Sometimes, the story in your head isn’t what comes out on the page. That’s what makes early readers and feedback so important, as Caitlin Starling learned when she circulate the first draft of her novel, The Death of Jane Lawrence.
In a post on Chuck Wendig’s blog, Starling says that her beta readers loathed her protagonist’s new husband, who Starling thought wasn’t such a bad guy. “My goal had been to make Jane’s husband sympathetic, but in belaboring his motivations, the book became me making excuses and crying, Oh, he’s not that bad!” she explains. “It turned out that the way to actually make him sympathetic (or at least engaging) was to drop his POV, stop justifying – and to let Jane react with a little less acceptance and a lot more frustration.”
The lesson here is that your readers won’t always interpret your characters the way you do, based on the text you give them. Running your draft by a group of trusted critique partners can help you ensure you say what you mean to say.
Starling also says her revisions made the book better. “There have been at least two ground-up rewrites, maybe three, and a whole lot of tweaking at each step,” she says. “It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my creative life: here was a book that I loved, beyond all reason, and it wasn’t right, and wasn’t right, and still wasn’t right. The things I loved about it just weren’t translating to my early readers, and I spent years tearing it apart and putting it back together, trying to find what was going wrong.
Eventually, she got it right: by leaning into her favorite parts and giving them more space and making them weirder. “There were dark times, of course, but by the time we got to the final draft, I was still having fun. I was having more fun, actually.”
