Dear Writing Diary Entry #4

My Literary Agent’s Feedback for Revisions

March 13^th, 2024

Dear Writing Diary,

Time to jump back into my 2^nd round of revisions for my current fantasy book. I’m not going to lie, I both dread and love this part. Dread because suddenly with revisions the pressure is on, pressure to self-impose deadlines, pressure to further sculpt and hone my story into a shape it isn’t in…yet. Love because it narrows my wandering creative mind into a single purpose for the next handful of weeks: to finish this round of revisions and deliver it back on my agent’s plate for review (and hopefully take one step closer to sending the book out on submission to publishers!).

While initially it was challenging for me to wrap my head around my agent’s feedback, after discussing on a call with her this morning, I believe I now have a better idea of where to start. Specifically, my agent recommended I focus on improving the following elements:

1)  Worldbuilding (Threading): Rather than introducing worldbuilding elements only when they take the spotlight in a chapter, I should hint that these elements exist several chapters beforehand. By doing this, the events that happen in the story will appear to occur more organically within the world I’ve created rather than either too randomly or as overly convenient plot device. For example, there’s a side character in my book who is a demigod—and yet I fail to mention demigods even exist until the chapter he first appears in. The solution? I plan to mention that demigods in general exist earlier on and how the mechanics of their existence fit into the worldbuilding I’ve established.

2) Character Self-Reflection: My agent pointed out that despite going through many hardships and unexpected events, my characters never really stop and self-reflect on these occurrences. Do I describe their actions and reactions? Yes. But do I really delve into their head spaces and depict their emotions in a realistic way given the things I make happen to them? Not yet. So really bringing out their emotions is something I will focus on with this draft.

3) Repeating Sentence Structures: This is a more subtle piece of feedback but still important. At the line level, some of my sentence structures repeat too much. I use sentences with the word “considering” too often. I too frequently describe my characters doing multiple actions within one sentence in a way that feels jumbled and confusing. This, I predict, will be the easiest and yet most tedious element to fix. I will likely save this as the last issue to tackle once I’ve fixed #1 and #2 above.

And with that, it’s time to dive into this new draft.

Here’s to seeing what tomorrow holds (revising most likely!).

-K