Manuscript assessment by The Literary Consultancy (UK)

Duppy’s World is a book full of invention and experimentation. You’ve got an obvious love of character, place and dialogue, and a real enthusiasm for trying to draw a reader into an imagined world. There’s a richness that comes from the variety of tactics you adopt when creating your fictional environments, too.

I particularly enjoyed the moment where you stepped into the voice of a Mongolian gerbil:

The giant creature turns its head towards me. What? I am doing nothing… it commences to turn its head in another direction, now is my chance! I am dancing – and now I stop. What? I am doing nothing… what is it that you look at, what is it that you so keenly observe? I am standing still – can you not observe that? Here I go again… ha ha… I am too fleet for you… what do you say old chap, eh? But I have done nothing wrong. Look at me – I am not even moving. Do I annoy you? Yes? Good. (p54)

This short first person section contains one of the book’s most distinctive and witty voices. Letting us hear the gerbil’s inner narrative whilst leaving us to imagine what’s going on outside is a great touch – the idea of someone seeing movement out of the corner of their eye and not realising the gerbil is deliberately taunting them is far funnier when left to the reader’s imagination.

I also enjoyed the ‘Last Day In Paris’ (p28-29) vignette, where the man throws the ball and then dies. It comes across as a really entertaining, captivating and self-contained little story, with a set-up, progression and conclusion. It works as an odd little cipher, leaving the reader to ponder its meaning.

However, despite these positives, at the moment there is little in the book to reward a reader’s persistence. You have a huge cast but very little development of individual characters, short, fragmented scenes that are often difficult to make sense of, and no obvious themes or ideas binding together the disparate elements. I’m not convinced you’re always in control of your stylistic flourishes, either:

But Tipper will stay, and in his heat he decides to cheat. It’s not too neat – nervy tumbling treat, and his competitors he cannot beat – for they see his white fumbling sheet. (p9)

Why have you chosen to slip into rhyme here? What purpose is it supposed to be serving? For me, it jars, and feels awkward, without adding anything to the reader’s understanding or significantly enhancing the flow. It’s important that you think about the effects of any unusual stylistic quirks you decide to use, so that the constituent parts of each section are all pulling in the same direction.

Having such a huge cast and no real story makes big demands on your readers. I’m not clear what the payoff is supposed to be for somebody who works all the way through to the end. There’s no implicit promise of a question being answered, no development of individual characters in a satisfying or elucidating way.

This isn’t to say that the structure that you’ve chosen can’t be used very successfully to tell a traditional story. Novels like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual are both great examples of episodic novels told through a variety of characters and viewpoints. In the former, the story is told by various viewpoint characters in first person narration. Some sections seem confusing or even completely nonsensical at first, until another character comes in later to clarify what was going on. In Life: A User’s Manual, each chapter describes a different room in a big French apartment block, including the stories surrounding various objects in that room. However, even then, a story builds up as we progress through the house, and the reader is rewarded for persisting with answers to earlier questions.

You need to think very hard about the promises your story makes, and how you can hook a reader early on and make them fascinated by your fictionalised world.

When it comes to storytelling, you basically have two very powerful building blocks at your disposal. The anecdote is the first of these, and it’s literally just a series of events: ‘This happened, and then this happened, and then this, and after this, this.’ It has a kind of suction to it that draws readers through a story – even with the most boring fact pattern conceivable, it still seems to work. For example:

So a man wakes up. He sits up in bed, and notices that the house seems really quiet. So he gets out of bed, puts on his clothes, all the time aware of this strange quiet. He opens his door, walks out onto the landing. Still, the house has an unearthly quiet.

Now I’m not sure I can think of a more boring series of events – a man wakes up, puts on his clothes, and leaves his room, all in a quiet house. But despite this mundanity, there’s still some semblance of something compelling, at least a little spark of something that makes you want to read on. It’s the implicit promise in the choice of details – by flagging up that the house is quiet, we’re telling the reader that this is significant, and that, if they read on, we’ll tell them why it’s significant, and we’ll surprise them, and they’ll derive some satisfaction from their expectations being simultaneously fulfilled and thwarted.

The second part is the ‘moment of reflection’ – it’s when you step back from the anecdote to reflect on what this means, how the character feels, what the bigger picture is. Moments of reflection work as linking devices that tether the personal to the universal.

These two building blocks are so powerful that they can lend even the most everyday events a compelling quality that draws your readers onwards. The key thing is that you make good on the implicit promise of the form, by answering questions raised – as you do in the section with the man throwing the ball, and also, to a lesser extent, in the bit with B.K., the goat.

I’m not suggesting you ought to mash this all down to a conventional narrative, but I do think you need to think very hard about coming up with some sort of organising principle that might grant this series of loosely related scenes some sort of shape and convince readers to invest emotionally in their content. With this in mind, it’d be worth thinking about the plot ‘shape’ of a classical story, and how you might apply that principle to this work. You might like to think of plot units like this:

Someone wants something. Their effort to get it is frustrated. They try an alternate, more risky means, and arrive at a win, lose or draw.

That is both a basic plot unit and the overarching form of the classical story. Such a description is often criticised as being reductive, but it’s reductive like a map is reductive – if a map had exactly the same size, shape and level of detail as the thing it was supposed to represent then it wouldn’t be a map, it would be a replica, and just as easy to get lost in as the real place. When writing a novel – where scenes are often created months apart – it’s invaluable to have some kind of simple, at-a-glance outline to help cut through the minutiae and establish what is salient and what can be safely dispensed with. Unless you have a model that clearly excludes large potential areas of exploration then everything is up for grabs and you end up writing Tristram Shandy – a fantastic novel to be sure, but one that’s been done.

The narrative is propelled by the dynamic between how badly your protagonist wants the ‘something’, and the gravity of the obstacles impeding him or her. Risks are the lifeblood of any successful story, but they must feel plausible. To feel plausible, a risk ought ideally to be the safest course of action available to a protagonist in the furtherance of his or her goal. For instance, if a shopkeeper plagued by a bluebottle is frustrated in his efforts to swat the insect with a newspaper, it is not plausible for him to hijack an aeroplane and crash the aircraft into his shop in order to achieve his aim. (dramatic though such a tactic might be) This means, of course, that as a writer, if you want to induce the maximum involvement in your reader whilst keeping the story believable, you must manipulate circumstances so that your protagonist’s actions seem like the only reasonable ones to take. This dynamic can be expressed in the following (very rough) rule of thumb:

Desire x Difficulty = Plausible Risk

Very crudely put, the higher the value of Plausible Risk, the more gripping the narrative. It does not, of course, follow that the best novels are therefore thrillers – after all, desires, difficulties and risks take many different forms, and a novel can be less than ‘gripping’ and still be entertaining. However, the risks your protagonist takes cannot exceed the value of Plausible Risk nor drop under it without threatening the character’s integrity. If a character finds himself under considerable threat and does not take reasonable steps to ameliorate the situation, he comes across as inhuman or a masochist. If a character attempts to resolve a minor problem through wild or reckless means, he comes across as insane. Unless your protagonist is actually a masochist or insane and these traits serve some narrative purpose, you must ensure at all times that his actions conform to the rule of minimum possible risk, whilst ensuring that circumstances force this minimum high enough to create tension and thus retain the reader’s attention. This value should build through the novel (though it need not necessarily do so in a linear fashion, the trend should be upward) so that it reaches its peak near or at the end, as the novel’s climax. Obviously, for the reader to experience this tension, you need to make sure your world follows consistent, understandable rules. We need to be able to make reasonable guesses about what might happen next, so that you can subvert or fulfil these expectations. Without expectation there can be no surprise!

That, for me, is one of the key problems in Duppy’s World – without any real grasp of a consistent world or a deep understanding of who these characters are, it’s very difficult to anticipate what might happen next and thus feel anticipation, fear, excitement, and so on. Moment by moment, the writing is relatively strong, but overall I didn’t take away any clear impression of the characters involved, or what I was supposed to feel. In many sections, like the ‘Ivory White’ section with Bunny, it’s very difficult to work out what’s going on. You need to address this by applying an organising principle to your content, and making some concessions to your readers, who at least need some clues to reward their persistence!

Given the wealth of ambition evident in the world you have created – and indeed, in your decision to write a novel at all – I am sure that you will relish working on these problem areas. Cutting sections over which you have spent a great deal of time can be an immensely painful process; fortunately, the pain is more than outweighed by the satisfaction of improving upon your original work. The ability to edit one’s work with a shrewd and ruthless eye is often all that separates a published author from an unpublished hopeful.

Please do not feel too overwhelmed by the scale of the suggestions I have made – I have attempted to be as exhaustive as possible. Whilst I advise that you remain as open-minded as possible when contemplating their worth, you must remember that they are suggestions rather than absolutes, so feel free to discard any changes that you feel conflict with your personal vision for the book. I have no doubt that, if you are able to overcome these weaknesses in your narrative, the quality of your writing will improve dramatically as a result.

Thank you very much for giving me such an interesting, accomplished extract to read, and I wish you all the best with your continued writing.