Manuscript Evaluation: Part 1

How does an editor provide feedback on a book?

Introduction

Normally, I open a manuscript evaluation by thanking an author for trusting me with their words, but I want to start this with an explanation of what this is and why it’s on Medium. I have two reasons for creating a formal manuscript evaluation for Accidental Notes and then publishing it into Building a Novel. The first reason is to be able to provide an example of what a manuscript evaluation looks like from me. What can you expect from this kind of editing service? What details do I look at? What is the tone of the evaluation?

I can’t share evaluations I’ve done of other people’s novels for two reasons: the first being that I don’t have permission to share them, and the second that people here have no access to the source material, so it won’t mean much. By posting the whole novel first, you can read through the whole book and then see my thoughts on it, if you want to. As I go on to evaluate smaller pieces, I’ll be linking to relevant chapters.

The second reason is because I think Accidental Notes is an interesting case study in a tricky novel to evaluate. I mentioned this when I started this experiment, but this book is, I think, fine. There’s a lot I like about it, from its voice to the themes it explores.

It also is fundamentally broken.

This edit letter, then, is geared toward an author with some experience, who isn’t struggling with the basics anymore, but who still has a lot to learn. What sort of things does an edit letter focus on once the foundation is there? That’s what we’ll be exploring in the two parts of this evaluation.

Overview

Thanks so much for entrusting me with this story. The heart is clearly there, and I grew to love Adaya and Grayson as their story progressed. I think you have a lot of beautiful elements here, and the story works fine as it is. That said, there is still work we need to consider if we want to move this book from “fine” to “great.” You noted some beta readers had said the point — the “so what” — of the story felt all over the place, and I can see where that critique comes from. As I wrote up the plot and structure in a condensed form, it became clear there is a lot going on in this relatively short book, and without the payoff of convergence we need to make this many subplots work well.

I imagine the next step for getting this book to work is going to involve a lot of decision-making. A sampling of questions that might help direct this thought process:

• What plot is driving the story?
• Do you want Adaya to have a positive change arc or a flat arc?
• What is the moral of the story — what do you want your 14-year-old reader to take away from this book?
• Which subplots contribute to the theme? How can they combine at the climactic moment in such a way that each one was necessary to get us there?

The rest of this report is split out by element, and split in two so it isn’t quite as long to read. We’re going to tackle the big things first, looking at the genre, point of view, plot, structure, and pacing in the first part of the evaluation. The second part will cover characters, theme, dialogue, and setting, as well as a conclusion that ties it all together.

Genre

The book is written as a Young Adult contemporary that seems to be geared at the younger end of that range, with its 15-year-old protagonist and life situations that straddle the line between Middle Grade and Young Adult. From our conversations, I know this was an intentional choice to fill a gap for readers who had graduated from MG but weren’t quite ready for older YA.

This works really well in terms of style and the romance in particular. While it deals with some very heavy topics — familial alcoholism, death/suicide of a relative, imperfect family relationships, etc. — I think putting them at a distance, with them being a mystery Adaya is investigating from her past, might give the young reader enough space to explore these topics without it getting so dark as to be too much for the 14-year-old you stated as your target audience.

Point of View

The book is written in first person past, with a deep point of view focused mostly on Adaya’s thoughts and feelings surrounding the events of the novel. The point of view never breaks and is done well throughout the book. Metaphors typically are related to music, as it’s clear that is the lens through which Adaya sees the world. At times, Adaya can come off as “unlikable,” but I think that’s a result of a character who is a little too self-aware in places. She can make bad choices, but making those choices shouldn’t involve thinking about, then dismissing, the kinder choice.

Plot

This section is going to write out the whole plot, point by point. I find this a useful experiment in looking at cause and effect, repetition of story elements, and growth of the character, and I include it in every manuscript evaluation I write, but you can skip to the analysis by scrolling down or clicking here.

Summary

Over winter break, fifteen-year-old only child Adaya flies alone from where she lives with her mother in L.A. to Oregon, where she is to spend Christmas with her estranged father so she can play piano at her grandmother’s funeral. At her grandmother’s house in Bend, though, she discovers a family she feels like she barely knows anymore. They’ve gathered for a meal when she arrives, and she learns her old frenemy, Grayson, now lives next door to her grandmother’s house. Adaya questions how close Grayson and her dad seem to be.

At the funeral in the morning, Adaya is shocked when the pastor of the church says she looks just like her brother. When she asks her dad about it, he ignores the question. Shaken, Adaya can’t bring herself to play the piano for the service and walks out of the sanctuary instead. Grayson tries to comfort her, but she pushes him away. The next day, she has a remote audition for the pit in her school musical, and her music teacher Mr. G is not acting like himself. She goes through the song but is told immediately she doesn’t get that part, but can audition for a smaller role as a choir accompanist after she’s home from Bend. however, her best friend at home does get in, causing a small rift between them. Adaya decides to build a gingerbread house with her dad to try to overcome her disappointment, but they have to rush it because her grandmother’s memorial is taking place after lunch.

Adaya decides to question all her relatives at the memorial, trying to figure out about this mysterious brother people keep mentioning. But everyone gets drunk and runs off the moment she asks, so she hides in a storage room upstairs to avoid people and get some answers. Instead, Grayson follows her and we learn about his own disappointments in music recently. Among the boxes, they find yellowed sheet music that Adaya thinks will be perfect for her audition. She and Grayson fight about how to go about learning it, but she decides to dissect it. However, she is waylaid by a young cousin asking her to play at the piano. She does, and makes her way through a song even with mistakes because she is thinking about the relationship instead.

That evening, Adaya is talking to her mom on the phone and tries to mention the music, but her mom keeps changing the subject, and questions why they’re staying at Grandma Nancy’s at all. She seems frustrated but wont tell Adaya why. When Adaya goes to the piano to learn the music, her dad listens but seems lost in his own thoughts. After some back and forth, Adaya’s dad finally almost admits something about the music and Adaya realizes that the sheet music she found was her dad’s, written to mourn his now-dead son.

Music comes from the piano, and when Adaya first hears it, she thinks it’s the ghost of her brother. Instead, it’s Grayson playing a song. He invites her to come improvise with him, but she’s distracted and tells him about the music being her dad’s. They agree to work together to uncover more about this music.

Later that day, Adaya’s dad all but forces her to practice her driving in his truck in the snow. On the way home from the store, she slips on some ice and the truck loses control. Everyone is fine, but someone who witnesses it stops to make sure they are okay. The way he talks to Adaya’s dad, Adaya realizes they knew each other a long time ago, and when the stranger says he hasn’t seen them since the funeral, it’s clear to her she’s talking about Brennan’s funeral. She goes to Grayson’s house to talk to him and learns that he wanted to be a composer but is ready to give it up. He admits he had a crush on her before she’d moved away and asks to kiss her. She says no, not yet, but that she’s glad to be back with him too.

On Christmas Eve, the family gathers at Grandma Nancy’s house, and Adaya tries again to get information from Meghan, and she warns her not to bring up Brennan. They have a white elephant gift exchange but every single one contains alcohol. Adaya ends up with a bottle of red wine she can’t drink.

When she confronts her dad about none of the gifts being alcohol-free, an uncle calls in and drunkenly calls her Brennan. With much persuasion, Adaya learns Brennan died of suicide a few days after Christmas. Adaya escapes to Grayson’s house for a distraction, and Grayson got her a present — kind of. He gives her tickets to a show he’d planned to give to her grandmother. Adaya’s torn between offended at continuing to get her deceased relatives’ cast-offs, but happy because she finally got a gift that wasn’t alcohol. She learns Grayson wants to compose for video games and the concert is for a woman who does that.

On the way to church for Midnight Mass, Adaya presses her dad for more information about Brennan. She learns that he was fifteen at his death — and she was born one year and nine months after his suicide. The only reason she exists is to replace him. After a tense Christmas Eve service, Adaya gets up in the middle of the night and she and her dad play music together before opening stockings.

That morning, Adaya’s mom calls to let her know that plans have changed and she can come home on December 27, the same day as the concert Grayson wants her to go to, and the anniversary of her brother’s death. Adaya escapes to the storage room and finds her brother’s memory books, and watches him grow up. Her dad interrupts her and asks her to save all the boxes with Brennan’s things before the estate sale happens in a few days. He leaves to take the boxes to storage and Grayson comes over, catching Adaya working on the song. Grayson teaches her to improvise — by going outside into the snow with her, where they kiss. She learns to put her feelings into the notes.

Analyzing the music deeper, Adaya pays attention to what she had excused as slips of the pen before, writing them down in her notebook. The message reveals that the music isn’t her dad’s: it’s Brennan’s, and it’s basically his suicide note.

Adaya’s dad comes home in the middle of the night, absolutely worse for the wear. But when morning truly comes and Adaya wants to know more about Brennan, her dad drives her to the last Blockbuster in the world — a place that had been Brenna’s favorite store when he was alive. Her dad still insists that Brennan couldn’t have intentionally left, and Adaya has a panic attack in the store she only barely manages to keep under control. When there are too many people at the house when she gets back, she goes to Grayson’s, where he tells her not to use the music for her audition, and she tells him she’s leaving earlier than planned and she will use the music. They fight and she leaves without things at peace between them.

She calls her mom to talk through what happened with him and hears Mr. Gutierrez in the same place as her mom. Adaya snaps at them when she learns they’ve been seeing each other for a year and hangs up the phone, saying she doesn’t want the audition anyway.

The day she’s supposed to go home dawns with a huge storm that closes the pass to Portland and the airport. Adaya is stuck in Bend. Grayson still won’t talk to her. the power goes out. When it comes back on again, Adaya and her dad fight about Brennan and whether or not she even matters to her dad. She ends up throwing the bottle of wine she got on Christmas Eve at the piano. It shatters there, and the wine ruins the piano that was her connection to her grandmother.

Frustrated, Adaya runs off, to the cemetery by the church, where she finds her grandmother’s tombstone, then her brother’s. She yells at both of them and covers herself in snow, becoming delirious with cold. In what she thinks is a dream, she texts Grayson. Grayson and his mother find her there and take her home. Her hands are so raw from being outside she’s lost the dexterity to move them she needs to play piano. The estate sale is still happening. Even soaked in wine, the piano works — kind of — but Adaya can’t play it with her fingers raw and bloody.

Her mom and Mr. G call to tell Adaya they’re engaged to be married, and Adaya asks forgiveness for how she blew up at them a few nights beforehand. Mr. G agrees to give her another remote audition for the choir accompaniment part. But she and Grayson are still fighting, so the next day she finds him, and he’s working on a song he’s writing, and he reveals he’s been writing it about her. Adaya’s learned she needs to improvise her life a little bit more, and Grayson has learned some things are worth planning.

When she gets home from Grayson’s, her dad has found the page with the message in the music and he’s crying about it. In a fit of grief, he tells Adaya he wishes he knew — because then Brennan would exist, even though that means Adaya would not. Adaya knows she has other things to focus on, though, so as her hands heal, she goes back to Grayson’s house to practice for the audition. However, she forgets the sheet music, and when she goes to get it, one of her relatives has thrown it in the fire as unusable. Instead of freaking out, Adaya chooses to mourn it, and help her family as they move the ruined piano outside in order to chop it up for firewood.

Afterward, Adaya walks to the church, where she apologizes to the tombstones she yelled at. A light is on inside the sanctuary, so she goes in and finds her sheet music for the song she failed to play at the funeral waiting on the piano. She plays the song and the pastor hears her, saying it was beautiful and she should take risks. She asks him if there is internet there so she can use this piano for her audition.

The morning of her next audition, Adaya goes to the store with her dad and Grayson. She’s given up on her dad ever truly being there for her, but Grayson has sent in his composition for a camp, and Adaya is feeling relaxed. The audition doesn’t go perfectly, but Adaya is happy with it and so is Mr. G, who offers her the part. She asks for time to think about it first, choosing to first spend time getting to know Grayson as her boyfriend.

Grandma Nancy’s house is put up for sale as Adaya heads to the airport with her dad and Grayson. She tries again to get her dad to leave Bend, but it doesn’t work. When she’s on the plane home, not much feels complete or certain about her life, but she doesn’t care. A lot of the best things are up in the air, like confetti. Like fireworks. Like stars.

Structure

Structure was the issue that every beta reader had with this book. “What kind of a story is it? What’s the main goal? What is Adaya about?” Reading it now, I think what we’ve been missing here is the genre of this story. I wrote it as something fairly straightforward and literary, but the whole time, it’s been a mystery at its heart. The story is absolutely summed up in the throughline of “What is my family keeping secret from me, and why is it a secret?”

As far as Save the Cat goes, that means something we really need to think through: in most mysteries, the main character doesn’t go through an arc, and Adaya’s arc is one of the stronger parts of this book. She goes from rigid to willing to improvise… but that has nothing to do with Brennan. So we have a strong character arc and a decent mystery, but nothing to connect them. In Truby terms, we don’t have an organic plot, because the theme — about the benefits of improvising our lives — and the plot — about a long-lost brother and realizing the point of your existence was to replace someone else — don’t align. Or play off one another at all.

Then we add in what Adaya wants: she wants to go to Bend. She wants to fix her relationship with her dad. She wants her audition. She wants to mend her relationship with Grayson. She wants to find out what happened with her family. She has the side mystery of her mom and Mr. G. She wants another audition.

It’s convoluted, with no real convergence at the end that makes it all make sense. There’s no “so what” to Adaya learning she has this brother. She changes, but her circumstances don’t. She stops wanting to mend her relationship with her family because she realizes they’re stuck in the past, but she doesn’t change them and they don’t change her. She’s a failed flat arc in that no one changes but her — the absolute opposite of a flat arc — and she’s a failed positive arc because the choice she makes in the end that she wasn’t capable of in the beginning doesn’t have much plot relevance at all.

Pacing

Chapter lengths are fairly consistent, and at around 2,000 words each, they are a good length for the target age group. The pacing of major plot points falls mainly where they need to, although the second half of the book is slightly shorter than the first half. Where pacing is a struggle, for me, is between chapters. I find most chapters end with a pithy remark that closes it well, but closing a chapter well means less incentive to keep reading to. I’d look at where chapters break and how we can up the tension at that end in particular, hoping to keep readers insistent on finding out what happens next.

Another thing I would consider with pacing is how to pace a mystery. Adaya learns so quickly about her brother, and while we have her misunderstanding the music she finds, it still happens so quickly that by the time I got ¾ through, I was wondering what was left to resolve in the story. It wasn’t holding my interest anymore.

Finally, a note that I’m wedging into the “pacing” category is that of plot-level repetition. This is tricky to fix, but combined with some of my other notes, I think it will come together well. So much of the story is “Adaya is at home. Adaya learns something new she doesn’t want to deal with. Adaya goes over to Grayson’s house.” Or, conversely, “Adaya is at home or outside in the snow minding her own business. Grayson shows up. She learns something new.” This cycle makes me lose interest as a reader.

The goal is often “escape what’s happening,” and the stakes are low. There is no risk in a lot of these conversations. While writing something atmospheric and literary was your goal, the mystery elements make this fall flat, and the internal tension — especially as expressed in dialogue, which we’ll talk more about later — doesn’t grip the way it needs to for the story to feel like it has forward momentum rather than going in circles.

Actually, now that I’ve said those words, I wonder how much that was intentional — at least on a subconscious level. Adaya feels like her family is stuck in a rut, stuck in the same pattern, and the scenes also feel stuck in a rut in a lot of places. But like I’ve talked about with the song “Mastermind,” hitting the goal of something falling flat isn’t exactly ideal.

Some questions to think about regarding pacing? How can we make the scenes feel differentiated from one another? How can we raise the stakes within them? How can we vary the goals and vary the stakes in each scene? What about ensuring that the story builds on itself?

Conclusion to Part 1

These are some of the thoughts I had about the story in a macro sense. Part 2 will look in depth at character arcs, theme, setting, and the style of the writing.