Is your manuscript complete, or is it finished? by Jason Black

The other day I finished one of Michael Crichton’s lesser-known works, Pirate Latitudes. I’m a sucker for pirate stories. It’s one of his lesser-known works for a couple of different reasons. One, it was published after he died in 2008. Two, honestly, it’s not very good. As we’ll see, though, those are the actually same reason just in different guises.

Now I’m not here to rag on Michael Crichton. The guy could write, and there isn’t a thriller writer I know who wouldn’t kill to have a list of mega-hit works like The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Disclosure, plus film and TV credits like Twister and ER.

But Pirate Latitudes is never going to be cited on Crichton’s greatest hits list, and I suspect he knew this. According to the inside back-cover text on the copy I read, it was found as a complete manuscript in his papers after his death, and subsequently published. According to Crichton’s assistant, Pirate Latitudes was one of the last books he worked on.

Now, Michael Crichton was a very experienced writer, more or less at the top of his game, so if he chose to write a pirate yarn, you’d expect it to be a ripping-good one. Yet, the story is definitely not as tight or well defined as any of his other works that I’ve read and/or seen. It’s clear to me that he knew it was complete, but not finished. He had the bones of this story down, but he knew he wasn’t really done with it. And it shows.

The premise is straightforward. English privateers, a Spanish treasure galleon, you do the math. What’s wrong with the plot Crichton drew from that premise? A bunch of stuff. Here’s the feedback I would have given him if I’d had the chance to critique Pirate Latitudes before it went to press. And yes, spoiler alert:

• Captain Hunter is introduced too late. The manuscript dithers around for 20 pages or so, in a minor character’s point of view, before that character recruits Hunter for the raid on the Spanish Galleon. Already, this diminishes Hunter as protagonist, since the genesis of the main plot doesn’t come from him. Because the plot involves an act that is just this side of outright piracy, consider how it might play if Hunter had learned of the Galleon first, and had gone to a less-corrupt Sir Almont for his Letter of Marque. That would give him an obstacle to overcome right out of the gate. Those 20 pages could have been spent at least in part by exploring Hunter’s personal motivations for going after Cazalla, which would be enough to allay any potential concerns readers might have about Hunter being too eager to push the bounds of legal maritime escapades.


• In my opinion, the antagonist was killed off way too soon. The first half of the book spends considerable time setting up Cazalla as a truly despicable antagonist. But then Hunter dispatches him with anticlimactic ease at the first real opportunity, leaving a void of opposition for the second half of the book. This forces the story to introduce a succession of necessarily lesser villains—Bosquet and Hacklett—who provide a lot less dramatic tension than Cazalla. Consider how it might play if Cazalla survives the encounter with Hunter, or turns out to be somehow in league with Hacklett, or something like that.


• The plot lacked significant surprises and twists. The notable exception was the capture of the Cassandra by Cazalla, but this was one instance alone and not enough by itself to overcome the plot’s predictability. Clearly, Sanson’s betrayal of Hunter was intended to be a twist, but wasn’t set up correctly. Ideally a twist makes perfect sense but leaves readers wondering how they never saw it coming. In Sanson’s case, I never saw it coming but when it came it made no sense. My immediate reaction was closer to “but Sanson wouldn’t do that!” More work is needed to establish that the twist was something he might do.


• The plot lacked sufficient unexpected obstacles and setbacks for Hunter and his crew. Basically nothing goes wrong with Hunter’s whole plan up through the taking of the galleon. It’s was just too easy. Throughout, nobody died who wasn’t a redshirt. The only notable exception was when Cazalla captured them all, but I couldn’t help but notice how easily Hunter and crew escaped through the cliché mechanism of drunk and incompetent guards. Further, that the escape itself was engineered by Sanson—rather than Hunter figuring out how to escape on his own—put Hunter in a passive role that diminished him as a protagonist.


• The minor characters tend to vanish, as though they have been put into stasis, until they are needed. Notably, Sarah Almont goes wholly unseen and unremarked upon for a lengthy stretch after they take the galleon. There’s all this stuff going on around her, which she would be mightily impacted by, so the lack of her in those scenes stuck out at me as a glaring omission.


• Following the capture of the galleon, the plot felt very episodic rather than well integrated. It was a succession of unrelated high seas predicaments, with Hunter and crew bouncing along from one to the next, rather than a set of interwoven sub-plots. It felt very much like you had a checklist of stuff you wanted to include, and when the list was done you suddenly fast-forwarded back to Port Royal. You could cut everything between the destruction of Bosquet’s ship and the return to Port Royal without anyone missing it.


• Some of those high seas episodes strained my credulity over-much. Sea monsters? Really? Leave the fantasy piratical elements to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Krakens have no place in a true historical novel.


• The ending felt rushed. After dealing with Hacklett, the book just ends. There is no real denouement or emotional payoff for the characters. The characters are not re-directed into the next phase of their lives, they are given not so much as a paragraph in which to divide their shares of the booty, nothing. It just ends with a checklist epilogue to say what became of everyone in later years.

In their generalities, if not in their particulars, these are all issues I regularly see in my clients’ manuscripts. Whether you are heartened or disheartened to know that even a guy like Michael Crichton dealt with the very same things is up to you, but that’s the truth. I see this stuff all the time.

Again, the point is not to rag on Michael Crichton. The point is, we’re not as done as we think we are.

All of us, we work on our novels to the best of our ability. Of course we do. We revise and rewrite and slave over line edits until our works are the best we can make them and at last we dare share them with others. But even so, chances are we’re not as done as we think we are. The manuscript may be complete, but it probably isn’t finished.

The difference between Jurassic Park and Pirate Latitudes is that for the dinosaurs, Crichton obviously dealt with those plot problems. I don’t know whether he had a critique group of fellow powerhouse thriller writers to look over his stuff, or a trusted editor at Alfred A. Knopf, or maybe his agent, but clearly somebody combed through Jurassic Park to help him find all the misplaced, loose-threaded, or just plain goofy stuff in the story so he could fix it. Because at least to the limits of my memory, Jurassic Park is tight.

Given enough time, anybody can complete a novel. Finishing one is a lot harder, and rare is the writer who can do it without help. So get some help. Find somebody with a good eye for plot who can show you what you can’t see for yourself. After all, if you can’t see it, you can’t fix it.