The Art of Detection, Part III: Point

So you’ll see the checklist ends with our second major question here: “What is the point?”
“The point” of a book is its guiding idea or theme

The truth you want to communicate to readers
The emotion you want them to feel
The concept you want to explore in your story
The answer to the question “What is it about?”

Points fall into two related categories

The first is what, if you’re being incredibly reductive, you would call the message or moral of the book—what we’ll call the moral point

I’d like to say—I do not want books with heavy morals, like “Hey, kids! It’s fun to share!” or “Now look what happened to Timmy with the light socket!”
But rather the thing your characters learn in the course of the action.

If you asked Jane Austen the question, “What is it about?”, she might say “It’s about pride and prejudice and the stupid mistakes smart people make when they allow those emotions to get in the way of seeing rightly.”

The second kind of point we’ll call an emotional point: and that’s the emotional effect the book has on the reader

If you asked Dav Pilkey, “What is it about?”, he might say, “It’s about giant flying toilets that attack the earth and using the word ‘poop’ as often as possible.”
Why? To make kids (and the author) laugh. That’s an emotional point—something your readers feel in response to the action

And both of those answers are just fine for the books they’re writing and the audiences they serve.

Not every book has to be deep. Not every book has to be funny. Not every book has to make you cry. Not every book has to be Harry Potter.

In fact, I don’t want to see “Harry Potter” again in a submission.

Yes, certainly, I want my books to give as much delight and sell as well.
But the point of that book has already been made. And the book itself has been written and published and is done.

I want to see the thing you want to think about, how you would tell the story of a boy coming of age in a time of war.

Every book must do two things.

One, fulfill the reader’s expectations for it given its provenance and genre

A literary novel has to have beautiful writing
A mystery has to have a crime, clues, and a satisfying answer.
A Dav Pilkey book has to have giant flying toilets

And two, give pleasure to a reader

Besides the writer. And the writer’s mother.
But that pleasure usually starts with the writer.

Don’t stress yourself out about it, really. Find the point of the material you’re working with and the story you’re telling, and go on from there.

So now, you have your pencils at the ready, your WIP in mind, and the question “What is the point of your book?”

30 seconds—go!

All right, how many of you found that easy? Or really, really hard?
This is TRUCK #6: Answer the question “What is it about?” with a one-sentence thesis statement for your book.
If you’re struggling with your story, come back to this thesis statement
Because if you can identify what your book is about or for,
you have an idea both to work towards and to judge the content of your story against.
In terms of something to judge your story against—suppose Dav Pilkey interrupted the latest Captain Underpants book with a serious interlude where Harold and George met a Holocaust survivor

The Holocaust is an important topic. But it is not what the Captain Underpants series is about, and its utter seriousness does not belong alongside the tale of giant flying toilets from Mars.
So I would advise Dav to edit that.

In terms of an idea to work towards—as the action in your story unfolds, the main character should discover the point you’ve identified.

Every plot development in the first half of Pride and Prejudice serves to establish Elizabeth’s pride and prejudice toward Darcy
So when Elizabeth learns that he’s actually a good guy, she recognizes the point: how she hasn’t seen rightly and that’s she just made a big mistake

So when the main character gets the point about pride and prejudice, so does the reader. Good work, Jane.

Do all the developments of the action plot inevitably lead your main character to discover the point you have in mind? Or do the developments add up to something else?

If the answer is “something else,” you can change the plot, or you can change the point. That’s a decision you have to make.
I was working with a talented writer earlier this year on a novel that had great characters, a strong story, original magic–but something wasn’t connecting.
And finally I returned it to her and I just said “I’m sorry, but this seems flat to me. I’m not getting the point you’re trying to make.”
She told me that point—her thesis statement--and we put it together: The problem was that her main character knew that truth from the beginning
So the novel wasn’t about her discovering the truth, but just a constant reinforcement of that truth

which wasn’t as interesting since it wasn’t a change

So the author went back and changed her point to fit the story, I think. And she’s revising the book along those lines.

If you have a rash of subplots—what is the point of each of the subplots? Do they support or offer variations on the theme set forth in the thesis statement? Or do they have nothing to do with that thesis statement? Do any of the points repeat each other?
Now if you can’t create this thesis statement right off, if you didn’t have a vision for the book particularly when you started it or you can’t say what it’s about now . . .

Well, sit down and sort that out.
What ideas in the book get you most excited? Which conflicts thrill you most? Or which characters interest you most? What inspired the book in the first place? Come back to that, and see if you can use that to help you winnow down your material and find yourself a point.
After all, as Sherlock Holmes says, “It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.”
That’s really the point of the point exercise—to figure out what’s the most vital thing you need to communicate to your readers, so you can concentrate building your story around that.

With SO TOTALLY EMILY EBERS, Arthur and I felt strongly that the book was about trust.

To quote from our first editorial letter for the book, “how you can trust others, and then what happens when they prove untrustworthy; and trust in yourself and who you are, no matter how others fail you or make fun of you.”
So we used that word as our guide in checking over the plot

First making sure that Emily’s level of trust in each character was firmly established for the reader, and why she had reason to trust them so
Then knocking them down one by one—which ended with the confident Emily losing trust in herself.
And then seeing how she acted when that trust was gone
And how she rebuilt her relationships after that.

I found out later that Lisa’s guiding word for the book was “abandonment,” which is the betrayal of trust, so we seem to have gotten it right.

You remember, way back before I started digressing on outlines and thesis statements, that I said I was reading the manuscript. Then I told you my reasons for doing so based on theory—the story and the point.
Coming back to practice: Once I’m done with that reading, I sit down and immediately write out my first impressions: what stuck out most in my mind, what was terrific, what needed work.

Please look at handout #6 from the Word document: My freewriting notes on the first draft of SO TOTALLY EMILY EBERS.

Like all of Lisa’s novels, Emily Ebers is a book about relationships, and the plots are in the relationships
So you can see I talk about relationships first thing: That the Millicent-Emily relationship wasn’t working for me. Why? It seemed dutiful rather than truly felt.

I take these notes and the analysis I did of the story and the point, and I keep thinking about and writing about and refining those things until I have a coherent list of problems and suggestions.
At this point, I often try to call or have lunch with the author to discuss these things now that I’ve thought them through

This is great because I get to hear the direction they’re thinking, their answers to these questions

And then I turn my notes and their responses into an editorial letter.

The goal of an editorial letter (especially on the first draft) is to confirm and refine the Big Things: What this story is about, who the major characters are, how the central Action Plot works.
I try to identify the problems I see and sometimes offer solutions, though sometimes I leave the author to work it out for herself.

I believe the great detective has a word for us here: “In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.”

What was one of the key problems I identified in my first notes on EMILY? (Millicent and Emily didn’t seem to be connecting.)
But what is the point of the book? What is it about? (Trust.)
Therefore Emily and Millicent have to connect for the plot to work.
So reasoning backward from that . . . how do we make them connect?

As friends have connected through time immemorial
Conversation and emotions—Lisa showed more of the dialogue between Millicent and Emily, particularly some moments that showed Millicent’s vulnerability
A common enemy—Lisa beefed up the character of Julie, the witchy volleyball captain, and made her teasing of both Emily and Millicent more prominent
Shared activities—you remember that the outline mentioned scenes at the Rialto and the recycling plant? Lisa added those in the second draft.

They’re both cool things that Millicent introduces Emily to—thus reinforcing the idea that Millicent is a neat person to know

You can look at handout #7 from the Word document to see Arthur’s and my letter addressing these questions.

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