Writer vs. Reader: From Allegiant to Seek the Traitor's Son
a reflection on revision
Recently I solicited questions on Instagram to be answered in this newsletter. One of them was, what is something about the writing process you wish you’d known earlier?
There are many answers to this question. I feel like I’m always answering it here, actually. In early January, for example, I wrote that I wish I’d known how to advocate for myself and how to love my work while thoughtfully critiquing it.
But the answer that feels most true right now is that I wish I’d known there’s a difference between how your book feels while you’re writing it and how it reads. I mean, I knew this discrepancy existed—of course I did. But I wasn’t aware of the extent of it. And I didn’t realize how becoming more aware of it would help me revise.
Make It Bigger
When I started working on Allegiant, it was the culmination of years of upheaval. I mean, think about it: before Divergent was published, I was a student at Northwestern University, unmarried, with almost no work experience. Everything in my life changed practically overnight after Divergent came out. So by the time I started writing Allegiant, I was overwhelmed in ways both good and bad. I was now a full-on adult, happily married, prone to panic attacks, frequenting a movie set, suddenly had money (hot damn), had to finish this series that had become huge (also hot damn!). My life was unfamiliar to me, strange, exciting, and overwhelmingly heavy…and there I was trying to draft this book that would close out the series.
In retrospect I can see that I was trying to make the book feel as big as the space it was taking up in my life. The scale had to be as grand as I could make it. Big deaths. Big world-building. Big emotions. Big ending.
But if you think about it, epic stories don’t necessarily feel that way because everything in them is as grand and consequential as possible. Some of them become epic the way a pile of Legos becomes a Death Star: piece by piece. Intimate moments between characters engage our emotions, and there are ways to make those intimate moments feel just as consequential as huge set pieces. In Dune, we see the fate of an empire resting on what happens to the family Atreides, the small story through which we see the Harkonnens, the emperor, the spacing guild, all the families of the Landsraad, the Bene Gesserit. A small betrayal for a simple reason—a man trying to save his wife—determines the fate of a family, and what happens to the family shifts the balance of power in the entire universe.
Or, for something completely different, think about The Pitt. The Pitt’s first season takes place over fifteen hours. That time scale is so small, you’d think it would be difficult to make the stories matter, to make the season feel consequential. But it builds up so many small stories so effectively that the scope actually feels pretty big. It’s your investment in those stories that makes the show impactful—not the “size” of the stories themselves.
It’s not that I reread Allegiant now and think it failed creatively because I tried to make it too Big. It’s more that when I reread it, what succeeds for me is what stayed intimate despite my intentions to make it otherwise. As a reader, it’s hard to connect to the idea of an entire city losing its memory or being observed by detached outsiders; it’s easier to connect to the growing (and then mending) rift between Tris and Four and the family drama of Evelyn, Marcus, and their son.
Make It Smaller
While writing Seek the Traitor’s Son, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the question of how to set everything up properly. The stakes of the book are high and the scale is grand: it’s about a woman whose fate is to save her people from domination by the cultists who control Earth. The fate of not just a city, but an entire planet is at stake. But this time, I decided to access those high stakes through a single character: Elegy, whose private concerns—including the man she’ll fall in love with—are the linchpin holding her people’s future together, though she isn’t sure how or why.
As I revised the major action scenes, I thought, how can I make this smaller? A scene with a full-scale military attack became a rescue mission in the woods. A battle became an intimate fight.
It’s counterintuitive, but one way to make a story bigger is to make it smaller. It’s the difference between a movie scene scanning across a battlefield and following a single character through it—both will give you an impression of size and scale, but the latter engages you emotionally, and emotional engagement creates a feeling of importance and urgency that make a story feel big. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for the other kind of stories— the big, sweeping shot of the battlefield—but those stories aren’t my stories. I know that now.
It’s a relief to stop trying to write every other kind of book at once. To know what I’m interested in and what I’m not. To give myself permission to be the kind of writer I am instead of one that I’m not.
What the Writer Needs and What the Reader Needs
Like I said earlier, it takes a long time to write a book. Because of that, you feel it differently as a writer than you do as a reader. When I write, I feel like I’m walking alongside these characters in real time, for months and months. I want to understand what everything looks like, and how their expressions change as they speak to each other; I want to slow down their conversations and saturate them with nuance; I want to go with them as they move from place to place. If I do that, I think, I’ll really know them and how the story they’re walking through is changing them, and I’ll have a better sense of what they’ll do and say when big events happen in the book. These are the things I need in order to understand the story and feel it as deeply as possible.
But the things I need as the writer are not the same things the reader needs. What they need is to be engaged, and interested, and to feel the story changing and developing as they read.
The reason so many people advise writers to let their rough drafts sit after they finish is so that we can distance ourselves from what the writer needs and remember what the reader needs. When I reread a draft for the first time after a break, I ask myself: Is my attention waning here? There? Am I having trouble tracking all of these descriptions? Did I just skip an entire paragraph because it was tedious? Am I dreading the next chapter a little because I know it’s going to take me away from what I really care about?
Because maybe the reader doesn’t need to walk with the character every step of the way. Maybe they can skip ahead and fill in the gaps themselves.
Writers have to remember that reading is participatory—it requires both the writer and the reader to bring something to the experience. And we have to let our readers imagine, extrapolate, assume, and dream. We can’t control their experience of our stories, and we shouldn’t try. Instead, we should be intentional with what we give them, and then let the rest go.
The draft where I stepped into my characters’ skin will always be there, suspended in time. But it served its purpose. I have to let it go. My book has a new purpose after that: to be read.
<3,
V
This changed my point of view! Thank you!
I wrote a chapter near the end of my current novel recently and it was a major titanic battle between the protag and her family's celestial nemesis. However it was really quite emotionally bland and even though my writer mind tried to inject something more interesting into it (I didn't want a straightforward battle I wanted an emotional event to turn the table) it still feels out of place. Ice tried to make the entire novel more intimate to the protagonist’s problems and her voyage or self discovery which involves some very unpleasant truths and tragedy ultimately. But anyway it's a first draft so it won't be perfect. Suffice to say what you say here about making some huge events smaller (because it fits your writing style) is interesting as I'm an emotional writer and big sweeping high stakes settings don't necessarily gel I think with a huge urge for emotional introspection.
I also love questions like these because I feel like it gets to the heart of lightbulb moments in writing. When you realise your storytelling is in need of something very specific to make it its best. So I assume when you say divergent is large it's because of it's sprawling outward scale and some of those really big world moments. As my writing style has also been quite large and sprawling (not withstanding the current need to go deeper into the individual characters emotional turmoil) I've debated whether that even still exists in tosay’s published works. I guess it does with some works! So thanks for the insight.