at least this is the way I do it. I’m sure other editors have other questions they ask. But I ask, how has the plot advanced (orange)? What do we now know about the character that we didn’t know before (goldenrod)? And, what question has been raised that the reader will now want answered (hot pink)? I believe these three questions will give you a good sense of the pulse of any book.

In addition, I asked two questions specific to my novel. I thought my book was about a love triangle, and about a search for home. So I asked how my heroine was feeling about each of the two men (blue), and how she felt about home in that scene (green)?

Well, as I said, this photo was taken when I was less than halfway through. Yet, you can glimpse how helpful it already was at that point. Look at the orange dots. You’ll see a long stretch where there were none. Readers need to be rested, but too long a rest and they’ll fall asleep. Those post-its without orange dots identified the saggy middle. So I went in when the analysis was finished and took a good look at the post-its of those scenes. I managed to identify two scenes that were interesting and nicely written, but weren’t doing much to advance our story. Those came out—zip—just like that. They’d survived the beta readers and my own radar because they were enjoyable scenes. Without the post-its, it would have been hard to detect that they were enjoyable scenes that weren’t serving the novel.

You’ll also see a blue top-level post-it with nothing below it. Just writing out the top-level scene descriptions helped me to identify missing scenes. By the time the analysis was finished, I’d found three key scenes that had been omitted.

You’ll see scenes that don’t have a pink post-it. They don’t raise new questions in the reader’s mind. Those scenes have to be considered carefully. What other work are they doing that can justify their existence? Can that work be done elsewhere? Can this scene be collapsed into another?

Any time you have two scenes where the post-its read pretty much the same, you have a stagnant scene. Those scenes got collapsed together to pick up the pace of the novel. You’ll see some of them flagged with little pink post-its.

But the greatest insight I gained from this post-it analysis came from my tracking of the two themes: the search for home, and the love triangle. I realized that actually, this book is not about the love triangle at all. There is a love triangle in the book, but the energy of the book isn’t there. The love triangle is part of the background, part of the plot, but it is not what the story is about. The story is about home. What it means. How you can lose it. How you must make it yours.

Did the post-it post-analysis work? I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know when I put my feet up to read Draft 3.

In the meantime, happy new year and happy writing!