Todd Stone
February 19th, 2011, 01:48 PM
Welcome back to our final lesson in Tough Love for Novelists. I notice there are fewer folks with us than when we started, which is to be expected, but I also note that we continue to have a mix aspiring and multi-published authors. That’s good too. The strong have survived to make it this far--the weak have fallen by the wayside.
For those who have found this workshop valuable, I’ll toot my own horn for a moment and tell you that I’m also presenting several other workshops this year here on SavvyAuthors, and it would be great if you could attend. We’ll do an “Advanced Tactics” workshop based on “Novelist’s Boot Camp,” a “Conflict and Character” workshop, a “Writing America's Toughest Warriors: Army Rangers,” workshop, and a pre and post NaNoWriMo workshop. You can look through the SavvyAuthors workshop list for details.
And if you look at some of the comments posted in our current lessons, you’ll see some folks who have commented about my in-person bootcamps. The most popular of these is an all-day combination of “Unstick Yourself--a dozen dynamite drills from Novelist’s Boot Camp” which we do in the morning, followed in the afternoon by the “Real-World Revision: Triage and the Seven Revision Passes” workshop. The morning is open to anyone, regardless of where they are with their writing projects. For the afternoon session, I ask that participants have at least three scenes drafted.
These are full days and focus on you making progress on your novel. The workshops are hands-on, so bring your work, your laptop, writing pad, etc.
If your writing group would like to find out more information, drop me a note.
Over the past week we’ve taken a hard look at your dream, your concept, your characters, your plot, and your first draft. You’ve received a graphic depiction of the writing process and a list of the phases.
Now we’re entering that last phase.
Today’s workshop, “Buck up your editing,” is something of a misnomer. We’re going to talk a bit about editing, but what we really want to focus on is understanding the process of taking a first draft to a final draft.
Making your final draft not lame
That process has four elements. They are:
Revision
Rewriting
Editing
Proofreading
Revision is the act of re-seeing your work in a different light and different perspective. In writing, revision suggests major changes or improvements, reorganizations, new understandings, and so on. Some people have called this content editing, but revision is really much bigger than that.
Re-writing is just that, writing the work again. You may edit sentences but you re-write big pieces--scenes, chapters, beginnings, middles endings. You don’t need to start with a blank sheet, but you will be making what feels like significant changes.
Editing is a much abused and misused word. There’s copy editing, content editing, technical editing, editing for house style...which do you mean? Sometimes editors will do all of the above, plus suggest revisions, plus some proof reading, and call it editing.
When I talk about you doing your own editing, I am talking about working with individual sentences or maybe small pieces of dialog or action (a paragraph or so), but very small pieces.
Proofreading is a hunt for errors. Grammar errors. Typos. Word choice errors. Names spelled correctly and consistently. Sentence structure errors. Formatting errors.
Revision, Rewriting, and making it better
What does this have to do with your final draft being lame?
Most authors, both aspiring and published, fail to understand that there are multiple steps in taking your first draft into a final draft. They kind of get that things need to be rewritten, and some editing done, and checked for correctness, but they don’t “get it” that there are multiple things going on here.
Especially for new or not yet published authors, they try to do everything at once. They try to inspect the draft to see if every scene has characters with goals in conflict, and the characters are acting out their personalities to achieve those goals, and the dialog is sharp, and the description is just right, while at the same time checking for typos and trying to make sentences tighter and making sure they character who had red hair in chapter 7 hasn’t changed to a blonde in chapter 9 and oh yeah I’d like to reowrite that part in chapter 2 and and and and...
Head is spinning. Too much to remember. Writer’s sensory overload. Screw it, run spell check, send it in. If they don’t like it then they just don’t appreciate good writing.
This is why there’s a slush pile, although we have a four letter word for slush, don’t we?
Or we rewrite and edit and rewrite and futz with it and worry and putz some more and change back what we changed before, or did we leave that as it was? And we’re never sure if it’s good enough or if we got everything and the self doubt says hello as we say screw it, run spell check, and send it in. You can’t do this and your inability to hold all this stuff in your head and do it at once is proof. Your work isn’t good enough and neither are you, or so your internal editor says.
Sound familiar? Been there, done that, have the rejection letters.
So how to address the issue? Like this:
Don’t start until you’re finished. No revising until you’ve written “The end” and re-written your opening scene to what you think is an “A” level, which means more interesting that your competitor’s opening scenes.
Recognize the power of revision. Here’s your chance to systematically evaluate your first draft and make it really shine. Sculptors don’t have this opportunity, neither do painters and for film makers re-shooting a work is expensive. You get to take all your creative energy and now focus it not on getting words on paper, but making those words better.
Plan time for revision and rewriting. I think the revision, rewriting, editing and proofing stage may take up to a quarter, give or take, of the time you have allotted to get the book done. No skimping. As we say last lesson, anybody can bang out 50000 or 100000 words of gibberish. Now it takes real skill to take the gibberish and turn it into a novel.
Have a plan and checklist. Of course, I like the Triage and Seven Revision Passes checklists in the certain little green book on novel writing who’s title shall not be mentioned (http://www.amazon.com/Novelists-Boot-Camp-Boring-Bestsell/dp/1582973601/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298126403&sr=8-1)lest someone whine that I am promoting my own work (http://www.storytellerroad.com)in a workshop that you didn’t pay for. The Triage and Revision Passes techniques in that book are adapted from screenwriting, and nobody knows story and story revisions better than screenwriters. These techniques are detailed and thorough, and we spend a half day using them on just three scenes in the in-person workshops I teach.
I can pretty much guarantee that if you put your draft through the triage and revision process listed there, you’ll have a very strong work.
If you do what we’re talking about here, you’ll have a stronger work as well.
So given time and space restraints that prevent us from going in to a detailed discussion of either Triage or the Seven Revision Passes, those passes are:
1.Make a Character Pass
2.Make an Objective Pass
3.Make a Dialogue Pass
4.Make a Description and Narration Pass
5.Make an Action Pass
6.Make a Logic Pass
7.Circle Back for a Miscellaneous Pass
Donald Maas also has a good set of story techniques in his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, and you can use some or all of those as a checklist in your revision.
But if you don’t use those, use somebody’s or make your own. Nancy Pickard teaches her system of looking at scenes. Others have theirs. Find a book on screenwriting and take that authors’ list. Just be sure you look at the key elements of fiction across the novel and focus on a single element in a pass. Character. Dialog. Action. Narration. Logical Flow. Technical and Historical detail. Genre expectations. You need some method to systematically assess the entire manuscript for these so know what you have to do to make it better.
Mark first, write second. I strongly suggest that you make several passes through the entire book, focusing on different elements and mark what needs to be done first, before you start rewriting. Yes, you’ll have to print out your manuscript. Go ahead, it’s a cost of doing business. You don’t have to print it all out at once. Some folks like to use different colored pencils or markers for each pass. Whatever harvests your crops, as long as you start at page one and go all the way through.
You may find something that you want to fix “right now.” While we’ve said to mark first and write second, and while you may end up re-writing this again, go ahead, it can’t hurt. In all cases though, keep your focus on moving forward. By the time you’ve gone through your draft six or seven times, you’ll know exactly what needs to be done and re-writing will feel like a relief!
Give yourself re-writing goals. Those are just like writing goals, only you’ll measure them in terms of scenes re-written. If you’ve marked first and are now ready to re-write, then you can concentrate on re-writing. If you are trying to do both at once, you’ll probably do neither well. Quit being lazy and make two trips instead of trying to carry everything at once and dropping something.
Double back to do sentence work. You printed it out, you marked it up, you rewrote it, isn’t that enough?
No.
Go back through, sentence by sentence. Or very small chunks, anyway. Tighten. Cut. Add variety to sentences. Cut narration in half. Find better, more precise words. Death to adverbs, he said wisely. Improve your writing in ten seconds or less by, for example, eliminating the word “as,” as in “As he opened the door, he thought about the impact changes in constitutional law would have on the production of tenderloins.” Do one thing in sentences so that your hero is not “running down the street, he considered the implications of quantum theory on his sex life.” This is polishing and tightening, this is editing, and this is real writing.
How do you know when your prose is tight enough?
A sad short story “For Sale: one pair of baby shoes; never worn.”
When it’s that tight, you’re good. Really damn good. It may take you a few novels to get there.
And please remember that your work will never be, and doesn't have to be, perfect. It just has to be damn good.
You may be able to do your sentence work electronically, without printing out another copy of your manuscript. If you try, save an original untouched version. Make multiple backups, at least one not on the machine on which you work. With Internet backups and Google docs, and so on, there’s no excuse for losing big chunks of work.
Proof your work. Hunt down errors and kill them. Make a grammar checklist, a list of character names, a list of mistakes you commonly make (for example, “there,” “their,” “they’re”), hunt them down and exterminate them.. No typos--none. Here’s a great place for that nasty internal editor to contribute to the process, in fact, let your inner critic/internal editor run wild--this is his or her time to shine. Go from front to back, back to front, a page at a time, use a sheet of paper or card to block off everything but the line or two you’re focusing on--whatever works. Just do it. Spell check is not enough, not nearly.
Do the steps in order. Why are you proofing chapter six when you haven’t evaluated or revised chapters seven through ten? Stop. What you change in chapter ten may impact what you do in chapter seven. It makes no sense to have a perfectly proofed manuscript that needs serious revision and rewriting, because then what you have is grammatically correct crap.
When you’re done with all those, when you’ve proofread the last page after the last edit after the last rewrite, then you’ll know you have a good piece of work on your hands.
Now is a good time to bring other readers in, because you’ve done the best you can and you now need a second opinion. You can, of course, get other readers’ advice and input earlier, recognizing that you still have work to do.
Will it sell? Who knows? Markets change, acquisition editors are looking for one thing this month, something else the next. That’s a hard hearted truth and not something you can control.
But If you’ve followed the processes and guidance from lesson 1, you’ll have a strong piece of book length fiction you can be proud of. If there’s a market for the kind of story you’re telling, then your novel will be competitive.
So starting last Sunday, we’ve taken a look at some of the hard-hearted truths about your dream, your concept, your characters, your plot, your first draft, and your final draft.
You’ve received a graphic depiction of the writing process, a list of the phases, before and during checklists for writing your first draft, and a list of passes you might make to thoroughly revise your novel.
I’ve enjoyed presenting and getting your feedback. If I have been of some help to you, you can be of some help to me.
First, if you have suggestions for improvement or critical feedback, please send it along to me. I welcome feedback.
If the workshop was of value to you, please let others know and let SavvyAuthors know when course evaluation time comes around.
If you have a writing group that would be interested in an on-site workshop, please have them contact me. I discount my fees for RWA chapters. We work hard, we have a lot of fun, we make progress.
And finally, I hope to see you in the other workshops I offer here on SavvyAuthors. If you have a topic you’d like to see, send it along to Sharon and I--that’s how we got the “Get the Most from NaNoWriMo” and “Now that you’ve NaNo’d, now what?” workshops.
Good luck with your projects, and now that I have 40 new friends, stay in touch!
Best,
Todd
For those who have found this workshop valuable, I’ll toot my own horn for a moment and tell you that I’m also presenting several other workshops this year here on SavvyAuthors, and it would be great if you could attend. We’ll do an “Advanced Tactics” workshop based on “Novelist’s Boot Camp,” a “Conflict and Character” workshop, a “Writing America's Toughest Warriors: Army Rangers,” workshop, and a pre and post NaNoWriMo workshop. You can look through the SavvyAuthors workshop list for details.
And if you look at some of the comments posted in our current lessons, you’ll see some folks who have commented about my in-person bootcamps. The most popular of these is an all-day combination of “Unstick Yourself--a dozen dynamite drills from Novelist’s Boot Camp” which we do in the morning, followed in the afternoon by the “Real-World Revision: Triage and the Seven Revision Passes” workshop. The morning is open to anyone, regardless of where they are with their writing projects. For the afternoon session, I ask that participants have at least three scenes drafted.
These are full days and focus on you making progress on your novel. The workshops are hands-on, so bring your work, your laptop, writing pad, etc.
If your writing group would like to find out more information, drop me a note.
Over the past week we’ve taken a hard look at your dream, your concept, your characters, your plot, and your first draft. You’ve received a graphic depiction of the writing process and a list of the phases.
Now we’re entering that last phase.
Today’s workshop, “Buck up your editing,” is something of a misnomer. We’re going to talk a bit about editing, but what we really want to focus on is understanding the process of taking a first draft to a final draft.
Making your final draft not lame
That process has four elements. They are:
Revision
Rewriting
Editing
Proofreading
Revision is the act of re-seeing your work in a different light and different perspective. In writing, revision suggests major changes or improvements, reorganizations, new understandings, and so on. Some people have called this content editing, but revision is really much bigger than that.
Re-writing is just that, writing the work again. You may edit sentences but you re-write big pieces--scenes, chapters, beginnings, middles endings. You don’t need to start with a blank sheet, but you will be making what feels like significant changes.
Editing is a much abused and misused word. There’s copy editing, content editing, technical editing, editing for house style...which do you mean? Sometimes editors will do all of the above, plus suggest revisions, plus some proof reading, and call it editing.
When I talk about you doing your own editing, I am talking about working with individual sentences or maybe small pieces of dialog or action (a paragraph or so), but very small pieces.
Proofreading is a hunt for errors. Grammar errors. Typos. Word choice errors. Names spelled correctly and consistently. Sentence structure errors. Formatting errors.
Revision, Rewriting, and making it better
What does this have to do with your final draft being lame?
Most authors, both aspiring and published, fail to understand that there are multiple steps in taking your first draft into a final draft. They kind of get that things need to be rewritten, and some editing done, and checked for correctness, but they don’t “get it” that there are multiple things going on here.
Especially for new or not yet published authors, they try to do everything at once. They try to inspect the draft to see if every scene has characters with goals in conflict, and the characters are acting out their personalities to achieve those goals, and the dialog is sharp, and the description is just right, while at the same time checking for typos and trying to make sentences tighter and making sure they character who had red hair in chapter 7 hasn’t changed to a blonde in chapter 9 and oh yeah I’d like to reowrite that part in chapter 2 and and and and...
Head is spinning. Too much to remember. Writer’s sensory overload. Screw it, run spell check, send it in. If they don’t like it then they just don’t appreciate good writing.
This is why there’s a slush pile, although we have a four letter word for slush, don’t we?
Or we rewrite and edit and rewrite and futz with it and worry and putz some more and change back what we changed before, or did we leave that as it was? And we’re never sure if it’s good enough or if we got everything and the self doubt says hello as we say screw it, run spell check, and send it in. You can’t do this and your inability to hold all this stuff in your head and do it at once is proof. Your work isn’t good enough and neither are you, or so your internal editor says.
Sound familiar? Been there, done that, have the rejection letters.
So how to address the issue? Like this:
Don’t start until you’re finished. No revising until you’ve written “The end” and re-written your opening scene to what you think is an “A” level, which means more interesting that your competitor’s opening scenes.
Recognize the power of revision. Here’s your chance to systematically evaluate your first draft and make it really shine. Sculptors don’t have this opportunity, neither do painters and for film makers re-shooting a work is expensive. You get to take all your creative energy and now focus it not on getting words on paper, but making those words better.
Plan time for revision and rewriting. I think the revision, rewriting, editing and proofing stage may take up to a quarter, give or take, of the time you have allotted to get the book done. No skimping. As we say last lesson, anybody can bang out 50000 or 100000 words of gibberish. Now it takes real skill to take the gibberish and turn it into a novel.
Have a plan and checklist. Of course, I like the Triage and Seven Revision Passes checklists in the certain little green book on novel writing who’s title shall not be mentioned (http://www.amazon.com/Novelists-Boot-Camp-Boring-Bestsell/dp/1582973601/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298126403&sr=8-1)lest someone whine that I am promoting my own work (http://www.storytellerroad.com)in a workshop that you didn’t pay for. The Triage and Revision Passes techniques in that book are adapted from screenwriting, and nobody knows story and story revisions better than screenwriters. These techniques are detailed and thorough, and we spend a half day using them on just three scenes in the in-person workshops I teach.
I can pretty much guarantee that if you put your draft through the triage and revision process listed there, you’ll have a very strong work.
If you do what we’re talking about here, you’ll have a stronger work as well.
So given time and space restraints that prevent us from going in to a detailed discussion of either Triage or the Seven Revision Passes, those passes are:
1.Make a Character Pass
2.Make an Objective Pass
3.Make a Dialogue Pass
4.Make a Description and Narration Pass
5.Make an Action Pass
6.Make a Logic Pass
7.Circle Back for a Miscellaneous Pass
Donald Maas also has a good set of story techniques in his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, and you can use some or all of those as a checklist in your revision.
But if you don’t use those, use somebody’s or make your own. Nancy Pickard teaches her system of looking at scenes. Others have theirs. Find a book on screenwriting and take that authors’ list. Just be sure you look at the key elements of fiction across the novel and focus on a single element in a pass. Character. Dialog. Action. Narration. Logical Flow. Technical and Historical detail. Genre expectations. You need some method to systematically assess the entire manuscript for these so know what you have to do to make it better.
Mark first, write second. I strongly suggest that you make several passes through the entire book, focusing on different elements and mark what needs to be done first, before you start rewriting. Yes, you’ll have to print out your manuscript. Go ahead, it’s a cost of doing business. You don’t have to print it all out at once. Some folks like to use different colored pencils or markers for each pass. Whatever harvests your crops, as long as you start at page one and go all the way through.
You may find something that you want to fix “right now.” While we’ve said to mark first and write second, and while you may end up re-writing this again, go ahead, it can’t hurt. In all cases though, keep your focus on moving forward. By the time you’ve gone through your draft six or seven times, you’ll know exactly what needs to be done and re-writing will feel like a relief!
Give yourself re-writing goals. Those are just like writing goals, only you’ll measure them in terms of scenes re-written. If you’ve marked first and are now ready to re-write, then you can concentrate on re-writing. If you are trying to do both at once, you’ll probably do neither well. Quit being lazy and make two trips instead of trying to carry everything at once and dropping something.
Double back to do sentence work. You printed it out, you marked it up, you rewrote it, isn’t that enough?
No.
Go back through, sentence by sentence. Or very small chunks, anyway. Tighten. Cut. Add variety to sentences. Cut narration in half. Find better, more precise words. Death to adverbs, he said wisely. Improve your writing in ten seconds or less by, for example, eliminating the word “as,” as in “As he opened the door, he thought about the impact changes in constitutional law would have on the production of tenderloins.” Do one thing in sentences so that your hero is not “running down the street, he considered the implications of quantum theory on his sex life.” This is polishing and tightening, this is editing, and this is real writing.
How do you know when your prose is tight enough?
A sad short story “For Sale: one pair of baby shoes; never worn.”
When it’s that tight, you’re good. Really damn good. It may take you a few novels to get there.
And please remember that your work will never be, and doesn't have to be, perfect. It just has to be damn good.
You may be able to do your sentence work electronically, without printing out another copy of your manuscript. If you try, save an original untouched version. Make multiple backups, at least one not on the machine on which you work. With Internet backups and Google docs, and so on, there’s no excuse for losing big chunks of work.
Proof your work. Hunt down errors and kill them. Make a grammar checklist, a list of character names, a list of mistakes you commonly make (for example, “there,” “their,” “they’re”), hunt them down and exterminate them.. No typos--none. Here’s a great place for that nasty internal editor to contribute to the process, in fact, let your inner critic/internal editor run wild--this is his or her time to shine. Go from front to back, back to front, a page at a time, use a sheet of paper or card to block off everything but the line or two you’re focusing on--whatever works. Just do it. Spell check is not enough, not nearly.
Do the steps in order. Why are you proofing chapter six when you haven’t evaluated or revised chapters seven through ten? Stop. What you change in chapter ten may impact what you do in chapter seven. It makes no sense to have a perfectly proofed manuscript that needs serious revision and rewriting, because then what you have is grammatically correct crap.
When you’re done with all those, when you’ve proofread the last page after the last edit after the last rewrite, then you’ll know you have a good piece of work on your hands.
Now is a good time to bring other readers in, because you’ve done the best you can and you now need a second opinion. You can, of course, get other readers’ advice and input earlier, recognizing that you still have work to do.
Will it sell? Who knows? Markets change, acquisition editors are looking for one thing this month, something else the next. That’s a hard hearted truth and not something you can control.
But If you’ve followed the processes and guidance from lesson 1, you’ll have a strong piece of book length fiction you can be proud of. If there’s a market for the kind of story you’re telling, then your novel will be competitive.
So starting last Sunday, we’ve taken a look at some of the hard-hearted truths about your dream, your concept, your characters, your plot, your first draft, and your final draft.
You’ve received a graphic depiction of the writing process, a list of the phases, before and during checklists for writing your first draft, and a list of passes you might make to thoroughly revise your novel.
I’ve enjoyed presenting and getting your feedback. If I have been of some help to you, you can be of some help to me.
First, if you have suggestions for improvement or critical feedback, please send it along to me. I welcome feedback.
If the workshop was of value to you, please let others know and let SavvyAuthors know when course evaluation time comes around.
If you have a writing group that would be interested in an on-site workshop, please have them contact me. I discount my fees for RWA chapters. We work hard, we have a lot of fun, we make progress.
And finally, I hope to see you in the other workshops I offer here on SavvyAuthors. If you have a topic you’d like to see, send it along to Sharon and I--that’s how we got the “Get the Most from NaNoWriMo” and “Now that you’ve NaNo’d, now what?” workshops.
Good luck with your projects, and now that I have 40 new friends, stay in touch!
Best,
Todd