IWSG

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group (click on the badge above for the list) and connect with your fellow writers - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting!

March IWSG Day Question: Have you ever pulled out a really old story and reworked it? Did it work out?

Late, as usual. Sigh.

Since I'm still in the throes of rewriting Pismawallops PTA 3, I thought I'd go with the prompt for this month. (The editing is going well, thank you, but more slowly than I would like, as usual).

The question is actually kind of appropriate, because the first PPTA book was a substantial revision of an abandoned draft. I'm not sure I'd call it *really* old, but it had been in the drawer for 6 or 7 years, I think, when I decided to take a look and see if it had any hope. I consulted with an editor, and between us we decided that I should try.

One advantage of editing something that has been on ice for multiple years is that you really can look at it objectively.  I'm not sure how many years it takes to be able to read a story or novel with little to none of the baggage you carry around in your head when writing it for the first time, but that was what I was able to do. 

With that perspective, I could rewrite characters to be more believable, and to have their own voices. I could also work out motivations more clearly, so that the murder made more sense and characters behaved more reasonably.

From that experience, though I've never tried it with a short story, I'd say that putting a project that isn't quite working into pickle for months or years might be helpful. In point of fact, I pretty much let all my rough drafts stew for around a year--my procedure is to draft a novel, put it aside to revise an older work to the point of submission to beta readers and editors, work on final edits to yet a 3rd project, and move back to the rough draft only when at least one of those other works is out the door. For me, the longer between first draft and further work, the better--at least, up to a point. 

I just don't know where that point is, yet.

How about you? Any experience with resurrecting the dead--dead stories, that is?

E: Editing

 

This month, Saturdays are time to talk about writing!  And since today is the letter E. . . let's talk about EDITING, even though that's sort of starting at the wrong end. Hey, I didn't invent the alphabet.

Since I've been in editing mode a lot lately, I've thought about it a lot (mostly while trying to avoid actually doing it).  So here are my three main things you need to know about editing.

1.  Revision, rewriting, editing and proof-reading are all different things and every piece of writing needs them all (to a greater or lesser degree).  Re-vision: to see again.  Really big-picture changes.  Re-write: make the changes, big and small, that make the text read well.  Edit: clean up all the awkwardness and excess adverbs and little words you love to overuse.  Proof-reading is what you do the last thing before you submit the MS, to catch every typo.

1a.  Why can't you do your own proof-reading, even if (like me) you are pretty good at it and can proof someone else's MS to near-perfection?  I knew the answer to this and went ahead and did it anyway, just to prove the point.  Two reasons: first, you are too familiar with the text.  You've read it 20 times, and you will see what you expect to see.  And second, the author will always want to tinker.  Tinkering introduces new errors.  I've uploaded a corrected version of Death By Ice Cream, after a friend found far too many errors (not awful ones, but more than I want and enough to make me a bit embarrassed).   So, again: do not attempt to be your own proof-reader!

2.  If you haven't read your book aloud, you haven't finished editing.

3.  No one is good enough to do all that alone.  Hire, bribe, or barter for a big-picture edit and a proof-reader.  Your readers will thank you.  Note: if this is a term paper we are talking about, it has to be your own work, but there's nothing to stop you bouncing ideas off friends, and proof-reading exchanges with classmates are completely legit. As is asking your mother to proof-read, if she'll do it (and if she spells better than you do).

And that's my word on editing.  Many of us love the rough-draft composition stage, and dread the editing phase of writing.  But after publishing three novels I can say: it gets easier. The feeling of taking an amorphous blob of text and molding (or beating) it into a well-formed piece of readable prose can be as great a high as the initial pouring forth of the idea.

 

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Voice: keeping it straight

Voice is, for me, one of the toughest things to get right.  For one thing, it's everywhere and it's plural.  The narrative voice is the biggie, since it runs through everything and had darn well better be consistent.  But every character has a voice, and each needs to be unique and right for that character.  I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to make everyone, up to and including my narrator, sound like me at my most ironic.  Needless to say, this is not always appropriate (though I gave the first-person narrator of Murder Stalks the PTA  permission to be the snarky cynic I sometimes feel like, and she's just fine, thank you).

Narrative voice is a character, just like any other.  What kind of character is determined in part by whether you choose to write in first person or in one of the various forms of 3rd person (or, I suppose, second person, but there are good reasons why that is uncommon).  But there are still so many variations, and like any other character, it develops as I write.  That means--yup--have to go back later and make it consistent.

You all know about the different kinds of narrators.  When it comes to voice, a first person narrator is an extension of a particular character, and the narrative voice should be consistent with (but not identical to--this part is a bit fuzzy) the conversational voice (and vocabulary) of that character.  It is also limited to what that person can see and know.  Thus, in The Ninja Librarian, the narrator (Big Al) can tell only what the Ninja Librarian does--never what he is thinking or why he does something, unless he explains (something he almost never does).  This allows me to keep the Librarian a bit of a mysterious presence--something I'd lose with an omniscient narrator.  Al must also use vocabulary  appropriate to the setting of the story.  Even with a first person narrator, however, the speech of other characters should be reported in their voices, not the narrator's.  Characters must still be distinct in their speech as they are in their actions.

The author will have to decide if the narrator will report the speech of more educated characters exactly as they say it--or as the narrator understands it.  So a child narrator might report the speech of an adult with mistaken words, to indicate the child's lack of understanding--but this, I suspect, should be used sparingly and deliberately, when the misunderstanding matters to the story.  Otherwise it's just cutesy (ick).

Third person narrators are divided into several types, which are described in just about any book on writing and I refuse to go into it all here.  I already told you that know all about it anyway. I'm interested in what that 3rd person sounds like.

Any form of third person narrator is typically written in a more neutral voice (for me, that means I have to go delete the wisecracks).  I think that the omniscient narrator who speaks aside to the reader about the characters and the action is not much used anymore, though it is not uncommon in older works, especially for children (Louisa May Alcott, for example, frequently breaks the 4th wall and addresses the reader directly with commentary on the behavior of the characters.  This reads today as a charming and anachronistic stylistic quirk, or annoying preachiness, depending on what she says and how you are feeling).  Whatever it sounds like, though, your narrative tone must be consistent.

Consistency is in fact the nub of what I'm talking about.  Big Al must always sound like Big Al.  The third person narrator of Halitor the Hero needs to be the same throughout, without changing level of diction or degree of insight into people's thoughts and motives.  This is harder than it sounds.  The temptation to use some clever turn of phrase can be overwhelming.  Go ahead if you must--but be sure to edit it back out later, when you've gotten over your cleverness.  Right now I am finding that Halitor's narrator is evolving a bit, and I'll have to make some decisions about levels of omniscience and involvement, then go back and edit until it all matches.  I'm pretty sure a 3rd-person narrator shouldn't evolve through a story (unlike a 1st-person narrator, who is expected to grow and change).

If you create a narrator who only observes, who is not allowed inside anyone's head, then proof very, very carefully for any place you wrote the words "he thought" or "she felt," because that violates the narrative voice you selected.  I am finding that it is pretty easy when writing in the first person to stay out of everyone else's head.  But I am writing Halitor the Hero with a third person narrator limited to peeking inside Halitor's head, and it feels slightly frustrating.  I want so often to comment on what another character is thinking or feeling.  I suspect it is very good discipline (and definitely good narration) to beat down the temptation.

As mentioned above, there is another aspect to voice: the voices of each individual character.  This one is really hard.  You have a whole zoo of characters, and while some are minor enough not to have any real personality (but I think that's probably another red flag requiring further editing--unless a character matters enough to have some individuality, what is her or she doing in the story?), in general each is going to need to be distinct from the others.  Manner of speech, tone, the things he or she will talk about.  Listen to the people around you.  No two sound alike, and I'm not talking about soprano vs. bass.  Different vocabulary.  Different tempi.  When you read your dialog aloud, can you tell who is speaking?  No?  Time for more revisions.

It's always time for more revisions.

I was going to write a bunch more about voice and how to get it right, but I think I'll just fall back on my #1 bit of revision advice: whether you are writing fiction, non-fiction, or even poetry, read it aloud.  When you say it and hear it, you will truly hear it.  I will also fall back on my assertion that I do not know what the heck I'm doing, except learning a whole boatload of stuff that they never taught me in those useless creative writing classes I took in school back in the Dark Ages.

Editing: the next step

So last week I was chugging away at editing Murder in the PTA, and feeling a little sluggish about managing to get through only 20 pages a day.

Turns out that was the fast and easy part.

See, what I was doing last week was working with a print-out of the MS, fussing with words and sentences, but when it came to things that needed big changes or completely rewriting, I would scrawl "fix this!" or "needs rewriting," or my favorite, "UGH!" in the margin and move on.

Now it's payback time.  Sitting in front of the computer, typing in those changes, I'll cruise along pretty well for a page or two (though even when doing simple changes, I read the whole thing as I go to see if anything else wants tweaking, so it's not all that fast).  Then I hit one of those evil marginal notes.  "Fix this?  How?  What the heck am I supposed to do about it?  And how DO I make this plausible?  Can I cut it entirely?" I grind to a halt.  Stare at the screen.  Shuffle through my pages and pages of notes about what needs modifying.  Ask myself again why I even wanted to try to beat this thing into a readable book (the answer, for those who care, is that I love the characters and their home on Pissmawallops Island).

Then I start typing.  And I realize that however hard it is, this is the part of editing that returns me to creativity.

I also realize that sometimes editing 5 pages a day is good progress.

So now I'm going to go all philosophical on you about writing and editing.  We writer-types get a lot of positive feedback from writing rough drafts.  You sit down, take up pen or keyboard (yeah, still undecided about that), and let the words flow. Out come 1000 words, 1500, and you get a cookie for being a good little writer.

Editing is completely different.  Sometimes the greatest progress is represented by the fewest pages completed.  I may hit a chapter that's pretty good as is and I can zip through it, change a word here and a sentence there, and think I'm really cruising.  But I haven't actually done much.  It's when I hit the rough patches, the "fix this!!!" parts, that I have to really write.

Here's the philosophical part.  I used to be a trail-runner (long story about why I don't get to do that any more, never mind).  When running trails, particularly in hilly country, the first thing you have to do is dump your idea of what your pace is.  Yeah, sure, I'm an 8-minute mile runner.  On the flat.  But when grinding up a steep, rough trail, the pace drops.  Twelve-minute, 15-minute miles. . . it's good.  A completely respectable pace, because you're climbing like crazy and gravity is a very powerful force determined to keep you at the bottom of the hill.  So you change your mindset.  You put yourself in a place where a completely different definition of speed holds sway.  Heck, it's a completely different definition of running.  One that says that as long as you are moving forward at all, up that giant, rock-strewn mountain, you're fantastic.

That's what real revision is.  A place where maybe you take all day to make two or three pages work right.  And you are happy, because it took you only one day to turn two or three pages of dreck into sparkling, witty prose (or just readable prose.  Sometimes the goal has to be truly modest.  It can learn to sparkle on another day).  And you stand on your little pile of two or three pages, and you are the winner of the New York Marathon.

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For those who are wondering, I'm past that stage with Return to Skunk Corners, and hoping soon to get it back from my editors (you reading this, Lisa & Emily?) and put on the final polish.  Hope to have a cover to reveal soon, too!  Meanwhile. . . having fun with a little murder and mayhem, and starting a new kids' book to keep me out of trouble.


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On another note--jump over to author S. W. Lothian's gorgeous web site to get all the details on the 14-book Middle Grade sampler, Love Middle Grade, Actually, free on Amazon from Feb. 7-11.  Read it and enter to win a Kindle, gift cars, and ebooks!

Pen vs. Keyboard

So here it is, the biggest question faced by every 21st-Century writer: do I write in longhand (or, in my case, a nearly unreadable scrawl developed out of years of note-taking and an utter inability to master cursive*)?  or do I boot up the computer, try to ignore the mind-sucking siren call of the internet, and draft my next book on the keyboard?

Advantages of the pen:
1.  Engages the whole body with the brain and makes me think a little differently.  Slows me down, makes me think before I write.
2.  I can haul my little notebook everywhere, and write in any spare moment.  I actually do this, often better than I do sitting at home during my designated writing time.
3.  Typing it into the computer so I can edit is an editing process in itself and a good way to jumpstart each day's writing.
4.  I'm not sure there is a #4.

Disadvantages of the pen:
1.  I may not be able to read what I wrote.
2.  I can't write for very long before my hand cramps up.
3.  I can't write as fast as I can type, or think (see Advantage #1).
4.  It all has to be typed anyway before I can edit.

Advantages of the keyboard:
1.  I can type really fast, so it encourages me to write lots and get it out when the ideas are flowing.
2.  I can read what I wrote.
3.  It corrects my spelling/typing as I go, or at least tells me it needs correcting.
4.  It's automatically saved and backed up.

Disadvantages of the keyboard:
1.  I can type really fast, so it encourages me to write lots without stopping to think.
2.  I can't easily haul it around and write wherever I happen to be.
3.  It distracts me from writing by telling me that I can't type/spell.  I can so.  I'm just in a hurry.
4.  I think differently at the keyboard, and once written, it all looks so nice and pretty, it must be good.
5.  (This one is big): My keyboard is connected to my computer which is connected to the Internet.  I'll just read one more article. . . .

So what is my decision?  Back and forth, some of each.  In other words, I can't make up my mind. Anyone else have notebooks with chunks of stories, missing the bits that were drafted at the computer?

*Cursive (n): a style of writing named for the cursing that children do while learning it and teachers do while teaching it.  Writers also curse while trying to read it, especially their own, especially when written while lying half upside down and overdosed on caffeine.

Drowning in words

Dorothy Sayers said it, and I heartily agree: "The rereading of one's own works is usually a dismal matter" (Gaudy Night).  Even the bits that you can see are really pretty good have a great deal less shine to them than they did when they were new.

And why, you ask, this spirit of disheartened eloquence?  Because, like thousands who "won" NaNoWriMo, I am struggling with the revision of a novel that isn't quite there yet.  Unlike the NaNers, mine isn't fresh, but rather a book abandoned about five years back when I couldn't interest an agent in it.  Now, it's better than five-year-old fish--the book doesn't stink--but five years is long enough to let me see it as an editor might, which is rather harsher than the casual reader, I suspect.

Thus the "dismal matter."  But here's the thing: if I don't push through the dismalness (did I just make that word up?  The spell-checker thinks so), my book will never be more than mediocre.  So I'm rereading, outlining, making notes of what works and what doesn't, all preparatory to heavily revising a manuscript that I have already revised two or three times.  And, of course, getting some distance and reading it like an editor will make for a better book.

Does this make me happy?  Frankly, no.  This is the work side of writing, and not much fun. Oh, there are occasions when the realization that you've figured out how to make something that was just okay into something good is as exciting as was composing the crappy first draft.  But most of the time, it hurts a little.  "Dang," you think.  "I loved that scene.  But it really doesn't work.  Not unless I figure out a way to get the dog out of there, and I already made such a big deal about the dog never leaving the girl's side."  So out goes the scene.  Or days are spent in dealing with the dog, only to decide that your changes ruin something else, and the scene gets the chuck after all. (I made that up, so when the book comes out, please don't go looking for a girl and a dog and writing me snippy letters when you can't find them.)

This painful reality explains the sudden burst of short-story writing I've indulged in.  I can only edit for so long before I need a creative booster shot, and have to write something.  So, coming up next week: "An Elegant Apocalypse," just in time for the end of the world on December 21st.  You know, just in case.

Random Absurd Theories

Revisions are on track!  I've finished the first rewrite, aside from some typing.  Bouncing between that and my activities aimed at getting a bond measure passed for our suffering local schools has me exhausted but feeling like I'm at least doing something.

So, for amusement, I'll offer some of the random thoughts that occupy my brain at off moments.  Sometimes, just for fun, I like to invent absurd theories to explain things.  Here we find a few:

Pay the Gravity Bill  There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin discovers his Dad didn't pay the gravity bill, and he floats away.  Well, it turns out that after a certain age, if you forget to pay the gravity bill. . . they turn UP the gravity.  Way up.  This explains those days when working out is just torture.  You didn't pay the bill, you get to suffer.

Too Many Athletes in Colorado  The reason there isn't enough oxygen for a good run in Colorado is that there are too many athletes and they have sucked all the oxygen out of the air.

Kids' energy supplies  We figured this one out well over a decade back.  Kids have separate stores of energy for different things.  For hiking, one source, and not a very big one.  For playing: some other, nearly infinite, source.  You arrive in camp after a three-mile hike with your 8-year-old so exhausted he can't even set his pack down, has to drop it with a crash in the dirt.  Two minutes later he's running up a mountain in pursuit of whatever it is that kids run up mountains to pursue, and doesn't stop until you force him to.
Corollary:  Kids get their energy by sapping it directly from their parents.  Ask any mother of toddlers.

Today you're a dophin, tomorrow a sea slug  Okay, this one isn't a theory.  More of an observation.  It's based on my swimming workouts, but the same thing is true for any kind of workout.  When a swim goes really well, I say I'm a dolphin--swimming smoothly and easily and could go on forever (or at least for a mile).  But other days, I'm lucky if I'm a sea cow, ponderous but not ungraceful.  I'm just as apt to end up a developmentally-disabled sea slug, whose limbs (do sea slugs have limbs?  Never mind) pay no attention to commands from the brain (I don't think sea slugs have brains, either. This may be the problem).  Anyway, it's generally true that if on Wednesday I'm a dolphin, on Friday I'm nearly certain to be. . . something less desirable. 

For biking, I guess you could say that if on one ride I feel like the winner of the Tour (ha!), the next ride I could be ridden into the ground by an Edwardian spinster on a one-speed with a wicker basket and a giant hat.

All of this may, of course, be related to theory #1, about not paying the Gravity bill. 

NaNoWriMo

What the heck.  Everyone else is talking about it, so I might as well too.  The month is November, and the title stands for National Novel Writing Month.  It's an interesting concept--get together (virtually, of course) with all the people who are always saying they are going to write a novel, and commit to producing a draft (or some 50,000 words, anyway) in one month.  Clear the decks and make it a priority, presumably except when actually stuffing yourself on Thanksgiving turkey.  Have a website where people can log their progress and offer each other support.

So I'm intrigued by the idea, especially as all my novels have been written over the course of not days and weeks, nor even months, but years.  I have always shoehorned a bit of writing in here and there, right up to this year, when I committed to getting the second Ninja Librarian novel out in a year, which means working at it like I mean it, but still has let me take about eight months for a draft, (leaving four for revisions, though some revising has happened as I go, whenever I just don't have a new story in me).  Compressing that into a single month would mean taking a very different approach to my writing--not scheduling it in when other commitments allow, but putting aside other commitments to make writing my primary job.

To be honest, I'm not sure I could do it.  For one thing, some of my commitments are, well, things to which I'm committed.  I can't blow them off for a month.  I could still work around that--many people do NaNoWriMo while working full time.  I can only assume that they blow off commitments to family (if any), exercise, and sleep.  My writing matters to me.  But my family and my health, I cannot deny it, matter more.  I'm not very creative when sleep-deprived anyway.

Then there's the matter of sitting still.  How do they do it?  If I stay at my desk or computer for more than a half hour at a stretch, I get so stiff I'll probably never move again.  I fidget a lot, and I mix writing with housework to avoid petrification.  That works for me, but probably will never allow for 50,000 words in 30 days.  But who knows.  Maybe another year. . . because an awful lot of this sounds like excuses.  I am growing very suspicious of all the reasons why I can't write more.

Still, I won't be participating in NaNoWriMo this year.  I may make November revise-a-novel-in-one-month time, however (a far more painful project).  I'm on track to finish my first draft within a week or so, and will be working hard to beat it into its final form before the New Year is very old.  Given the impact of the December holiday season on my ability to find time to write, November looks like a good month for rewrites.  I have to be sure to give my readers and editors plenty of time, too.  They'll be working on it at the same time I am, but they have lives too.  Then I have to put it all together.  Writing a draft is only the beginning. 

But it's a darn good beginning.

Maybe next year.