What Makes a Story Compelling: An Intern's Perspective

For those wondering about what makes a great story from an agent's perspective, this post from the Greenhouse Literary blog as well as its second part are a great read. The author of the posts breaks down how she knows when she's reading a submission if she's got something she wants to take on, both something that's a great story and something that's going to sell. Because make no mistakes, publishing is a business and anyone who doesn't treat it as such is going to get burned.

I agree with her wholeheartedly on all her points. If a manuscript isn't making me want to know what happens next, I already know I'm going to reject it. If I get interrupted after twenty pages and I come back to it and think, "Eh, if I didn't finish this, I wouldn't really care," that's a problem. I can't agree more with her points about the emotional resonance and themes of a novel being so important. Oftentimes when I can't put my finger on what's wrong with a manuscript at first, it's that the characters don't feel real. Their struggles don't resonate with me emotionally. I want the author to convince me to care fiercely about these characters. For me personally, plot can always be fixed, but characters are so important and hard to get right. And if you have well-developed characters, the plot will follow from putting them in challenging situations.

I like that she points out that the stakes can be high even in contemporary stories. Just because it's about a high school girl living in an ordinary town doesn't mean the stakes can't be high. What does she want most? Put that in jeopardy. And likewise, just because a story is set in a world alien to our own doesn't mean it doesn't need to feel real. For example, Marissa Meyer's Cinder sounds absolutely insane: a retelling of Cinderella where she's a cyborg in future Beijing, oh yeah and there's a race of people that live on the moon. But our protagonist wants what we all want: acceptance, freedom, love. She wants to move out on her own, away from her stepmother who hates her. She wants desperately to help her stepsister when she gets sick. She decides to try to help the prince even though it might mean revealing herself as a cyborg in a society where her kind are reviled.

Oftentimes, I read something and think, what is the point of this manuscript? The author introduces all these themes or motifs but doesn't say anything about them. To use another YA example, Across the Universe takes place in a setting alien to our own: a giant, self-sustaining spaceship. Many people dismiss science fiction stories as "not good literature," but the best science fiction stories are about what it means to be human (see The Twilight Zone if you want some amazing examples). And the Across the Universe trilogy (without giving too much away) explores what it means to be human when you've never lived on a planet. How much of our humanity comes from living on Earth? Can we still be human in an artificial world? How will a person who has only known life on a planet react to this spaceship? It also explores secrets and knowledge. The whole trilogy is like an onion, peeling back layers of secrets to get to the truth. When is it okay to keep secrets for the greater good? Do people always deserve the truth? Can you really love someone when you have no other options? In the face of unspeakable atrocities, how do you go on? Can you maintain hope and faith even when everything inside you wants to give up? I could go on and on about this novel, but I'll stop here.

I think something important to think about when writing is what makes you as a reader, engaged in a story? What about those characters and plots keeps you turning the pages? Use those techniques to construct your story, while adding an element that is completely your own.

Instead of a Portal World, Try Peeling Back the Layers of Our Own

This post about portal fantasies gave me some food for thought. The author of the post is wondering why no agents are interested in representing portal fantasies in the vein of the Chronicles of Narnia. Many agents feel that portal fantasies have low stakes because the danger never affects the protagonist's home world. I tend to agree with that sentiment. I remember that I liked The Magician's Nephew, the prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, much better than the actual first book. In the prequel, the White Witch actually comes into the human world and wreaks havoc, while in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the entirety of the action takes place within the portal world. I also find it a bit unbelievable when the residents of the portal world are these amazing, powerful beings who need a human to solve all their problems.

On another note, the author of this post notes that there is little YA fiction that involves space travel and alien planets. I think that is largely because for a long time, those premises were relegated to the hard sci-fi section and as YA doesn't have a ready made market for hard sci-fi, people may have been confused as how to sell these books in the young adult market. However, I think this is changing, due to the popularity of the Across the Universe trilogy and the recently published Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal.

Also, the author suggests that "Maybe the lack of portal fantasy is a metaphor for the belief that modern teenagers don’t want to travel to strange new worlds, even in their reading." I think this whole discussion about portal fantasy ignores the fact that perspective is crucial to the story being told. I have nothing against exploring a strange new world, but I don't need it to be introduced to me via a portal fantasy premise. To me, that seems like an extra step, and I'd like to cut out the middleman. Every time I read a new book, I, the reader, fill the role of the protagonist of a portal fantasy as I enter the world this book is showing me. I greatly prefer straight fantasy because the perspective is from the natives of that world. Some writers might find it hard to introduce their new world and use a portal world as a shortcut, however, for the most part, I find this to be lazy writing and story-telling. In Cinder by Marissa Meyer, for example, Meyer sucked me right into her futuristic Beijing retelling of Cinderella with a cyborg protagonist. I never say "never," so a well-written portal fantasy can certainly suck me in, but for the most part, I prefer a different premise.

A really good way for me to talk about this is to discuss a recent YA book I've read and loved: Croak by Gina Damico. This is a book that introduces the reader to a strange new world while still keeping the stakes high for the "real" world. In this novel, Lex is sent to live with her uncle after a recent run of delinquent behavior. Little does she (or her parents) know that her uncle is a Grim, someone who sends departed souls to the afterlife. Lex arrives in the little isolated mountain town of Croak, one of a few places where Grims live and work together. Non-Grims don't see these places for what they are, and the magic of the places send them away confused. The Grimsphere is another layer to our world, and Grims can still move freely through the rest of the world. One of the Grims goes rogue and starts Damning criminals (preventing their souls from reaching the Afterlife), but soon the Grim starts Damning innocent people as well. The eternal souls of the entire human world hang in the balance, which gives this story high stakes and makes it so compelling.

All in all, when I was younger, I read a fair amount of portal fantasies, but I've since left those stories behind, and I look with excitement to the future of YA fantasy. I'm only a lowly intern at the moment, but someday down the road when I'm an actual agent, I would love to represent something like Croak. For those interested, there are currently two books in the series with a third on the way. Add it on Goodreads here. By the way, how cool is that cover?