I’ve invented a new writing rule. It’s called – Save the Kitten!
Some time ago I started watching a Korean television series that shall remain nameless. It got off to a good start – a woman with terminal cancer discovers her best friend and husband are having an affair and are just waiting for her to die. When she dies from a struggle, she suddenly wakes up years earlier with the chance to make a different set of choices. She now knows the man she marries can’t be trusted and her best friend has been controlling and undermining from their school days. Navigating through her second chance, there’s hope that she has a better outcome this time round.
Of course, there’s another love interest – her boss. A man the camera lingers on for far too long at every opportunity.
However, when I returned to watching the series recently, I found a flashback section that showed that the MC and her future boss had some tenuous past connection that she wasn’t aware of. And this is where the kitten of this post’s title comes in…
One of them discovers an abandoned kitten all by itself, no mother, and no sign of an owner. Do they take it home? Or even take it to the shelter?
Nope.
What happens is no doubt meant to be cute, but it infuriated me so much I had to switch the episode off. Just as well I wasn’t hooked up to a blood pressure monitor.
I went back with trepidation the next day.
The problem started with one character deciding to feed the kitten and the other then witnesses this. So then the second person feeds it and it escalates to the guy building a shelter, the kitten getting a litter tray, etc. It’s all meant to be cute and heart warming. Bear in mind this is happening on a campus. The snow comes and this is meant to be magical.
Not if you’re a kitten on your own with two idiot humans checking in on you.
It’s a kitten. Anything could happen to it out there on its own. I know it was just a story, but it infuriated me that this was supposed to show a secret connection between the prospective future love interests. Who dreamt this up? Who thought this was a good idea?
A decent main character would take the kitten home or to a shelter. They’d try and find out if it belonged to anyone and they might also wonder where the mother is. They would Save the Kitten!
When I returned to watching the episode, the kitten ended up on the middle of a road, about to be run over. Told you it shouldn’t have been left on its own! The male character threw himself on the road. Later we notice an adult cat of the same colour in his apartment. Presumably he finally took it home.
Finally!
This choice of leaving the kitten outside for supposedly cutesy interactions with the main characters scunnered me (Scottish expression) beyond belief. They almost lost me as a viewer. Instead of making the main characters sympathetic and relatable, it left them looking thoughtless and stupid. And it didn’t reflect well on the writers and programme makers either.
Who leaves a kitten out at night? Who leaves it with a knocked together wooden shelter when any old drunk or dog could come along and harm it.
As a developmental editor, if you sent me a manuscript with something like this, you would get some diplomatic suggestions about not leaving your characters looking like a couple of jerks. Many people are animal lovers. Even those who are not particularly keen on animals won’t appreciate a kitten left to fend for itself in between cutesy aren’t-these-characters-so-sweet scenes.
I’d also remind you that Amazon and Goodreads reviews are a thing, and it could come back to haunt you as the animal and cat lovers go to town on your novel!
Call it the ‘Save the kitten rule’ and file it away for future reference.
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In an earlier blog post, I brought up the topic of whether it’s worth dusting off an old rejected novel. After all, the reasons for rejection might relate more to submitting against dominant publishing trends rather than writing a bad book. In this post, I explore revisiting a rejected novel. Because often the advice is to leave them. But this is not always the best advice. It really depends on a number of things.
Some first novels are also overly ambitious and beyond the writer’s abilities at the time. But after more experience, it’s possible to revisit a rejected novel, polish it up, and bring it to publication.
Case study: Hilary Mantel
The case study I’m going to use is that of the late Hilary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall. The first novel she ever wrote was the French Revolution novel, A Place of Greater Safety. She was twenty two when she started writing it and she was interested in writing from the perspective of the leading revolutionaries. Because she was moving abroad to Botswana, she had to do a lot of her research at the start, taking advantage of still being in England.
In an interview with the Paris Review she said that she only became a novelist because she thought she’d missed her chance to become a historian.
How fitting then that she started with historical fiction.
A Place of Greater Safety
She wanted to tell the story of the revolution from the viewpoint of the idealists who drove it, not the aristocracy they targeted. She felt the story she wanted to read wasn’t there, so she wrote it. She started off intending it to have a documentary element to the writing (which in some ways is still present in some places), and when she could she quoted directly from history. But she ran out of known facts at times, leading her to have to make things up, but never in a way that went against historical truth.
It was simply a case of not enough being known about some revolutionaries or some events. She never changed the truth to ramp up the drama:
I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction.
Hilary Mantel in the Paris Review
At the time of the original writing, she did not focus on the women around these men. She lived part-time as an eighteenth century man in 1790s France and part-time as a woman in the real world of Botswana.
When she finished her novel, she grieved for the characters. Like her, they’d been young.
Facing rejection
But now that she’d finished the French Revolution novel, she had to try and get a publisher or agent. Unfortunately, there was no interest. The market had turned against historical novels, and at least one person rejected outright on the basis they didn’t take historical romance. Yet that wasn’t the book’s genre.
Mantel also had health issues and spent time in hospital during this period. She came to realise then that the novel would not be published for now, though she had not lost faith in it.
And so Mantel turned to contemporary fiction. It was her ‘cunning plan’ to get a publisher and a foot in the door. After she had some success there, she was contacted by Clare Boylan who was writing an article on unpublished first novels. Did Mantel have one? The answer of course was yes. But of all the authors Boylan contacted, Mantel was the only one who wanted to see her first novel published. It had sat on a shelf for many years.
Finally submitting the novel
I thought, What if it’s no good? Because if it is no good, then that’s my twenties written off. And it also means that I commenced my career with a gigantic mistake. But inside me there was still a belief that it would be published one day.
Hilary Mantel in the Paris Review
The day Mantel took her manuscript to her agent, she met another writer for lunch first, and they warned her not to submit it. But she ignored this advice and did it anyway.
Many years had passed since she’d written the novel. Mantel was a lot older, and more academic work had been done on the French Revolution, including feminist historians researching the women involved.
With her novel finally accepted, Mantel plunged into a furious summer of reworking. This included building up her female characters more. But the size of the book meant that she was not able to polish everything to her satisfaction. She’d written the novel in present tense and someone at the publishing house objected to this. Yet the novel still has present tense at times.
A Place of Greater Safety
Indeed, the novel’s style is somewhat erratic at times – it even resorts to simple dialogue scenes written like a script in parts. The novel was published without Mantel sorting out all the issues. The summer of rewriting took its toll on her. But the book finally emerged, going on to win the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
Written in her twenties, in the 1970s, it was finally published in 1992. She had not started her career with a gigantic mistake. She had not wasted her twenties. She fully captured the youthful idealism of the revolutionaries at a time in her life when she could identify with them. Then once she’d established her name enough, she was able to get the novel accepted.
Her cunning plan worked out.
Later she would realise, when writing about Thomas Cromwell, that she couldn’t have written A Place of Greater Safety in middle age. She was more cynical by then. But she would go on to make her name as a writer of historical fiction with the Thomas Cromwell novels.
Feel free to check out my long review on A Place of Greater Safety, and my post about dusting off an old rejected novel. If you have a long-abandoned manuscript you’re thinking of reworking, you can check out my manuscript critique service. While there are different tiers, depending on the depth of the feedback, the lowest tier or a special package can be arranged for a shorter assessment of your draft. Feel free to contact me at karen@indiecateditorial.com to discuss your options.
It should be recognised though that sometimes authors cannot bear to go back to an earlier rejected book. Sometimes the enthusiasm is no longer there. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t learn from the writing.
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When writing your early drafts, you don’t need to worry too much about the nitty-gritty details of locations and character experience. You have the basic foundations of your story to lay down first. With each redraft and polish, you can add and remove things, reshaping your novel or memoir into its ideal form. But why are sensory details so important? Why should the reader care about scent and touch, etc?
The truth is that the human brain actually reacts to these details as if experiencing them for real. If you give great immersive sensory details, you help your reader inhabit your characters and enter the world of the story, leaving the real world behind.
Sensory details – and all senses matter – help ground your story in realism. You can show character reactions through sensory details, and show landscape and location too.
Obviously, you don’t want to overdo it with sensory description. It’s about maintaining a balance.
Sensory detail doesn’t just relate to the way the characters experience the outside world though. It also relates to their own bodies reacting to emotion. Here I would recommend a great book that helps authors to use better descriptions for emotional states. It helps you to show and not tell. I’ve recommended it to a lot of my clients.
The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Puglisi and Ackerman.
Opening chapters developmental edit deal!
If you want to check out your use of sensory information in your manuscript, or other issues, you can opt for an opening chapters developmental edit. This allows me to go over the first 12,000 words of your manuscript and give you the usual feedback on plot, character, theme, use of viewpoint, tone, dialogue issues (if any), whether you open your book in the right place, plus smaller detailed feedback that you can then apply to the rest of your manuscript.
The opening chapters developmental edit is usually £150 for 10,000 words. The current deal, running until the end of the year, is £120 for the first 12,000 words. You will receive a report running to thousands of words, plus a copy of your manuscript with comments in the margins. Feel free to contact me at karen@indiecateditorial.com.
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Michael Crichton’s 1991 blockbuster novel Jurassic Park is a great adventure story as well as a warning against corporate greed and the corruption of science.
My first contact with the novel came through the fantastic Audible edition. More recently, I read the hard copy. There are differences between the two – the physical book includes graphs and tables.
While I like the book a lot, there are character credibility problems I’ve seen in a number of my client manuscripts. I’ve written about the issue in a previous blog post which I’ll link to at the end. However, in the case of Jurassic Park, it seemed a particular and earlier section of the book that was impacted more than the rest.
Alan Grant – the palaeontologist
When we meet Grant, one of the main characters, he’s excavating an infant velociraptor. The skeleton is millions of years old.
Pound for pound, a velociraptor was the most rapacious dinosaur that ever lived. Although relativity small – about two hundred pounds, the size of a leopard – velociraptors were quick, intelligent, and vicious, able to attack with sharp jaws, powerful clawed forearms, and the devastating single claw on the floor.
Not all the ‘facts’ about dinosaurs in the book are correct and science always moves on. However, these animals will be the most dangerous predators in the book, even worse than the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Shortly after this, Grant gets a visit from the Environmental Protection Agency rep who wants to know about John Hammond and his mysterious island off the coast of Costa Rica. Grant doesn’t know what Hammond is up to, even though he wrote a paper for him on juvenile dinosaur behaviour and took calls from a colleague of Hammond’s on what dinosaurs eat.
Shortly after this, he receives an X-ray of an animal that attacked a little girl in Costa Rica. Grant identifies it as a small dinosaur. He and his colleague Ellie are shocked at this development.
Next he gets a phone call from Hammond, asking him to come to his mysterious island.
Lured by money, Grant and his palaeobotanist colleague Ellie agree. They receive a map showing military-level fortifications there, including high electrified fences and wide moats. It’s very far from anything expected in a resort.
On the flight to Costa Rica, Grant and Ellie are still not asking what’s going on, even as Ian Malcolm, the mathematician, says the island is doomed to fail and it’s an accident waiting to happen.
This ought to trigger a reaction from Grant. It doesn’t. He lacks curiosity and seems strangely passive for an expert on a mysterious mission to an island. He also doesn’t reflect on the fact a small dinosaur, previously thought extinct, has turned up on Costa Rica. He and Ellie should still be obsessing over this development.
Landing on Isla Nublar
When they land on the island, they see their first brontosaurus. There’s a herd of them. Naturally, Grant and Ellie are shocked, but also excited. However, neither asks if there are other dinosaurs. There is a sign that reads ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park’ and still no one asks if there are other prehistoric animals.
This lack of curiosity from specialists doesn’t seem credible. Even an ordinary member of the public would immediately wonder what else is roaming the island.
Ellie is more interested in prehistoric plants that could prove dangerous to humans.
When Grant is shown to his room, he sees a TV with a card listing channels. None of the live feeds work. But with names like Triceratops Territory, Sauropod Swamp, Carnivore Country and Velociraptor Valley, Grant ought to react immediately. Instead, he finds the names irritatingly cute. Not exactly a credible reaction from a man who has studied dinosaurs all his life, never expecting to meet any.
He’s been working on a velociraptor dig. The chance to see them in the park should blow his socks off. But knowing how dangerous they are likely to be, he should also show concern.
He should be wondering exactly what species Hammond has brought back to life. Especially given the heavy fortifications shown on the park plans.
The only thing he does is look at the skylight and the windows, noticing that they’re fortified in ways that weren’t included in the plans he and Ellie saw. When Ellie appears, she agrees that these bars on the windows must be a new addition.
Think about it – they’ve worked on dinosaur digs, yet neither of them are reacting to the listed species above the television or drawing any connections between them and the high security. They don’t speculate. They don’t join the dots. They’re passive characters, except when there’s an opportunity to show their expert subject.
The author might sneak some dinosaur names to the reader, but while it’s possible to sneak information past a viewpoint character at times, this wouldn’t be a situation where that would work. Grant knows too much about the subject. His heart should have leapt at the channel list. He should have been full of questions.
A growing sense of trepidation should have crept up on him too – as he linked the live cam channel list to the fortified visitor quarters.
Likewise, when they go to the visitor centre, where an animatronic T-rex is on display, Grant, Ellie and Ian Malcolm don’t ask if there are any real T-rexes in the park.
Most ordinary people would ask this, possibly partly in excitement, but also fear, given the reputation of the species.
The visitors are told they’re there to check the safety of the park which opens next year. You would think at this point someone would step up and ask about any other species in the park, especially more dangerous predators. But no one does.
Crichton controls the narrative to such a degree that he essentially favours pushing the plot on in a way that sacrifices character credibility at this point.
A missed opportunity with Tim
When Hammond’s grandchildren turn up, they know nothing about the dinosaurs. The boy, Tim, is a dinosaur nut and recognises Grant. They talk about a museum exhibit of a T-rex with the wrong number of vertebrae. Grant says the museum probably won’t do anything about it now because of what’s happening on the island. Tim doesn’t know what he means and Grant says he’ll explain as they walk.
The first time I heard this part of the novel, on the Audible version, I expected to see Tim’s reaction. He’s a dinosaur nut. His grandfather is responsible for Jurassic Park. Tim and his sister are now on an island with dinosaurs. This ought to spin his world upside down. In an instant, his perception of the world around him should have changed. There should also be shock, disbelief, excitement, fear, and so on.
Instead, we get no reaction at all. The novel skips over it and the next we see of Tim is when they’re exploring the labs. He’s excited by the biohazard signs, but he’s not thinking about dinosaurs. He has already accepted there are dinosaurs here. Soon, he’s bored with the science talk and wants to see the dinosaurs.
But how many people would adjust to this new reality so quickly? Tim’s reactions don’t match someone who has ‘dinosaurs on the brain’. He would also likely wonder what species were in the park. He’d surely wonder if a famous species like T-rex was around.
The lab and control room
When Grant and the others reach the lab and hatchery, specific species are mentioned but no one reacts. Stegosaurus and Triceratops first, but then Wu mentions that the T-rex, though female, tends to be referred to as a male. Neither Grant nor anyone else reacts to the mention of the legendary carnivore.
To say this is odd or even incredible is an understatement. The very presence of an animal of this type should not only result in excitement and anticipation, even disbelief that they are finally going to see one for real, but also concern for the park. This is a resort. There will be visitors. No one is reacting appropriately.
Before they all reach the control room, someone (Malcolm) finally asks how many species there are in the park.
Again, it seems incredible that Grant never asked this, or even Tim. No one asks for a list.
Later in the control room, a list shows up in the computer, complete with the number of expected animals in each category, the number found by the motion sensors, and a version number for each animal – for example, 4.1. Instead of reacting to the list of extinct animals brought back to life and assessing what this means, Grant only wants to know about the batch numbers.
There are also issues relating to the first face-to-face meeting with the adult velociraptors. However, the point has been made. The characters are not acting like real people with a background in palaeontology.
Likely obstacles to credible character reactions
There are a number of reasons why the characters often don’t react in a credible way to a situation. Part of it is down to where Crichton wants to direct reader attention and when he wants to delay something to be revealed later.
The problem though is that in the real world such characters would be falling over themselves to ask questions. There would be overwhelming curiosity, a sense of urgency to know the truth. They would lack patience and would be more assertive in asking questions. This in turn would raise stakes and tension.
Info dumping is another issue which gets in the way of credible character reactions. Crichton uses his characters to impart a lot of information to other characters and the reader. These dialogue sections allow characters to sometimes give extensive information without much interruption. In the real world, impatience and interruption and people talking over one another would be more realistic.
The information dumping and the questions that lead to these dumps are also a distraction technique. If Malcolm, the mathematician, asks a question about something, it means the dinosaur revelations are delayed a bit further. On re-reading, this seemed like a deliberate choice on the author’s part. He used ‘look squirrel’ conversation topics to delay revelation and information.
Meanwhile, the viewpoint characters can often become little more than a detached camera at times. Deeper perspective might have forced more credible reactions.
There are also times when some of the characters retreat so much into the background that it’s easy to forget they’re there. If Malcolm and someone else are talking, it prevents Grant from asking what ought to be the more realistic questions about a dinosaur park.
Conclusion
In spite of all that, Jurassic Park is still a very entertaining novel. I only watched the film after my first contact with the book, so I preferred the book to the Spielberg film, partly because the film went into less detail. I still prefer the book in spite of any flaws it has. There are many great and memorable scenes and flashes of humour.
I’ve written before on character credibility issues and how one event/experience should really act as a domino that hits the next. A character should be impacted by previous experience or knowledge. You can read the relevant post at the link below:
If you’re looking for feedback on your manuscript – characters, plot, structure, etc – feel free to contact me at karen@indiecateditorial.com. You can also check out my services pages. Only the Opening Chapters Developmental Edit has a flat rate. Any other prices are a general guide.
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