Finding the Time to Edit

This summer is the first time I’ve ever had a full-time job. Shocking, I’m sure. It’s led me to realize how spoiled I’ve been. As a student, I could stay up late writing and go to an early class without a problem, because I’d scheduled a two hour break in my day where I could eat lunch and take a quick nap to recharge for afternoon classes. No such luck with a full-time job.

I’m beginning to understand these adults around me who say they’ve started a novel, but can’t seem to find the time to complete it. When sleeping and writing compete for the time, writing usually wins for me. But now I’m not so sure. I come home from work exhausted after an 11 hour day so that it takes two hours, roughly, to get all my mental capacities back. That’s two hours I could have spent editing!

So to do my last round of edits on the WIP, I printed the entire draft and put it in a binder. I take it to work with me, and edit during my lunch break. I also try to sneak some edits in when I’m not on assignment. I had a goal to edit a chapter a day, but since I’m reading each chapter at least three times, I suspect my goal was a bit too lofty. (The good news is that I’m really liking the draft so far. It’s covered in pencil from my markings, but I’m finding more gems than rocks, proverbially speaking.)

So you full-time workers, do you have any advice for the newbie? How do you balance being a professional and a writer at the same time?

WIP: A New Beginning

A little over a week ago, I added a new scene to the beginning of the WIP. It shifts the moment when the reader joins the story from the original scene to fifteen minutes earlier. Amazing, what a quarter of an hour can do, right? This new scene completely changes the tone of the opening chapter, yet still is in keeping with the tone of the entire work. My problem is that I feel the original scene also sets the story and tone correctly. Which should I choose?

Original

Clouds, dark and thick, descend over Mary Winslow as she flees the manor house at Compton Beauchamp. Her throat is hoarse from shouting and her gloved hands shudder; her black walking skirts swirl around her rushing feet and she half-trips. The gravel drive crunches with each step until she slips through the high wrought-iron gate and out into the pale green English lane, where shriveled leaves spin and dance with a small eddy. Her lips press together against what she fears is a sob. There is a figure to her right and she jumps away, scratching her back along the brick wall that flanks the gate on either side. Ten minutes ago was bad enough; now is much worse.

“Took you long enough,” Trentwood says. It is windy, and there is a bite to the air, but he is without a coat and stands spinning the chain of his pocket watch, his black boots gleaming in the gray light.

Mary stares at Trentwood, taking in his sandy hair lined with gray, and his irritated expression. How he stands without needing her arm as a support. How he can watch her without forcing a smile through the ever-encroaching pain. I can’t do this again.

Above, boughs sway and whisper as Trentwood follows the silent Mary down the shadowed, tree-lined lane. “Now you’ll answer me. How could you have accepted that idiot?”

Shadows play across her face. If I ignore him…? Her low voice is raw and ragged when she finally speaks. “I felt alone.”

He tucks away his pocket watch. “In that house?”

Mary’s mouth twists. “Well… lonely, then.” She scrambles over a low opening in the hedgerow to walk across the farmer’s field. Her skirt catches on a grasping bramble, and she yanks it free.

“You’d rather be lonely and alone your entire life than marry that idiot.”

. . .

Update

Mary Winslow suspects today will be worse than most when she finds her fiancé seducing her scullery maid.

The point of coming to the scullery in the first place was to hunt down the cook, whose name Mary cannot remember at the moment, and ask what came of the smoked ham that should have been at breakfast. But when Mary entered the kitchen, she found the stoves untended, and the scullery door open. It was an innocent and natural assumption to think the cook—oh, what is her name?—was back there, already preparing for luncheon. The scraping, shuffling noises certainly corroborated Mary’s suspicion that someone, at least, was in the scullery and might have an answer to her question. After all, one does not pay for ham and then expect it to disappear.

Head tilted to the side, Mary gapes at the back of Mr Spencer’s blonde head, which nuzzles naughty words into the freckled neck of her giggling maid. His pants are undone; the girl’s short kitchen skirts hitched up.

In all fairness, the clandestine couple is only half-hidden in the back refuse closet of the scullery, paying no mind to the pile of vegetable peelings rotting on the floor beneath them. Even with the lamp dimmed, they are plainly visible. They are insulting by their carelessness. Mary’s lip curls, wondering how they can stand the rancid, greasy smell that comes from standing in—oh goodness, is that an actual pig’s snout, there? Does anyone do their cleaning duties anymore?

This is what comes of rash decisions. How many times did Mary warn Mr Spencer that if she heard so much as a murmur of his philandering, that she would end it?

This is more than a murmur.

. . .
 

So here is my question: Should I keep the old beginning, or continue with the new one? FYI, the original still exists, but happens later in the chapter (as in, about two pages later). I have my own opinion, but I’d love to hear yours. Which one grabs you more, as a reader? Does the new scene completely turn you off, or intrigue you?

Mark Twain’s Tips on Writing Well

We all know Mark Twain for Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, etc. In literary circles he is known for his lambasting essay, The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper, where he writes his Nineteen Most Important Rules of Literature. The essay claims that James Fenimore Cooper, another well-known American author, broke eighteen of them. How do you make out?

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

3. The people in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The people in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the people of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. When the author describes the character of a person in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. When a person talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a [slave] minstrel in the end of it.

8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. People of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. Characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

Whoosh. Twain really didn’t like Cooper’s writing! And he isn’t done yet. Additional requirements for authors include…

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

For the life of me, I can’t find the 19th rule, the one Cooper didn’t break. If you want to read Twain’s complete essay, check it out here. You have to admit, though, Twain is onto something here. Especially #5, where characters should only talk when they have something interesting to say that also has to to with the plot. So come on, fess up: How many rules have you broken?

Quote: Honest Assessment

Make an honest assessment of what it is you’re willing to sacrifice for your writing because it is quite a painful exercise, it’s so subjective. It should be a process of reasoning – you’ve been honest with yourself, you know what it is you’re prepared not to have in order that you might try to be a novelist.
- Elliot Perlman

On Giving Feedback

So, as writers, we are expected to be the paragons of all that is writing and editing, yes? Goodness, I hope not. Many of us have the same trouble editing another’s work as we do our own. Here is an article by Rebecca Swift about how to give good feedback, whether you are a reader or a writer, editing your own work or a friend’s. She mentions how your mood can change your feedback, how feedback is an absolute must, and more. Take a gander, tell me what you think.

Giving Good Feedback
by Rebecca Swift of The Literary Consultancy, former editor at ViragoRisking a Reader
So, you have written a piece of fiction. So far, you only have your own opinion on the work. On the one hand, you may be so delighted to have finished anything at all you think it’s brilliant and wonderful and be patting yourself on the back, even running around telling your friends you think you’re a genius.

On the other hand, if you’re a different kind of person, or indeed the same person in a different mood, you may be punishing yourself because you don’t think what you have written is quite what you hoped it would be. In fact, is it rubbish? What is it? I think that most people, when they have finished a work of writing, are not quite sure what they really think of it. You may also be worried that whatever you yourself think of your writing personally, another reader may not feel the same. Part of you may be dying to know what other people feel, and part of you is probably incredibly anxious about showing your work to anybody. What if they hate it? Will it put you off writing forever? Of course the degree to which you feel any of this will be altered by what you have written, and with what end in mind. For example, if you have written a short story for the BBC site you may feel differently than if you have spent five years on a novel. Either way, you will have had some hope for your work and it’s time to find out what will, if anything, happen to it.

Editing Tips

Tightening Up
You will probably find that the opening of your first draft has been more of a warming up exercise, a way of breaking yourself in gently to the often daunting task of filling that first blank page. Strangely, these initial efforts can persist through any number of drafts, and it’s only when you eliminate them and see that nothing’s been lost that you realise what has happened.

Similarly, the ending of the first draft – often persisting through version after version – merely reflects the fact that you are unwilling to let go of something to which you have become deeply attached. Sometimes you just have to be ruthless with yourself.

Sentences and Pace
Are your sentences long and complex, or short and pithy? If the length varies throughout the piece, are they randomly varied or does there seem to be some sort of correlation between sentence length and content? In general, there’s a tendency for long sentences to slow the action down, while short sentences speed it up. Many writers do this unconsciously, but knowing about it puts you in charge. You should aim for an equal balance of long and short sentences, but you can alter the balance to suit the pace of your work.

Passive and Active Voice
Compare ‘Arthur sharpened the axe’ and ‘The axe was sharpened by Arthur’. The first sentence is active – the subject of the sentence is doing the action and therefore more immediate and engaging. The second sentence is passive – the subject of the sentence is having something done to it and therefore more wordy and potentially more abstract. Always try to use active verbs – make the verb muscle the sentence. How else can you say ‘is’ and ‘was’?

Abstractions and vagueness
Although an image may be perfectly clear to you, to the reader, it may be abstract. ‘She washed the shrunken wrinkled green sheets, layered them into a bowl and decorated them with slices of iced cool eyes and pebble sized tomatoes.’ (cf. ‘She made a salad.’) Tell it as it is.

Article found http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/module3p.

Shameful Admission

All right kiddos, it’s admission time: I have let life get in the way of my writing. I know, I know, one should always make time to write. That’s been my personal mantra the last couple months, anyway. However, there have been extenuating circumstances, such as my health, school…basically, the sources of big bummers in my writing life.

As such, in this semi-depressed mood that always seems to fall during the last final weeks of winter, I have lost the will to write. I want to write, but every time I open the file, I just stare at the last bit I wrote. I can’t get past the last paragraph, because I hate it so. I take it away, and I can’t write anything new because…I can’t? This is the oddest sort of writer’s block I’ve ever had. I know where I want to go next. I just can’t transition to that point. Usually, I don’t know where I want to go next, I panic, and the Block Against Writing pummels me to the point that my ego breaks, and, to add insult to injury, throws me in a pit to fend off Doubt, Anxiety, and Cliche-Turns-of-Phrase.

It’s a traumatic experience.

But this time, I feel different. I’m in the dark but I can see the light; I can almost reach its source, I just can’t seem to unsquint my eyes long enough to know exactly where to grab.

So, I’m waiting. I’m letting it come to me, rather than forcing it out like I did with NaNoWriMo. Each night, I think about my characters rather than worry about my health or school: I do this so I will dream about my characters–my dreams tend to be eerily vivid and dreaming about my characters brings me some of the most interesting ideas. (Not that it’s worked yet in this instance, but it doesn’t hurt to try?)

Anyway, I thought I would throw this out to the blogosphere*. Maybe letting some steam off will allow my ideas to cool and solidify into something I can actually write about.

* blogosphere: the social phenomenon of blogs linking to other blogs. Term respectfully taken from Questionable Content.

Re-Writing Woes

So. I’ve begun working on the prequel again, after taking a seven week hiatus to participate in NaNoWriMo and then study for Finals Week. I’m glad I took all that time off, because after reading the first three chapters I realized chapters 1 needs to be cut, chapter 2 if kept should be put after chapter 3, and chapter 3 should be the new chapter 1, but only after an extensive re-write.

Remind me why I write, again? Haha I’ve sort of been in a slight despair ever since I realized my beginning is well-written, but boring as all heck. Way too much backstory. Not enough action. I hate stories that begin with characters just sitting around talking to one another, explaining the story to the reader, and that’s exactly how this novel begins. So, I’ve decided to completely start over from scratch. Consider that first complete draft as a three-year warm-up, as it were. You might think me crazy, considering it took me three years to write almost 100,000 words, but then, you have to remember I did NaNoWriMo, and finished, so…writing another 50,000 words shouldn’t be too hard, right? Not when I know the entire story this time? And can outline what I want to keep in the story and what I want to throw out?

Is this wishful thinking?

C’est Finis!

94,811 / 94,811(100.0%)

And now to my favorite part. EDITING!! Seriously, I love this part. I can go back and mold my characters, twist their subplots, add the details I didn’t want to worry about the first time around. Double-spaced, my work is 334 pages at 12pt Times New Roman. That’s insane. Of course, each new chapter starts on its own page, so that might have something to do with it. but still. I’m so excited! The ending is sort of iffy, but that’s cool. A lot can change through editing. I’m just glad I finished the first draft. Took me three years (I keep taking time off for school, work, and research!), but I’ve done it and now the editing phase begins!

Creating Convincing Characters

Happy Labor Day!

Today is a list from The Writer (July 2006) that quickly describes how to create convincing characters by Corey Blake. Blake begins the article, Creating believable characters takes time and discipline. Creating dynamically real individuals and not imposing your own thoughts and impressions on them is not easy to do, and is often the difference between a novel or screenplay that sits in a closet and one that finds its way into the hands of audiences.

1. Label the desire essences of your main characters. Come up with lists of desires, fifty of them, and slowly condense them into twenty. Focus on the ones that feel right for each of your main characters, considering their religious beliefs, major life events, appearance, intelligence, siblings, education, parents, music, sex, etc, anything and everything a person in real life faces.
2. Label the fear essences of your main characters. This is a little easier now that you’ve come up with the desire essences. The fear essences are the “polar opposites” of the desires. They battle the desires, and at each decision, either the desire or the fear will win. Make the pairs, and discard the pairs the character doesn’t feel strongly about. Keep doing this until you have 10 pairs that excite you.
3. Get specific in the backstory to understand how these essences came to be. As Blake says, “A character’s current behavior is a battle between fear adn desire, and his or her immediate choices are made based on very specific (yet unconscious) experiences from the past–experiences that leave imprints.” Write as much as you can about each half of each pair, so you have pages and pages on the character describing how they think or would think in a given situation because you know the history behind that certain essence.
4. Describe their current behaviors. Take the essences and specific examples and determined the kinds of behavior your character has because of it.
5. Raise the stakes. Don’t be afraid to throw horrible obstacles at your characters! Watching them deal with obstacles is what makes a story interesting; no one wants to read about a girl who sails through life.
6. Don’t meddle. A “truthful story is going to grow from your willingness to let your characters make their own decisions based on how you defined them. As their parent, you have to let your children go.”
7. Let your characters play. At this point, your characters will be writing themselves.