Category: projects

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The Five Stages of Novel Revision

  By current projects, editing, projects, publishing, Uncategorized, writer development, writing life

Pick an emotion…any emotion…

The other day I watched a video by James Andrew Wilson, called The Emotional Stages of Writing a Novel. It’s both funny and true, so if you’re a writer (or even if you’re not) you should go and watch it.

Having recently been asked by an editor to revise a novel*, I think there are several stages to that process, as well. Here they are:

1. Elation Disappointment Disalation? I don’t know what to call this stage. Someone likes your novel and has said nice things about it! They think it has promise! Hurray! But you have to change things. It’s not perfect. The road ahead is paved with hard, hard work. Wah! It’s wonderful and horrible at the same time. You need a drink, some ice cream, or (insert favorite comfort item here) while it all sinks in.

2. Despair You don’t know how to do this. You can’t do this! Those changes won’t work! They’re too hard! They’ll wreck your novel! You can’t cut that subplot because then no-one will understand why the vagrant had to be blind. You can’t cut the busboy character because wasn’t it obvious that he was the one who saw the murder and reported it anonymously to the police? And how can the novel work at all without the circus? *headdesk*

3. Planning Okay, you just need to take a while and think about this. Think, and make a lot of notes. Maybe buy one of those huge whiteboards and diagram the entire novel on it. No! Better still, paint a wall of your office with chalkboard paint and diagram it there! Also, print out all the editor’s comments and highlight them with different colors according to level of importance, then glue them onto giant pieces of bristol board and brainstorm revision ideas around them! Oh yes, the pieces are all going to fall into place now…

4. Actual Work Half the time allotted for the revisions has now flown past. You’ve started seven different methods for working out how to fix your novel, but they’re all too much work or are too confusing. Finally you sit down with a printout of your novel and a red pen, and start reading and making notes. When you’re done, you start typing in your changes. It takes you all the rest of the time you’ve got and you have to alienate your family and friends to get it finished, but you do it. You think it stinks.**

5. Collapse You’ve sent in the revision just in time. By now you hardly care if the editor likes it or not–all that matters is that it’s done and you don’t have to look at the horrible thing any more…at least until the editor emails you…

*more details on that another day
** or you think it’s brilliant. Don’t worry, that won’t last.

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[Process] The Story Idea (Part 1)

  By current projects, projects, writer development, writing life

I’m in the process throes of creating a new short story this past week, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the mechanics as I move through the process. Every writer has his or her own way of doing this, and sometimes even different processes for different stories, so this is certainly not a “how-to” as much as a “this-is-how-I’m-doing-it-this-time.”

My process has changed over time. I used to come up with the start of an idea—maybe even just a first line, or a first scene, or a character in a setting—and sit down to start writing. Over time, I learned that in general, this was a bad idea for me. I have a LOT of story beginnings (let’s say anywhere from two to ten pages) that fizzled out, tripped up, or bogged down and never went any further. I’ve even found stuff on my hard drive that I don’t remember writing, or have no idea where they were going or what I thought the story was going to be about.*

There’s not a huge market for story beginnings. Just like there’s not a huge market for standalone first chapters.

After a while, I learned the first lesson about me and the way I write stories: don’t start too soon.

I need to allow time for an idea to percolate before I start putting words on paper (or virtual paper—you know what I mean). Although I often want to sit down and start banging out words, I consciously make myself wait until I have thought through more of the story. I’m not an outliner, but I do often make notes as I’m thinking about the story and the shape it will take.

For this new story, I knew I had a certain theme to consider, because I’m writing it for a themed anthology. The first thing to decide was how I wanted to incorporate the theme—what kind of story did I want to write? I mulled that over for a few days, trying out numerous bits of idea flotsam and jetsam before I realized that I want to write a humorous story. Could that work with the theme? It would be a little unusual, but it could work. Good. Now I knew the tone of the story.

Next I needed at least one character, and ideally two, who would be the main players in the piece. They stepped onto the stage quickly, now that I knew what kind of story I was writing. Only one had a name yet, but that was all right. I put them both onstage in my mind, and thought about their relationship.

Now, maybe you’re picturing me sitting in my tidy, inspiring office, staring out the window or into the middle distance while I put all my concentration and creative energy into this bold and invigorating hunt for story. Sorry to shoot down that lovely little image, but that’s not how it’s happening this time around. I’ve been travelling, on a family vacation, as I’m working on this story idea, so my thinking time has been 1) while we’re driving, 2) when I’m falling asleep, 3) when I’m in the shower, and 4) when I’m awake in the middle of the night listening to all the unidentified noises in and around our cottage and trying NOT to imagine what could be making them.

In spite of this, after three or four days of thinking, I have some characters, a mood, and a general idea of the story problem (also known as a little thing called plot**). No notes yet, but that’s okay; I haven’t come up with any details or plot twists that I’m likely to forget. Also no title yet, but a couple of ideas.

I’m off to a good start. And this is getting long, so I’ll pick up the process (and hopefully have more to report) in Part 2…

*This experience is scarier than you might think.
**Not vital to all stories, but definitely so for the ones I write, and like to read.

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The Multi-tasking Blues

  By personal, projects, writer development, writing life

Hello, my name is Sherry, and I’m a multi-tasker.

It’s true–I love multi-tasking. I love having two monitors and a fairly fast computer, because it means I can have so many things on the go at once. Right now, for instance, I’m writing this post in one browser tab. Other open tabs hold Gmail, some affiliate link things I’m working on for The Scriptorium, a couple of articles I want to read later, and a map I used earlier today. (Okay, I can close that one now.)

In addition to the browser, Evernote is open, as is Photoshop, two twitter clients, Skype, and Outlook. I also have a widget for my four favorite RSS feeds.

Sure, I’m only looking at ONE of those things at a time, but it’s somehow comforting to me to know that I can pop over to any one of them at any time. I feel busy and productive and WOW, like I’m really getting a lot done.

Except.

Except that I’ve read a few things lately about how multi-tasking is really not that good for us. That it leads to less productivity overall, and shortened attention spans, among other things.

My first reaction to these claims was “pshaw!”. Well, I didn’t actually say “pshaw,” because who really does that these days? But my feelings were the equivalent of “pshaw!”. I mean, that couldn’t be true, could it?

And yet now that I’m thinking about it, I am beginning to wonder. It’s very easy, when one has so many options, to hop back and forth between them, tinkering a bit and then hopping off to something else when the first thing gets difficult. And even when things eventually get done, I’m starting to wonder if they’re suffering from my lack of focus. Are they actually somewhat diluted because I haven’t given them enough of my undivided attention?

I also notice that I skim/skip a lot more magazine articles. The only magazine I read with any diligence is New Scientist, and I used to devour almost every article, cover to cover. Now I tend to skim through, sampling first lines here, reading a paragraph or two there, and then moving on. That can’t be coincidence. Science news hasn’t gotten more boring, certainly.

While I wrote this post, I answered a tweet, looked at a notification, and checked a note in Evernote (that was not related to this task). That’s not too bad, I suppose, but would this post have been even better if I’d had nothing else open on my screens while I wrote it?

I’m seriously considering cutting back on my multi-tasking to see what effect it has, if any, on my concentration and focus. I’ll report back on this entirely unscientific investigation in due course. If I remember, that is!

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The S-Word Again

  By editing, projects, publishing, writer development, writing life

So first, a project update–yes, I’ve been working on my summer edit. I’m about ten chapters in, and it’s going well, if a bit slowly. Not because there’s a whole lot to mark up–a relatively small number of pages actually look like the one in the photo–but because, well, it’s summer. There’s a lot going on. But I don’t want to let Bare Knuckle Writer down, so I am plugging away.

However, the sad realization struck me the other day that once I finish this editing pass, I’m going to have to write a synopsis. I could wail and moan a bit about that, but I won’t, because it is part of the writing process (well, if you want to submit your work anywhere, it is) and simply a Thing That Must Be Done. Instead of griping I thought it would be more productive to offer some advice on writing one.

I’ve found that there are two things about writing a synopsis that I really find difficult. One is starting. The other is holding the whole novel in your head in the proper order, so you can distill out the important bits. Fortunately, I’ve hit on one method that effectively deals with both these problems.

Note: if you are an outliner, you probably don’t have either of these problems. You already have the bones of your synopsis in your outline, so you just need to flesh it out. I might hate you a little bit, but I digress.

Since I never have an outline that’s an actual outline before I start writing (I might have pages and pages of story notes, but that is not an outline that’s of any use in creating a synopsis), I’ve learned to outline as I go. I’ve mentioned before that I use Writer’s Cafe Storylines for this. I write a scene or chapter, and either when I finish it, or at the end of the writing day, I create an index card and jot down just a couple of sentences about what just happened. I note where the scene or chapter takes place, and who is present. If I have multiple storylines/subplots, I might have cards going for each of those, too. I do the same thing for the next scene or chapter, and the next, etc. If I go back and insert a missing scene, I insert the appropriate card(s) for it, as well.

In this example, I have three rows of cards going. The dark purple row is the scene-by-scene breakdown. The light purple row tracks which characters appear in which scenes. (That helps avoid that “whatever happened to character X?” question.) The green row tracks the time and setting of each scene. Each column is a scene, and the black headers show me where the chapters break. (I have the wrapping option turned on, so that’s why you can see a second set of colored cards.) You might also note that some scene cards bear a checkmark–those are the ones I’ve marked up in this editing pass. I can see my progress at a glance.

So, the outliners out there are probably wondering how this helps me write the story–it doesn’t. But what it does do is twofold: it shows me at a glance an overview of the arc of the storyline (very helpful when I start revising), and later, it gives me a jumping-off point when it comes to writing a synopsis. Because I can run a report in Storylines and export the information from the cards that I want, and I have a rough outline of my synopsis. All the important stuff is there…because that’s what I’ve jotted down on the cards. The bones are good.

The rest–well, the rest is mostly rewriting it in coherent and well-formed sentences, and polishing it until it’s intriguing, explanatory, and shows the editor that you’ve got a solid story told in an engaging fashion. Yeah. That’s the easy part.

Note: You can use this method perfectly well via the low-tech method of real paper index cards, too. But I’m a big fan of Writer’s Cafe and all the other things it can do as well.

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Spice Tins D.I.Y.

  By DIY, just for fun, personal & miscellaneous, projects

And now for something completely different…but I can’t write about writing all the time, can I? “All work and no play”, you know?

So, this is not my own original idea, but I did tweak it to fit my needs, so I thought I would share. I saw the idea over at A Beautiful Mess, to make these cool spice tins that were space-saving, efficient, and nice to look at. However, the original idea was to add magnets to the backs of the tins so that they could stick on the refrigerator. My refrigerator is already full of pictures, notes, and magnetic poetry, so I wasn’t interested in that. I was, however, interested in cleaning up my spice cupboard, and I’m going to swallow my pride and show you why.

Yes, it’s a horrible mess. You can just see some adhesive on the inside of the cupboard door where I had some cork for holding takeout menus, but my idea was to utilize the spice tins idea there. At first I thought I would have to find a thin sheet of tin or something, to put inside the door for the magnets to stick to, but then I realized I was looking at it the wrong way around–all I needed was a magnet for the tins to stick on to, since they’re already metal. This also cut down the work considerably since I didn’t have to cut pieces of magnet sheets for every tin. I knew I could get magnet sheets, since I had found them before. So, line the inside of the cupboard with those, and I’d have my magnetic surface.

As the gals at A Beautiful Mess did, I ordered my little tins from here, but I think you can get similar items from bulk stores. The other materials needed were the magnet sheet (I got mine at Michael’s, a nice long roll that just needed a bit of trimming to fit my cupboard door), scissors, ruler, pencil, and some labels.

I washed all the tins out first, and if you’re doing this, I’d recommend leaving them overnight to dry. The covers tend to hold a bit of water around the edges, and you don’t want to get your spices wet. Dry them off and then give the residual water time to evaporate.

While you’re waiting, you can take stock of your spices and go off and make your labels. I did mine on the computer and used plain white mailing labels (they needed just a little trimming on the edges), but you could hand-letter them, use colored labels, or whatever strikes your fancy. Get creative!

The magnet sheet was easy to trim to shape with just scissors, but the adhesive was VERY sticky. I could have used another set of hands to help me get it in place, nice and straight with no air bubbles. I was alone, so this took me a few minutes, and was actually the hardest part of the project. It turned out well in the end, though.

The final part of the project was to transfer the spices into the new tins. I did discover that the tins would hold only about half a jar of spice, so I have a few jars left hanging around, waiting until it’s time to refill the appropriate tin. From now on I will plan to buy spices in bulk, so I’ll only buy enough to fill the tins. The final product looks great, I think! I arranged them with those I use most on the bottom, within easy reach. You could, of course, arrange them alphabetically, or by color or texture, or whatever way your heart desires. The magnet strength is just perfect–the hold is nice and firm (they don’t fall off if the cupboard door bangs shut) but it takes only the tiniest bit of effort to pull off the one you want to use. They look much nicer than the previous jumble of jars, it’s much easier to find what you want, and BONUS! I have a clean cupboard with much more space for other things.