Written in My Mind: When to Edit

Question:

"I want my first lines to be perfect. I've written 20k, and I've planned out the whole story in my mind. I know the tone I want to set and what my key themes will be. Will you help me?"

Answer:

Um, no. Because a) I'm too lazy to waste time and effort on b) something that will invariably be re-fixed later on.

It's easy to think my response is mean until you stop and think about it. Personally, critiquing someone else's work, even just a handful of sentences, takes a lot of time and effort. I'm a high school English teacher, so I do A LOT of critiquing - only it's called marking, and I mostly get paid for it. I also have very little time to devote to writing of any kind right now, all of which means, if I'm going to critique something non-school-related, I want to think that it's the ABSOLUTELY BESTEREST BEST the person can do themselves before I have at it - otherwise it feels like a total waste of time, or else that THEY are being lazy.

So what's wrong with the above situation? Why couldn't these first sentences be as perfect as the author can possibly make them before they finish writing the book? Because of one thing:

Plans change.

Have you heard the phrase, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy"? Substitute 'first draft' for enemy (although, let's face it, the resemblance is striking :P) and you'll have the motto that every writer needs tattooed on... well, the back of their hand would be more practical that their forehead, because hands are visible while writing, whereas faces, not so much. Unless, I don't know, you write with a mirror next to you, or your webcam open on your computer ;)

Because here's the thing: For most people, most of the time, it doesn't matter how much you pre-plan a story, something will always crop up as you're drafting that will surprise you. That's an awesome thing, and it's the whole reason for me why first drafts are fun - but it also means that you'll never really know what your beginning needs to encompass until you're done with the rest of your book.

Sure, you might think you know the plot, because you've written it out in your head, and you might think you know the precise tone that you want to convey - but what if you have a brilliant spark of inspiration halfway through writing that will work with what you planned, but subtlely shift the emphasis so the story is even deeper, even brighter, even better?

There's a really good reason the pros don't do more that a light polish on drafted chapters before they type 'The End'. Actually, reasons. 1) It means you haven't wasted time polishing something that you won't actually end up using (same reason why you should always do your structural edits before your line edits), and 2) it means you can avoid being caught in the mire of 'If I Can Just Get This Perfect, Then I Can Move On'.

I'm not saying editing before 'The End' is always terrible. In fact, as I pull out my old half-written draft of The Project, I'm planning on doing some edits. There's a subplot that I really need to weave into the early chapters so I can figure out how it impacts the later chapters, so I'm rereading my draft, doing light polish-line edits and inserting the three or four (I hope!) scenes that I need to build my subplot - and then I'll write the last third of the draft.

But the difference here is that 1) I've had this book shelved for over a year, and 2) wow, look at that, my plan didn't survive first contact. The story changed. And now I need to figure out how to change my plan to match.

Sure, people are going to disagree with my assessment, and I know people happy to swear that their plan won't change, they promise, because they've been imagining the story for years and they know it so well. Each to their own. Just don't expect a lot of people to be clamouring to help you line edit when you haven't finished the book ;)

(Incidentally, this is part of the reason why agents and publishers aren't interested in incomplete manuscripts from unknowns - they have no guarantee whatsoever that what they read will actually make it to the final draft, or that it will even be RELEVANT.)

Revelations

I had a revelation the other day - January the first, in fact, which is a Very Good Day for revelations.

For too many months, now, I've struggled to find drive and motivation in my writing. Why, really, did I need to write? My job was more fun than I expected it to be, and although it's often hard work, it is, really, quite cushy: great students, great colleagues, great hours, decent pay. Not a single person I know would fault me if I decided I wanted to walk away from writing and throw my energies into teaching.

Ultimately, no one cares if I write or not. Not really. And writing is hard, and all kinds of scary in ways that non-writers will never comprehend.

But here's the revelation:

If no one cares whether I write or not, then no one cares if I write badly. If no one cares, then I am free to write the worst verbal suckage in existence, even in 'edits', as long as I am having fun.

And that, my friends, is insanely, delightfully, liberatingly, uncomplicatedly good.

Yay.

The Joy of Editing

So, I discovered today why I like editing so much more than first drafts. I mean, I knew basically why I did, but today I added layers to that understanding :)

How did I make this discovery? I'm glad you asked :)

Liana has a great post up at the moment about types of first draft writers. She's beta reading a couple of novels right now, and they all have unique styles, and therefore unique flaws. I'm not specifically any of the novels she's talking about, but I am a Sparse Draft writer. Most definitely. My finished novels clock in at about 67k, which is way too short.

The funny thing is, as I'm writing I'm always paranoid that I'm being too wordy. When I did a few creative writing classes at university, my professor was always on at me for overwriting, and of course the speculative fiction genre seems to be uniquely plagued with info-dumps, and so it's been drummed into my head that less is more. So when I'm drafting, I'm almost deliberately being sparse.

Of course, I HATE first drafts, and being sparse could just be a good method of getting through them quickly...

But on to edits.

Because I'm a sparse draft writer, it means my edits are a lot more creative than they would be for, say, a too-much-fluff drafter where edits primarily consist of cutting things out, or for a enough-but-the-wrong-stuff writer, where edits consist of slashing things you like, even if you do get to creatively add stuff back in.

But for a sparse drafter, the edits are all creative. I'm adding stuff in, I'm layering - and in effect, I'm playing. With my world, with my characters, with my story... Editing is pure play, for me.

I hate drafting. It's rough, it's messy, it's illogical and full of holes and totally imperfect. It's creating the skeleton, which in the end looks ugly and mishappen and just barely functional.

I love editing. It's creative, it's fun, it's logical and works to fill in holes and create perfection. It's fleshing out the beast, giving it beauty and personality and life.

Editing? Yes. I love it.

So - what sort of drafter are you, and how does that affect which part of the process you prefer? Who of you prefers drafting to edits, and why? Honestly. I want to understand how someone can prefer drafting. And those of you who like edits - why? Similar reasons to mine, or totally different? Opinions, please!

Having Not Done Anything...

Lately, I've been really flat when it comes to writing. My stats for the month are terrible - less than four thousand words so far. I think I'm going through a general Isuckitis phase due to tiredness.

But I realised, the other night, that the real reason I've not written particularly on Jesscapades all month is not only due to a lack of time, but also to the fact that I've been avoiding it. How? Why? I think the problem is that I've lost faith in the story. I'm not sure I believe it's good at the moment; I hit that big wall at the end of Feb, where I nearly gave up on the project because it turned nasty on me. I figured out what I needed to do, of course (see pretty diagrams here), but it's going to be a lot of work. So between that, and the fact that I've lost faith, I've been avoiding it. And I'm not sure what to do to regain my faith in it, either, other than just sit down and write the horrid thing. I loathe drafting so much :S

However, the good news is, I've been doing a bit of work on short stories. Thanks to a couple or fabulous crits, I've fixed a couple I had in edits (Ice Wolf and Murder) and sent them out again. I'm also making progress on the new short, Death and Foxes. It's going to be long at first draft, maybe 5k, but I can probably shave at least 1k off that in edits.

Which brings me to my point. For the first two thirds of the month, I'd completely forgotten about this. It's an article I wrote a few months ago, titled 'Always Do Something'. In my avoidance of Jess, I'd been writing altogether, and we all know that habits snowball: the longer I didn't write, the harder it was to write.

So, I have a new goal. It's to write something everyday, on something. It doesn't matter what it's on, even if it's the start of a new story or just a creative description or something, as long as I'm exercising my writing muscles for at least 500 words a day. Muscles need to be exercised, or they atrophy, and I'd hate to lose all the progress I've made over the last year.

And this, I think, I can do.

Breakthrough

It’s been a while since I blogged (ha, I could so just end that sentence there!) about Holly Lisle’s Think Sideways course. Not because I fell out of love with it, not because it suddenly sucked – but because it went faster than I did. I ‘finished’ the course a month ago, and I’d read everything in it – but I hadn’t applied it.

Usually, it isn’t until you apply stuff that you get those gorgeous ‘Eureka!’ moments, where things crystallise and become clear, and you fall in love again.

Yup, it’s middle time. I’m a squeak away from the halfway point in Jesscapdes, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about my way of writing a novel, it’s that the closer I get to the ending, the more scenes ahead I need to have mapped out.

When I start writing, I’m pretty content to go with just a vague – ok, this, then maybe this, and probably this is what will change things in the middle, and it might end like that. By the end of act one (usually between 7 and 12 chapters in), I start outlining a few scenes ahead, so I always know what’s going to happen in the next handful of chapters.

By halfway, it’s time to break out the index cards and have a serious, midstream re-think. The story’s big enough to have gravity, it’s alive enough to have morphed away from my initial plan a little, and it needs tweaking. By now, there are things happening in the beginning which I just know won’t work with where the story needs to go – and I can’t move on until I’ve fixed them. Interestingly, Lisa Shearin shares how she hits a similar point at about 3/4s of the way through.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I go back and edit. If I did that, I’d never finish. I just pretend to edit. I redo the outline, so I know what the story ought to look like by this point, and I keep going. Now, to be honest, the middles section of the Think Sideways course was my least favourite, and for Jesscapdes I used a different model. But now that I’m there, now that I’ve plotted well past the middle and am sniffing the ending – well, my brain needs to know what it is.

So I broke out month five of Think Sideways, and got to work. And man, I am here to tell you, this is why I love this course. I spent a couple of hours yesterday working through the lessons on how to find your ending, and I am so excited. The day before, I hated my story. I hadn’t written in over a week, the story felt like rubbish, the ideas stale, the characters flat... I hated it with all the passion of being-stuck-in-the-middle-of-the-first-draft.

But thanks to Think Sideways and the lessons on story gravity (how to find all the promises you’ve made to the readers in the story) and on how to find the RIGHT ending for your story (pulling together all of those promises without being trite, or lame, or boring or predictable) – wow. I am so excited.

And I remember why I like themes: because even though I’m the one writing the story, I learn something about life every time. Today’s lesson, brought to you by the Theme of Jesscapades: There are some things in life you just have to fight, even if the rules say otherwise.

So, here’s to endings, and being over halfway through the book! *hefts glass* :)

PS - Hoorah! I finally have internet back on at home! Here's also to more regular blogging! :D

The Late 2008 - Shine in 2009

Like my cheesy title? *grin*

So, given it's what everyone else is doing*, I thought now would be a good time for my 2008 recap.

Raw stats first.

In 2008, I:

* wrote 161,207 words of fiction.
* finished a draft of TBAEO.
* did preliminary edits and replotting of TBAEO.
* worked on The Black Gates, then retired it at about chapter 5 - the plot Needs Work.
* started Logan. Wrote 10 chapters only to realise the story started at chapter 11. Put aside, as the MC was too boring.
* learned how to write short stories - hoorah! Total of 8 in various stages.
* edited my first 'proper' play. Wrote several others, including an 8 act one to be performed in a week's time.
* began The Project. Wrote half, outlined the rest, realised I hated the MC and put it aside.
* signed up to write a self-pubbed non-fic ebook, to be completed this month.
* began several MG novels for nano, none of which behaved, so they've been temporarily put aside.
* started Jesscapades, which I adore, and which at this point I'm planning to be my debut novel.

My main goals for the year were to make 10 submissions and have 3 complete manuscripts. Sadly, the year has been fraught with false starts, so I have only one :( As for submissions, I've done 12 :) So that's a success. Granted, a lot have been resubs, and I've had no bites yet though a couple of commendations and personalised rejections, but hey - I did more than 10 subs :) Rah!

Although on the one hand I feel like the year has been a bit of a failure - I haven't completed any novels that I'm happy with - on the other hand, my total word count is up by 60% on last year's count. And more importantly, I've learned a lot. Sure, I've had a lot of false starts - but I know why they were false starts, and each time, they've been for a different reason - which means I'm learning.

And now I've hit on a novel that I like, with a reasonably strong voice, a fun plot, a great MC... Mind you, I'm not halfway yet, so I'm hoping like mad that I like the book because it really is good (this is what the beta readers are saying) and not because I just haven't hit the wall yet (what my brain is saying).

So, this is what I've learned from each of my false starts this year:

1) TBAEO - not a false start, but something that DEFINITELY needs work before it can see the light of day. From this I learned perhaps my biggest lesson of the year - that I can finish a complete novel, and that I can dissect it and replot it to make it stronger.

2) The Black Gates - this is actually my first novel. I've been working on it off and on for years - and because of this, it's fraught with beginner mistakes - not least of which was a lack of original, interesting plot. I fixed that by introducing some great twists - but I'm yet to figure out how on earth it all goes together. It's not complex enough - but it's too complex. Gack.

3) Logan - heh. From this, I relearned the importance of having not only a strong MC, but one who has enough tension and internal conflict to drive the plot. Logan, the MC, was not strong enough to be a driving force - instead, he was someone who was driven, being forced and manipulated into making his decisions instead of reacting to the situation himself - and so he was boring. It was about now that I also realised that I didn't actually want to write traditional-style fantasy after all...

4) The Project. If TBAEO could be called an exercise in character development, then TP is its opposite: an exercise in plot. I set out to write this deliberately as a pot-boiler, simply to force myself to learn how to keep up the pace and tension, how to introduce stumbling blocks and small problems - in short, how to keep the middle from sagging. I succeeded pretty well, but unfortunately in doing so sacrificed character, and the MC turned into someone whom I didn't like, couldn't identify with, and just plain didn't want to write about.

5) The Edge and Gem series - I only made a tiny start on these at the beginning of Nano, but it reinforced for me the necessity of knowing your character's voice before writing the book.

6) Jesscapades. With luck, this one won't be a false start. So far (about 1/4 of the way in) it's got a great combination of character AND plot, and I'm excited to see just how much better this is than anything I've done before.

And that, my friends, was 2008. I know, I haven't talked about my goals for 2009 yet - but to be honest, I can't really get my head around the idea of new goals until this big camp (Jan 16-24) is over, and the dog book is written. I'll think about goals, and post them either in the final week of Jan, or in early Feb.

In the meantime - what's the biggest thing you learned in 2008?


* I was going to do it anyway. It just seemed like a good excuse O:)

Following a Weathered Outline...

So, you'll have to excuse the multitude of puns in today's title O:) Puns, you ask? What puns? Ahh. Bear with me but a moment, and I shall reveal all *looks wise and knowing*

Firstly, following: I'm sure a lot of you are aware, but blogger has developed this nifty little concept called 'following', whereby you can elect to follow a blog and thence have it appear on your blogger dashboard, conveniently letting you check all blogs you're following at once, and see at a glance who's updated and who hasn't. Consider this your official *poke* to FOLLOW MEEEEEEE! :) There's a handy link over there in the sidebar, right below Works In Progress, if you'd like to become a follower.

(As an aside, don't you just love how secret-cult-shall-rule-the-world that sounds? Hello, everyone, this is my blog, and these are my followers......)

Next, weather. This is completely unrelated to the blog, but it's just so jolly unfair I feel compelled to mention it. I live in Australia. AUS-TRA-LI-A. It is November. NO-VEM-BER. This, dear weather gods, means it's nearly Summer. This is NOT the appropriate time to start dumping the best snow of the year. \:|

Right. Which brings me to outlines, and the following of them :D As every tactician knows, no plan survives first contact with the enemy; and as every writer knows, no outline survives first contact with the story.

When I started writing The Project, I had a vague idea of where it was going, and that was all. It didn't matter too much: the entire object of writing it was an exercise in plot, in learning to race from one troublesome situation to whatever problem my muse came up with next. But there came a point when the time travel and multiple subplots got the better of me, and I outlined. Just one sentence per scene, in a pretty little table in a word document.

It was good enough to get me through to over halfway, but naturally, it couldn't remain intact. So, when I decided to start rewriting TP in order to get the characters right, since I knew the plot and twists etc, I broke out my outlining tools to give the book a bit more oomph, and to make sure I had everything covered. Hence, it's my weathered outline ;) It's weathered the storm of most of a first draft, and is still a bit rough (weathered, ha ha) around the edges! Gwa! *is proud of puns* O:)

This is the complete outline:



Yeah, I know, you can't see a thing. If you could, though, what you'd see would be something like this:



That's nice, you say, but what does it all mean? Well, each card has a sentence on it (roughly; work with me here ;)) that corresponds to a scene. The letter in the circle at the top right of each card is the POV; the green stripe or lack thereof at the top left indicates to me which timeline the card is in (past, present or future). The colours down the right hand side indicate which plot threads the scene relates to, selected from the following:



Don't know if you can read that or not, but it basically says pink is developing sympathy for the girl, blue is solving the mystery (the main thrust of the story), yellow is revealing past events, orange is a third party subplot, and purple is 'Angela', the second POV character.

So, why did I go to all the effort of writing this down on cards, and colour-coding, etc? Isn't that an awful lot of work for something that - again - may not survive first contact?

Well, yes... But no. Writing out the outline like this* has lots of advantages. Firstly, there's the visual aspect - you can see everything at once, all out in front of you, and it's dead easy to pick up the cards and shuffle them around and see what happens to your timeline - and your story. All sorts of connections can be formed that you'd never have found otherwise.

Secondly, you can immediately identify the weak spots in the plot: sentences that drag, that have no conflict, or that are just plain boring are usually indicative of scenes that do the same. Conflict is the meat of any writing, and this is a quick way to spot places you might be lacking.

Thirdly, the whole colour-coordination thing: subplots. Unless you're writing YA, MG, or really short books, you absolutely need subplots. My current wip, Jesscapades, has no less than 11 plot strands at present. And the easiest way I've found to keep track of them all is colour coding. Once again, it's a visual thing: you can see it all there in front of you, and you can tell at a glance how much of the book is devoted to which plot threads, places where perhaps you've ignored a thread for too long, and places where you might be able to introduce a new one - or even ways which you can combine threads if you have too many for the book you're writing. It's also a great way to make sure you've tied up all your threads. That's what the big black dot on card 35 above means: I've tied off plot threads pink and purple.

Not everyone likes outlining, and most outlines end up looking nothing like the finished book. But that doesn't mean there's no use for them, as I hope I've demonstrated. And not only can you use this to do a check of how you're going, getting the cards out and shuffling them around can be a great way to unstick yourself if the story feels like it's getting out of hand; a handful of white squares seems so much more manageable than nebulous story concepts colliding in your head.

So, do you outline? Why or why not? How far do you go? And would you ever consider this method?

* If you're a pantser, who absolutely cannot outline before writing, consider using this method for editing and revising instead. If you're an outliner, you can use this method then too.

Unsticking The Project

Yes, you're getting an overload of posts this week :) I do hope that's okay with you. I'm running on the theory that it's making up for all the weeks I've missed posts O:)

It's about now that I'm due to do a Think Sideways: Month Three review. I'll do that properly some time next week, but for now, I need to squee a bit :D

For the last month, I have been majorly stuck on The Project. I've forced a few chapters out, because I felt I should, but I'm well and truly in the mire of the middle. I'm sick of the whole thing: the plot seems contrived, the characters I know are thin, and I just can't see the point of plugging through the first draft when the final product is going to be so rubbish.

Enter Think Sideways, week 13.

The title, most appropriately, is "Can't I Just Kill Them All? How To Fall In Love With Your Novel A Second Time." Boy, was this what I needed this week.

Oddly, one of the main things I got out of it was something I've read before in Holly's free workshops; but it's something that bears repeating. If you're stuck, it's usually for a reason; listen to what your muse is trying to say.

In my case, dear Musey is sick of writing about characters that neither of us like or care about. Heather is flat, boring, and undeveloped. I knew that. This story was an exercise in creating a plot (much like TBAEO turned out to be an exercise in character), and I realised very early on that I had no idea who Heather was; but I kept writing anyway.

Now, in the mirey middle, that strategy isn't working any more.

But now, thanks to Think Sideways, I know how to fix it. I know how to retrace my steps to the point where things were last working well, and I know how I'm going to write the ensuing chapter differently this time.

And this time, it's going to work.

I think I might just have fallen in love again :)

Always Do Something - Another Reason To Nano

If you're looking for one more reason to do Nano, here it is. In their book Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland discuss the principle of quantity over quality. The relevant bit is quoted on the webpage, and goes like this:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. "

Right now, I'm struggling through a first draft. I HATE first drafts with a passion that sometimes makes me wonder why I'm doing this whole writing thing. First drafts SUCK because they are never, ever, EVER perfect - and I'm a perfectionist.

When we're stuck in the quagmire of an imperfect first draft - or caught in the death grips of editing, for those of you that hate that bit of the process - it's so easy to lose sight of what we love about writing. It's so easy to fall back into the default position - everything I write is terrible, I'm no good at this, I think I'll quit.

Don't. Quit.

Every word you write, every sentence you think, every scene you bash your head against the desk over - everything you read over later and wonder what you were on at the time... It's Something. It's Practice. You're Learning.

Quantity. To improve, you must practice. And practice means volume.

Go. Write. Do something.

This Week: A TP Update

Hello, everyone! I'm officially back! Very happy to be here again :)

Rest assured, I'm working on some more meaty articles to feed to you soon, but I thought that in the meantime I'd kick the week off with a nice, easy update.

Basically, the middle ten days of June were out of action for exams and assessment. Thankfully, that is all over and passed and went much better than expected (though this is usually the case, so you'd think I'd learn to raise my expectations!), and now I can use the last ten days of June for writing again. Ah, such symmetry! :D

Possibly the biggest news is that I'm thinking of entering a competition for a manuscript assessment. The only catch (besides trying to 'describe creatively' what makes my manuscript stand out from the rest in under 100 words *pulls face*) is that I don't actually have a manuscript. So I'm making a mad dash and aiming to get TP finished by the end of July. I'm currently just shy of 18,000 words, so that's another ~65,000 words in a little over four weeks. Can we all say 'eek!'?

Really, though, I can't wait to have the draft finished. I want to know what the story is /about/, already, and how it's going to work.

What?! (I can hear the screams from here.) You don't know what it's about?

:D

Yes, I know what it's about. But only in general terms. I love this description of the writing process that Lisa Shearin posted:

First drafts are for learning what your novel is about. Revisions are for working with that knowledge to enlarge or enhance an idea, or reform it.

I love it. But it also means that trying to figure out what makes my story 'stand out' is jolly difficult without a complete first draft. Unfortunately, I only have until July 4 to enter the competition... And I don't think I'm going to have a full draft by then.

However, I am aiming for 5 chapters a week, and another 10 chapters should put me nearly at the middle of the book. So that should give me at least something more to work with than I have now :D

Wish me luck!