The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: revision

  • Reread, Revise, Repeat

    The truth is I have very little idea what I’m doing.

    I came into NaNoWriMo a little bit of a cheat. I had a novel that I’d already spent a lot of time on, and I wanted to finish it, so I used NaNo to do so. Since then, I’ve been letting it cool. I am a big believer in the advice that after completing a manuscript you should get a little distance from it before you dive back into editing.

    The idea is you’re trying to see your story with fresh eyes. If you’re like me, the time away also gives you the opportunity to stop hating your characters. By the end of my novel, I was barreling toward the finish line because I didn’t want to spend one more day with those people in my head. I loved them when I created them, but familiarity does indeed breed contempt, and the gang and I had spent far too much time together.

    Since completing the manuscript, I’ve sent it out to some beta readers, and I’m just now beginning to get some notes. They’ve been mainly positive, but there are also a lot of good suggestions for improvement.

    (more…)

  • There Ain’t No Road Too Long

    Everything I need to know, I learned from Follow That Bird.
    Everything I need to know, I learned from Waylon.

    I had never heard of the concept of a zero draft before I started hanging out with The Confabulators. It is a nice idea. The zero draft  gives you permission to write garbage and worry about sorting it into recyclable materials later. However, I’ve never had an issue with my willingness to write garbage. The term isn’t that helpful, and honestly, I find it to be a bit cutesy.

    Personally, I don’t ascribe numbers to drafts. There is no first, second, third, fourth, etc. There is only “in-progress” and “completed.” Think of it long the lines of a Claude Levi-Strauss binary opposition (come on, linguists, I know you are out there). How do I know it is in-progress? Because, it isn’t completed. But, how will I know when it is completed? Because, it won’t be in-progress anymore. Numbering drafts just makes me self-conscious if the number is too small or two large. I don’t like giving my writing a stigma just because one story took me twelve drafts and another was finished with a spelling check. The journey determines the road. Sometimes you are just going out for a drive. Sometimes, you pack a lunch. (more…)

  • Forgive me, Padre

    Forgive me, Padres, for I have sinned. And I will continue to sin, throughout the month of November.

    My confession?

    I edit. During NaNoWriMo.

    I edit every single day. Sometimes more than once. I probably spend as much time editing during November as I do writing.

    There. I said it.

    Now, let me explain. (shh, Padre, shh. You can assign me my act of penance later. First, an explanation for my awful behavior. The other parishioners can wait, dammit!)

    I have tried, over the last seven years, to adhere to the mantra (as an aside: there are virtually no rules in NaNoWriMo beyond 50k in 30 days. But there ARE suggestions, and some are more zealously encouraged than others. This is one of those) “DO NOT EDIT.” You will see these sagely words of wisdom repeatedly and with various means of emphasis during NaNoWriMo.

    The reasoning behind this school of thought is that your inner editor is, in almost every case, a man/woman with his/her hand on the brake lever, ready at any moment to pull a Full Stop on your writing progress. And, in the process, scream epithets in your ear about the utter uselessness and awfulness of your writing efforts during November.

    To wit: your inner editor is an asshole.

    So, during NaNo, where the goal is 50k in 30 days, many writers make the conscious effort to lock their inner editors away, in deep vaults under heavy mountains on distant planets, and throw the keys into the fiery furnace of the local star.

    No editing = no brakes, and no internal monologue of self-loathing.

    Does this work? For some/many/most people, yes, absolutely.

    For me? Nope. No way.

    My stopping mechanism is different. It’s not a set of brakes being applied by a hypercritical inner child whose parents never showed any affection or approval. It’s rusty, creaky, near-to-frozen gears of thought that need constant and lavish lubrication to allow the machine to even function, let alone move forward at more than a snail’s pace.

    What’s my manuscript-writing-machine lubricant of choice? My WD-40?

    Editing.

    During November, I write for a few minutes. Then I stop. I ponder. I reconsider. I go backwards. I tweak. I add words. I rearrange paragraphs. I interject conversations.

    I edit. Line by line. And while, on occasion, that results in the deletion of words, the net effect is always, always, an increase in word count.

    Unfortunately, this line-editing process does mean that I move slowly. Sometimes embarrassingly slowly. Last year (much to the perverse delight of my local WriMos) I wrote 67 words during a 15-minute sprint. 67. That’s…not fast. That’s the opposite of fast. Writing 1,667 words a day, words I’m willing to live with, takes me forever. So, when people say they’re busy during November, I tend to roll my eyes. Busy? You have no idea.

    It’s my own fault, but, yeah.

    The next day, when I first open my manuscript?

    I get sadistic.

    I reread my scenes, and then I kick my complacent characters down the stairs. Then I march down the stairs and punch said character in the head, steal their lunch money, and make fun of their hair style. Then I stand back and see how they react to my torture. If it’s boring, I go back in and do it again. With flair and panache. Rinse and repeat, until my re-re-re-read elicits an evil grin.

    Once I’m happy with my new, revised, dastardly scene, I rinse and repeat.

    Write. Line edit. Sleep. Torture.

    The end result has been, historically, a manuscript that’s passable. Not necessarily a first draft, but not exactly a zero draft either. Zero point five. Zero point seven, if I let my ego speak its mind.

    So, yeah. I edit. It’s part of my process, and for me, it works.

    Don’t agree with me? Cool. Have your own process that works? More power to you. And if anyone tells you your approach is wrong?

    Push them down the stairs.

     

    P.S. Two more quick things. 1. Square brackets are your friends! [insert something pithy here]. 2. Retconning during your own story is completely acceptable. There’s no WAY my Chapter Four can happen without completely rewriting Chapter Two. [Change Chapter Two in December] fixes that.

  • No secrets here

    Editing secrets? I don’t have any editing secrets. In fact, I am really excited to read everyone else’s posts revealing their editing secrets this week so that I can steal them.

    I have no editing process because I have yet to significantly edit anything. In general, when I’ve “edited” a manuscript, I’ve made cosmetic changes: grammar corrections, delete extra adverbs/adjectives and unneeded passages, and make the remaining sentences prettier. Maybe tweak dialog a bit. But I honestly haven’t ever taken the editing process past surface level.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried. I always make notes for bigger edits, send out my manuscript to my trusted writing friends for their feedback, and I always have big plans for revision. At first. But then I get overwhelmed and never make them. The Novel Graveyard gets bigger every year as I write and drop project after project.

    Maybe nothing I’ve written has been worthy of the edits needed. Maybe I’m just a lazy writer because I won’t actually do the hard work that’s needed to perfect a manuscript. Maybe it’s my fear of success as much as my fear of failure that keeps me from ever polishing anything beyond Zero Draft status. I don’t know.

    My editing goal, of course, is to someday edit a manuscript within an inch of its life and actually submit it. Hopefully someday I’ll get out of the lazy chair and do that. In the meantime, I have smaller goals: like write some short stories and edit them. And edit them again and then submit them places.

    I suppose my biggest editing secret right now is that I need practice. And confidence. My fellow Confabulators assure me that working with something smaller than a one-hundred-thousand word manuscript will give me the editing skills I need, while getting published will give me the confidence I need. Baby steps, right?

    For now, I am listening to all of my fellow writers’ editing secrets with open ears. Enlighten me, friends.

  • Who are you and what do you want?: Developing characters and finishing what I start

    Back when I never finished anything, I used to just give my characters a name and a situation and watch the ‘fun’.

    But it wasn’t enough, I cannot be pantsless (See Confabulator Ted Boone’s Pants are optional. Plans are not. | Confabulator Cafe.) and I never finished anything! And it wasn’t all that fun, either.  Not that it was their fault. Among other things, I found through this process that I needed to know these people extremely well to have a grasp on how they might act, or react, to other characters and the situations I put them in, and, come to think of it, what the situations might be that they’d be in in the first place.  Is this making sense?  Hello?

    Writers need limits, or this one does anyway, to circumscribe the possibilities, to give boundaries to work in, to pressure the work to make it go.  Willy nilly is too chaotic for me, too many choices (like those giant @&#% menus at chain restaurants) made me a worse writer, and I NEVER FINISHED ANYTHING. Did I mention that?

    Now I use character worksheets to help me think about what these people look like, their backgrounds, relationships, desires; I use screenwriting techniques; I brainstorm with people about what might work; I practice with my characters in situations other than the story I think they want to tell.  I think hard about them:  What do they want to say? What do they want more than anything in the world? What’s to stop them? Then what? Go from the inside out. I’ve ‘finished’ some things, but it doesn’t end there–I’m still trying to make them better in revision, and I find getting down to the base motivations of my characters is a big part of that making that process better, too.

    As for the reader, oh yeah, I do not want to insult the reader with boring, cliché, two dimensional characters, the actions need to flow coherently from who these people are and if they don’t, well, I hope you do shut your laptop or throw down the pages in disgust. I’m lucky to have your attention in the first place.  And that’s a pretty good motivator…