I recently started reading John Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man. I’ve been a big Le Carre fan for decades; nobody gets the spy game better. This time, though…
I’ve been working to improve my own writing style. One technique is to start your day by editing what you wrote the previous day, before you resume your draft. The edit does a number of things- it reminds you where you were and what you were trying to accomplish, grounding you for the new day’s writing. It also gives you valuable feedback on your writing problems- valuable because you found those mistakes yourself. When you’re writing you focus on the mistakes you look for and catch all the time- and thus to make them less. Which speeds the daily edit.
It can be a curious thing to read a favorite author and see in his prose the same mistakes you make. What I found is something from my checklist: excessive use of narrative summary. A Most Wanted Man’s first scene, the first dialog, doesn’t occur until page 10.
Don’t get me wrong. Le Carre’s a hell of a story teller, and could spin a great yarn even if he told it all in narrative summary, Henry James style. His worst narrative summary is better than my best scene will ever be. And Le Carre’s novels are big on introspection, as befits spy novel. Introspection is hard to do in scenes. Opening the book at random to a few pages, there are plenty of scenes; it’s a story opening issue. But then, opening pages aren’t the best place for narrative summary; it’s a data dump. Oh, my.
Renni Browne and Dave King, in Self-Editing For Fiction Writers, point out that writing in scenes is hard work, harder than writing a summary of the same events. That has that Eagles’ Lyin’ Eyes lyric bouncing around in my head- Did she get tired Or did she just get lazy? Did Le Carre start his novel out this way because this is his twenty-fifth novel?
All I know is, I’m sticking to my daily edit checklist.