Rule S: don’t beat a dead Story

Linda’s Rules of Writing

Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil, remember no evil. Yup, it was an amnesia novel.

We’re onto the letter S in Linda’s Rules of Writing of the A to Z Challenge, and don’t beat a dead Story.

My first novel was a dead story that I kept trying to fix.  It was called “Remember No Evil” and was a thriller.  I’d get about to the first 100 pages and the story would stall out.  I could see the whole story, but I couldn’t seem to get past that first point.

So I rewrote it.

And rewrote it.

And rewrote it.

I got hung up having to finish it because I’d invested so much time in it, and I didn’t want that to go to waste.  It was a story though I should have walked away from much earlier than I did.

When my former cowriter approached me about doing a book, I realized that if I wanted to actually finish a book, I needed to go to a new project.  I couldn’t quite bring myself to give up on RNO, so I set it aside.  Then I was able to finish a new project, which was Valley of Bones, later revised into Audacious Run.

When I returned to reassess RNO, I realized that I had been writing it for long that I had grown out of the original story.

Sometimes finishing a story isn’t always the best thing.

Do you have a trunk novel you had to give up on?
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Caption: A to Z Challenge Logo

 

Rule H: treat line editing like Housekeeping not revision

Linda’s Rules of Writing

I admit it! This was an excuse to show a sail boat at sunset amidst palm trees!  In case you’re wondering, my book Miasma is set an alternate Hawaii.

We’re onto the letter H in Linda’s Rules of Writing of the A to Z Challenge, and treating line editing like Housekeeping, not revision.

One of the things that Holly Lisle mentioned in her course How to Revise Your Novel was that a lot of writers start revision by line editing, instead of focusing on the bigger issues that revision really entails.  It hit me that I’d been doing exactly that in my early “revisions” of my contemporary fantasy, and it also hit me how much of a waste of time it was actually was.

Because I’d line edited scenes, then discovered a major problem in the story that needed fixing.  I’d go through the manuscript and fix the problem, and three scenes that I’d labored over to do line editing came out.  Then I’d go back and start line editing again until I ran into a big problem and repeated the process.

I felt like I let the wind out of my sails. And all on my own, no wind required.  It made the revision process frustrating and time consuming — and a lot MORE work.

Time to write is hard enough to find without me making more work for myself!  Now I try to think of editing as a form of housekeeping.  Because it really is clean up work: Fixing grammar problems, word choices, getting rid of repetitions, fixing unclear sentences.  And all of these get done AFTER I’ve done all the major work, because there isn’t any point to line editing 24K of scenes and then dropping them.

What have you learned about your editing process?

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Writerly Adventures

Sand Dollar Wishes was a very short (under 250 words) flash fiction piece that I wrote for Writer Unboxed’s Flash Fiction Contest.  The story won an honorable mention.  I had to do a lot of editing to keep it at 250 words.

Caption: Banner for the A to Z Challenge

 

When I Almost Gave Up Novel Writing

I just got accepted into Odyssey’s Getting the Big Picture: The Key to Revising Your Novel, which is a huge milestone in the journey for book Miasma.  You see, because of Miasma, I thought about giving up novel writing and going back to just short stories.

When I broke up with my cowriter, it was messy and I was very angry.  But I realized one thing: I needed to get another book started.  That became Miasma.  I wrote the entire story in about 30 days.  Then started revising it right on the screen.

Yet, there were a couple of nagging problems.  These problems were why I had agreed to cowrite in first place, and unfortunately, cowriting didn’t fix them:

1. The books ran too short, as in unpublishably too short.
2. I couldn’t get subplots into the story.

So I cast about for solutions.  But how-to books are written for common problems, and these was clearly rare problems.  I posted to message boards, and this was typical of the response:

“Just add a romance!”

Uh, guys, I couldn’t get the subplots into the story.  How would adding a romance be any different?  It was discouraging because there was nothing out there.  I finally decided that subplots weren’t going to happen.  So I did every workaround I could think of to get the word count up.

The Details Monster attacks!

Enter The Details Monster.

A little short on a scene?  Add more details.

I did not know I was bad with details.  I was a big picture thinker, but twelve years in the army had left me overcompensating on the details.  What I didn’t realize was that I couldn’t tell when I had gone to far.

I finally got the story up to 80K.  Barely.  I sent it out the agents, got the rejections, though I was scared to death of the prospect of getting published.  I wasn’t sure what I would do if I got published and had a year deadline and ran into more problems.

One agent was kind enough to give me comments.  When I read them, I realized that the subplot problem was really affecting the story, and that I’d gone too far on the details.

So I restarted the story from scratch and used mind maps to help me cut back on the bigger details.  I decided to only use three of the bigger details on any subject and that forced me to pick the best of what I had.  One of those was on what kind of magic the main character had.  I also decided to let the lowest level of details go because it was too hard trying to manage the Details Monster.

But that subplot problem was still there.  Maddeningly, I could see how it was influencing the story and creating other problems, and yet, I did not know what causing it.  If I couldn’t figure that out, my novels were dead in the water.

At the point, I wondered if I was ever going to be able to produce a publishable novel, and if it was worth my time beating myself over trying to solve the problems.

For whatever reason, I started looking on the internet one more time in the hopes of finding a clue, and I ran across Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel.  There’s a lot of truth it in it.  I had been line editing rather than revising, which was keeping me from seeing the story.  I signed up and spent two months pulling out my hair.  I was going through pages and pages and pages and pages of details.  There was so much I could not find the story.

I also found myself beating around the edges of the subplot problem.  Only now it also involved theme.  Class members told me that theme and subplot were there, and that I must just not be seeing them.

Finally on lesson ten, the source of the problem revealed itself to me.  I was walking through one of the steps and it suddenly hit me that I’d started the story way late.  Every writing book assumes that writers need to chop off the first 50 pages, not that the writer is starting too late.  I’d literally started in the middle.

It explained a lot.  I’d been seeing setup in  weird places, even at the end.  Because the story started in the wrong place, setup had to force its way into the story, and it was forcing out theme and subplots.

Or so I thought … my journey to the land of subplots and details was only beginning.

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Have you ever had a time when you just wanted to give up because the problem seemed so insurmountable?  Tell me below!

 

When the Novel Bites Back

Out there in a bone graveyard is a place where manuscripts go to die.  We call them the trunked novel.  Sometimes it’s because the novel is so bad that no one should ever witness the horror.  Others have a sordid past that people won’t bother whispering about.

That’s my first novel, Remember No Evil (RNO).  I came from writing short stories, steered there by well-meaning people who thought a novel was too big for me to handle (I was 8 when I started writing).  But novels were what I wanted to write.

I was excited about the story and jumped right in.  About page 100, it stalled.  I didn’t understand why.   Writers tell us now to skip ahead when that happens, but I didn’t know that. I scoured the craft books for advice and didn’t find anything.  So I finally decided to revise what I had.  Surely that would help me find the problem!

Nope.

Got to 100 pages, same problem.  What could it be?  So I continued to look through writing books and try rewriting.  I’d get so stuck that I’d return to short stories for a while, then come back to the book.  No luck.   I followed this pattern for a long time.  I was so frustrated I would have switched to a new novel project, but I didn’t have any other novel-sized ideas.  I didn’t know how to come up with them.

Then one day, I was reading a craft book and something jumped out me.  It said that short story writers often have problems writing longer works.  Could that be it?  The more I thought about it, I realized I had never left the story story mindset.  I had started out writing the book like a long short story.  I also imagined the chapters as long short stories.

So I did an outline based on one in that same book to see if that would help.  At the same time, I was approached by a friend to cowrite a book.  He was familiar with the problems I was having and thought our strengths could shore up the other’s weaknesses.  That meant a new book from scratch.

I’d have to stop writing RNO.  I felt on the verge of getting past the 100 page hump.  But I also realized that if I didn’t switch to a new book I might never finish one.  I couldn’t trunk it even though I know knew I should, so I decided to set it aside with option to return to it after I finished what became Valley of Bones.  No stalls on page 100.  I’d finally finished a novel!

Now with that success in place, I returned to RNO and now understood somewhere along the way I’d grown out of the story.  It carried a lot of baggage from all the rewrites, and the idea was no longer me.  Cowriter thought we could tackle it after Valley of Bones, but no, I wasn’t going to resurrect it from the grave.

What’s your trunk novel story?

 

Houston, We Have A Story

Miasma is done.  At long last.

I’d finished it in May of 2010 and started submitting it to agents.  But there was a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, and I was admittedly uncomfortable with the fact I’d had to do every workaround imaginable to get the word count to 80K.   It wasn’t until an agent gave me personal comments, that I realized there were profound problems with the story.

Some were caused by my trying to bring up the word count.  Because I’d had to fight my way to the word count, I’d focused too much on numbers and not enough on good story.  But there were other problems, like me not being able to develop any subplots.  The story also felt off for reasons I couldn’t pin down.  The two things I knew for sure was that I needed to identify the problem, and that if I didn’t, I would continue to repeat it everything I wrote.

On Thanksgiving Day last year, I happened to visit Holly Lisle’s site and saw her How to Revise Your Novel course.  There was a section on subplots.  I figured that if it could help me solve the subplot problems, it would be worth the money. (Holly is planning on releasing the lessons as an eBook.)

And I went over the novel, following the lessons.  I could see how much the details and trying to pump up the word count had messed up the story.  But when it came to subplots, I didn’t have any.  I just had stubs — sentences here and there that might hint at a subplot.  There was something like forty different ones.  Then I got to theme, and everyone kept telling me I just wasn’t seeing it.  But the truth was, I didn’t have one either.  And the answer to the problems I was having remained very elusive.  It wasn’t until I got to lesson ten, when I connected the conflict when the problem suddenly revealed itself.  Second half of the story worked pretty well, but the first half, just didn’t connect.  And with it came the realization that, in all the writing advice that said, “Start with the action,” I’d managed to start the story too late.  My original beginning is now 130 pages into the story.  The result of starting too late was that the story setup still came in, just in the wrong place.  I was even getting it at the end of the story.  So it was crowding out the theme and the subplots.

I spent a lot of time on the beginning, trying to get it to be in the right place.  Eventually, the story seemed to be coming together.

And then I realized it was running too short again.  What could I do?  I still wasn’t able to get subplots into the story, though I figured it was the type of story I was doing.  So I added a second plot (Clive Cussler actually has 6 plots in each of his stories!).  But as I continued writing, the story was starting to overcomplicate itself again.  That second plot.  At the same time, Holly announced that she was going Indie, and I started looking at that.  Indie books don’t have word count requirements like traditional publishing does.  So I decided to let the word count go.  With that, I took out the second plot and combined some of the action scenes into the main story.  Whew!  Story uncomplicated itself and the bumps started smoothing out.

Then I took Bob Mayer’s Self-Publishing Options class and identified my platform.  That led to the addition of a subplot in the last two months of the writing of the story.  I also still felt like something was off, but now I started to get that there was a problem with the structure.  I researched a few sites and found something that made sense to me.  I started rearranging scenes — that pesky beginning again — and moved a major scene out of the front of the book to make it the Mid-Act Crisis and the book began to really come together.

Next up is to do a Style Sheet in preparation for the editing phase.

 

A Time Waster: Revise While Creating

This week, it’s been tough getting writing in–did 590 words yesterday and got an idea for a new, short scene.  We’ve had thunderstorms all week, so at the first sign, computer gets shut off.  We’re also starting to get early humidity, which is turning into tornado warnings.  Maryland’s had a few watches, but nothing has gotten close to me.  I’ve never seen a tornado, and that’s not an experience I want!

I used the time to print the entire first draft and the entire second draft.  The third draft was what I launched off this revision with.  Each one is quite a bit different, so I’m looking for anything I can reuse.  I thought the first draft was terrible — and there are places where it clearly doesn’t make any sense because I just plopped scenes in there — but I’m finding sentences I can reuse in the current revision.  My idea for the new short scene came from a paragraph I ran across while recycling.  It didn’t fit into any of the scenes, so I created a new one that will give the reader information but not the main character and play into theme of lying.  Will try to work on that one tonight if we don’t have more thunderstorms.

Never, never again will I revise as I write though.  At the time, I thought it was a huge time saver that would cut off time on the revision side.  Instead, I’m spending time hunting for material edited out along the way.  I have so many changes in the story that even printing the first and second drafts isn’t getting me all the material. I started on the hunt because I was looking something specific that I know was in the story.  But, while revising while I was creating, I took it out.  I’m now going to have to hunt through the backups to find it.  It’s very easy to revise good stuff out of the story!

I’m reading Life of Pi, which is not a book about math!

 

Pick a Scene, Any Scene

I did 1,595 words yesterday, some of it recycled from the earlier version.  I also did a scene shuffle.  That is, I moved the location of a scene.  When I was doing the revision in One Note (no actual writing involved), I constantly moved the scenes around, trying to find the right place where the flow worked with the big picture.   Shuffling descriptions is so much easier than shuffling the entire scenes, and it saves so much time waiting until it’s more or less settled before revising.

Still, I’m finding places where the flow still isn’t quite right.  Not as major as the changes above.  For this scene shuffle, I had two scenes at the same location.  Looked at the scenes and realized the second one should go first.   In Word, this was a messy process.  I either had to save the scenes as individual files and then change the names and the page numbers or keep it in a bigger document and cut/paste it.  Scrivener is a better tool for me — all I have to do is select the scene, arrow it up, and done.

One of my big take aways from How to Revise Your Novel Workshop is to spend a lot of time working out the scene issues before doing actual writing.  I previously did all this shuffling in the actual writing, fixing problems that crept up, and I was constantly revising the same things over and over again.  It’s so much of a time saver to get everything in the right order first before revising!

Today is my day off from writing.  I may do a little, but I won’t try for any specific word counts.  Spring has finally taken hold either — just last week I was still seeing barren trees.  Everything now seems to have exploded with growth.  The tulips are spectacular, their cups all leaing towards the sunlight.

What I’m Reading:  The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck.  It won a Pulitzer in 1931.

 

Recycling is not just for cans and newspapers

I’m making a lot of progress with my revision to Miasma–I wrote 1,218 words today, bringing me up to 18% done.  One-fifth of the book done is not far away!   This is a fairly major revision because I’m correcting all the problems that came with starting the story too late.  I ended up having 47 new scenes (out of 50) that I have to write from scratch.

So I’m recycling where I can.  Not like article writing where you take an idea and the research and write many different articles.  I have the finished version of the story, plus about 10K where I was starting it from scratch (didn’t start that in the right place either!).  Everywhere I can, I’m grabbing sentences and paragraphs from the older versions to reuse.  Scrivener for Windows makes it easy for me to do this.  I saved all my scenes from both older versions, so when I need something, I just click on the different files until I find it.  Then copy and paste.

In this case, I recycled one of the few scenes that survived all the changes–a prelude to action and monster hunting.  The setting changed and several main characters were eliminated, so some of the scene needed actual revision.  But reusing sentences and paragraphs was a big time saver!

 

Writing the Opening Scene

At last I’ve finally hit the lesson on cutting the book, which for Miasma means I started with 44 scenes in the first draft and have only 3 scenes surviving in the revision.  The rest are new, including my opening.

As I write this scene, I have three goals:

• Pull the thread of the inciting incident into the scene.  It’s not a big bang inciting incident, but a more subtle one that will become more obvious in the next scene.
• Nail the conflict of the scene.  A lot of it is tied into the inciting incident, so hopefully that’ll come together.
• Get some world building in.  This one is tough for me because I can’t tell if I’ve got enough.  I’m going to have to go back over the scene briefly and make sure I’ve gotten the setting in the right order.  When I submitted this story previously, I identified the original opening being in an elementary school in the query, but didn’t say it soon enough in the story.  An agent was thrown off because she thought it was a high school.  I already know I have one of those in the scene, so I’ll have to go back once I finish it and add a paragraph for clarity.

I’m color coding this revision because I’m dealing with 2 1/2 versions (the original finished draft, and 10K of an attempt to start it from scratch).  The originals are all white, and the new draft is blue.  That way, I can tell instantly what’s what and not get confused.  At the moment, I’m writing it by hand (though I’m not sure how long that will last–90K is a lot to write by hand!).  The various parts are going into color-coded folders.  Yellow for my scene notes; orange for my “Forget Me Nots” (things like making sure it rains 3 times in the story and that one of them is an indirect description); blue for the revised story; and red for the remains of the old story.  The folders are clear plastic, and I’m using a clear plastic step sorter to hold them.

Meanwhile, the Cherry Blossoms are scheduled to be at their peak on March 29.  I’m having a hard time believing it.  We’re still pretty barren here!