The Fiction Doctor's Pharmacopoeia

Diagnosing and treating the most common ailments in novels and short stories

So you’re in a feedback situation - a beta-reader, a workshop, a well-disposed agent or a helpful magazine editor - and they say it’s too long, so you dutifully start cutting words … But then it gets rejected for being too skimpy and rushed.

Or they say the main character seems too introspective, and how about cutting lots of the thinking? … Then someone else says they love everything about the story except the MC because they have no idea why she acts as she does.

Or they say it sags in the middle, and given the bad marriage your MC would head into an adulterous affair and … Then not only does your whole plot have to be rebuilt, but your next three readers say the affair is when they stopped caring about him.

This post explores the difference between finding problems, and solving them, how this problem happens, how to tease feedback apart to get at the real ailment and therefore the cure, and finishes with a diagnostic list of the most common symptoms in fiction and possible causes.