Title : SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW

Author : Angela Jaques

Genre : Novel, Womens Fiction

View Opening Chapters

Synopsis
In 1988, Deirdra takes her own life. Twenty years on, Eve falls victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Will history repeat itself?

The professional critique by author Martyn Bedford is displayed in the next post

I also have a more general concern, or query, relating to Deirdra’s suicide. Why is her response to Eddie’s infidelity to kill herself? I know you refer in the synopsis to her intolerable sense of humiliation, but in this opening section her mental state (as reflected in her narrative tone and voice and in the representation of her thought processes) seems somewhat neat and tidy in its articulation of her situation and what she’s about to do. There’s a particularly curious sentence: “Maybe her departure will make Eddie see sense.” This strikes me as a somewhat odd way of thinking on her part and serves as an illustration of my general concern with this whole opening passage.

Certainly, I don’t have a sense of her humiliation, or of the kind of despair which might drive a woman to end her life; rather, she seems to be calculatedly organising and rationalising a solution to a problem. As such, it seems too authorial (as opposed to character driven). The suspicion it raises in a reader’s mind is that here we have an author who needs her character to commit suicide to suit the plot and therefore has to come up with a rationale. I have to say I am not convinced by Deirdra or by her suicidal state of mind, as depicted. Nor have you done enough, in my view, to persuade me that she would respond to Eddie’s infidelity by killing herself rather than opting for one of various alternatives: she could expose his affair to Jonathan, for example, or simply leave Eddie or throw him out, or if a more drastic response is in her nature (the tone/voice/attitude suggests not) she would be more likely, wouldn’t she?, to try to kill or harm Selena or Eddie rather than herself. At least, we need to understand why she opts for suicide over these alternatives.

In a nutshell, we need to believe Deirdra would kill herself and, as it stands, I’m afraid I don’t. If you have never been suicidal (and I sincerely hope you haven’t) then, of course, it is a stretch for an author to get inside the mind of a suicidal character. But I feel you need to address both the tone and the rationale if this scene is to be credible and to fulfil its dramatic potential.



Timeframe/Organisation (of honeymoon section)

In Eve’s first section, you incorporate a number of timeframes and shifts between them in a relatively short narrative space, making it somewhat tricky for the reader to navigate. You open with the honeymoon in Venice . . . then flash back to the proposal . . . then have a flashback within a flashback to when Eve and Patrick first met . . . then a flash-forward from that point to them setting up a business and home together at the chapel . . . then forward again to the proposal scene (prefaced confusingly by “Now, however, they were deep into the red”, when ‘now’, in terms of this chapter, is actually the honeymoon) . . . then we come forward again to the wedding and to Eve’s first encounter with Patrick’s folks . . . then, finally, we return to the honeymoon. As a structuring scheme for a short story or novel, say, this handling of timeframe would be fine - taking us from present to past, to more distant past, then forward again in sequence to the present. Over a larger narrative it would be more navigable, but with a relatively short chapter it feels somewhat cluttered and complicated. On first reading, I had to check myself two or three times and go back over things I’d already read to work out where we where, timewise. So, I would suggest looking at ways to simplify or streamline the narrative in this regard.



Characterization (Eve)

As I mentioned above, under the positives, you handle Eve’s response to Patrick’s revelation convincingly. But there are other instances where she seems somewhat too easily manipulated and put-upon (by Patrick, or by his mother), considering Eve is in her mid-thirties and well-used to creative and personal independence. Also, the tone and register of her sections isn’t entirely consistent or altogether convincing, in terms of creating a sense of her in the reader’s mind. (This reader’s mind, anyway.) Comparing her sections to those of Martha, I’m not sure you’ve quite “nailed” Eve’s voice just yet and that might be symptomatic of the fact that you are still in the early stages of a first draft. Character and voice commonly take time for an author to “inhabit” in the initial phase of the writing process. The trick is to approach it like an actor getting into role: whenever you write an Eve section, try to “be” her. Ask yourself at every point, line-by-line: what would she be thinking, saying, doing here, and why? If you can get inside Eve’s skin, the tone and register of her 3rd-person narrative voice will come, as it has done with Martha.



Characterization (Patrick)

As one of the main players in the novel, key to what will become a romantic triangle with Martha and Eve, Patrick needs to bear a lot of the narrative burden, even if he doesn’t get to be a viewpoint character at any stage. At present, and I recognise that it’s early days in the first draft, I find him somewhat thin and two-dimensional in his characterization. Apart from his youthful good looks, I don’t quite see what would have attracted Eve to him so strongly in the first place - enough to agree to marry him, despite various reservations, and enough to put up with the controlling interference of his mother and father. I can see why Martha, at 18, would respond to him on a superficial and romantic level (the posh, handsome artist) but Eve, at 35, would surely be a bit more worldly wise than this? Would a woman of her age, with her acumen, in these times, really think that ‘happiness’ for a woman derives from the simple, Barbara Cartland-ish ingredients she comes up with in response to Patrick’s question: “Happy?” She seems too easily pleased by, and satisfied with, him. So I feel that more work needs to be done to develop Patrick, to make him more complex and credible as the figure in Eve’s life that he needs to be.



Point-of-View

There is one small PoV slip in the dinner scene, at Foyle, when we are in Eve’s 3rd-person viewpoint and we are told (of Martha) that: “Below the table she wriggled as her skirt rode up around her thighs.” Eve would not know this, or be able to see it.



In conclusion . . .



As I stated at the outset, these chapters were enjoyable and engaging to read, with much to praise in your writing. Looking at the synopsis, I would say you have bags of potential in this novel, with two strong narrative strands, past and present, and a resonant connection between them. It is still at an early stage, though, so the few concerns that crop up are not surprising and nor should they be cause for despondency. In a novel of this kind (of any kind, really) the success or failure of the story hinges on the extent to which we believe in and engage with the characters. There is still some work to be done with Eve and especially Patrick, as outlined above, but plenty of time to address that. A more general concern, arising from the synopsis and the handling of the first Deirdra section, is the “suicide factor”. The synopsis hints at Eve reaching a similar point of suicidal despair, as a result of marital infidelity, and I worry that you’ll need to do a lot of groundwork to persuade us that either or both women would kill themselves, or want to kill themselves, because their husbands had cheated on them (and not simply because it fits the author’s plotting/thematic strategy.)

Can I end by wishing you all the best with this novel and with the hope that my feedback will prove helpful.





Martyn Bedford

for YouWriteOn.com