Hello, dreamers. At long last, I’m nearing the point where I’ll be diving into the query trenches. It’s daunting, but I finally feel like I’m ready. Over the past few weeks, however, things took an unexpected turn. I began making major changes to Pioneers for the first time in years. And I dare say this is a much better story for it. Because I finally fully embraced interiority in my most treasured work-in-progress.

The Value of Interiority

After I completed my first draft of Pioneers and did my own initial editing, I began passing it off to beta readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive (my friends are a reflexively supportive bunch). And during that first round of beta reading, one of the most common comments I received was that it felt “cinematic”. I kept hearing that it was so descriptive they could picture each scene perfectly.

At the time, I took that as a compliment. To be fair, my beta readers clearly meant it as such. It took a while before I began to realize that, in the modern literary industry, “cinematic” is usually an insult.

There was a time when it wouldn’t have been so. When being able to so richly describe what’s happening would’ve been a sign of incredible skill for a writer. But in the end, the advent of cinema had the same effect on literature that photography had on painting: being able to faithfully capture the scene was no longer enough.

Literature responded the same way painting did: by embracing the one thing it could still capture better than film. Emotion. Today, there’s really no value in being able to richly describe the setting and events in a novel. You might as well just make a movie, or a TV series, or a video game. Whatever. Readers don’t want to just know what’s happening, they want to know how it feels.

And that’s where interiority comes in.

I’ve said it a lot lately, but in modern literature interiority is everything. Readers, and by extension agents and publishers, want to know how the scene feels. The funny thing is, my early drafts of Pioneers had a lot of that. But another thing I’ve said a lot recently is that I fell into the trap of listening to way too much of the bad writing advice that’s floating around these days.

Over the past year, I’ve basically been working to unlearn what I thought I’d learned about writing. To write like myself again. The initial result was a string of short pieces over the past six months that are worlds beyond anything I’d written before. But even as I churned out thousands of words of killer prose, I refused to revisit Pioneers. I kept telling myself the story was as good as it could be, just as it was. In retrospect, I’ve come to realize that was just me giving up in advance. “Sure, I’m writing a lot better now. But there’s no way to change this story now. It is what it is.”

Then, I passed my query letter off to my editor, and receive glowing praise in response. I wasn’t expecting that. Suddenly, I was faced with the real possibility that, sooner or later, an agent would actually read my manuscript. The whole thing. I’ve learned a lot since I first wrote Pioneers. Why shouldn’t I give this story my best effort? So, I opened things back up. And the results took me by surprise.

Over the past week, for the first time in years I was immersed in Pioneers. I reconsidered everything, mulling over paragraphs, passages, entire scenes and chapters I had barely touched since the first draft. I started digging into the messy minds and emotions of my characters. Soon I was consumed by the story again. I would lie awake in bed at night, composing scenes. I started making notes on my phone when a new paragraph came to me. Sometimes just individual lines. I turned things over, messed with the wording, deleted entire sentences. I broke stuff. And I left better stuff in its place.

The result was a story that, frankly, feels a lot more like me. I embraced my inner romantic, and ended up with a story that was much more human, much more intimate, than the original. At first, it just felt like putting things back the way they were. But eventually, it grew into something new. Something different. Better.

What was, probably, a pretty good story has evolved into something that really feels like it belongs on a bookshelf. Something someone might actually pay to read. And something I can truly be proud of.

This weekend I’ll be making my final editing pass. At this point I’m eager to get on with things, but after all the sweeping changes I’m loath to just toss this story out there, potentially riddles with word echoes and spelling errors. I’ve come too far, worked too hard, to half-ass this now. When I put this story out there, I want to do so secure in the knowledge that agents are seeing me at my best.

Then, I’ll be ready. – MK