Category: A2Q

Well, if all goes well, we’re making a big time jump here. All the past things I’ve been blathering on about—plot, characters, story, theme—these are all elements that we can spend a day or three on. Maybe even less, if they’ve been fermenting in my head.

But between last week and this week, well… hypothetically a lot of time has passed. I’m really, really hoping you didn’t write an entire first draft in a week. If you did… well, that’s another issue we need to discuss. I’m hoping you took your time, within reason, and we are—hypothetically—a month or two or maybe even six later.

You have a first draft now. And it’s a beautiful thing. Maybe the file is so big it’s an entire meg on your computer. An entire megabyte of your words. I know that might sound laughable or dismissive, but seriously—you need a lot to hit a one megabyte Word file.

But…

(yeah, here comes the but)

…it needs editing. No probably. There’s a chance you wrote a perfect, flawless first draft, but more than likely… you didn’t. I haven’t yet and I’ve been doing this for a while.

It’s okay, though. Everybody needs to edit. Everyone. Anyone who says they don’t is either A) lying to you or 2) delusional. Our work needs editing and revising. If you remember waaaay back at the beginning of the A2Q, I talked about how ideas need to be cut and polished like diamonds? Well, that’s what we’re doing now. Figuring out what needs to be cut and then giving it all a good polish.

Again… this is okay. Don’t worry. Every book you’ve ever loved has gone through this process. And we’re going to go through it so this book can be one other people can love.

Ready?

First up, the easy part. This is a 100% complete draft, right? Beginning, middle, and end? I’m not going to get a hundred pages in and find blank space or notes to myself like [FIND WHAT THESE ARE REALLY CALLED] or [ASK ELLEN HOW TO DO THIS]. There’s nothing wrong with doing that on a first pass—I do it all the time—but before I start editing I need to fill in those spaces in my book with actual, y’know, book.

So, again… this is a 100% complete draft, right?

Fantastic.

Before diving in, may I suggest taking some time away from your book. You don’t want to finish a draft, then turn right around and start the next one. We want to get a little space, and let things fade in our mind a bit. I don’t want to be looking at the manuscript in my head, I want to be seeing the one in front of me—the one everybody else is going to see. We’re going to need some stark honestly for this, so I want to be clear what’s really there.

One tip for this—I’d suggest switching the font. Go from Times Roman to Courier. If you’re one of those folks who likes to write in Comic Sans, switch it back to Times. A different font is going to make everything sit differently on the page and it’ll make you actually read what’s on the page. You’ll become very aware of what is and isn’t there, and catch a lot of stuff that’s been sliding past you.

Once you’ve taken some time away, changed the format… read it. Just read through this new manuscript with those fresh eyes. Maybe make some quick notes, but for now just read it. Again—don’t remember it, read it. Try to see what’s really there on the page.

Now, I’ve talked about editing a bunch of times. It’s a big umbrella that a lot of things fall under, many of which I think can get broken down into three categories or types. It is my humble opinion that one of the big reasons people have issues with editing is they get these different types confused because they never get more specific than “editing.” I want to talk about each of these three types of editing and maybe give a few examples of each. You may have heard of one or two of them.

First up is story editing. This is when we try to improve the plot and story by reorganizing different elements, clarifying them, maybe even adding to them. Sometimes we might even add all-new elements.

Second is what I’m going to call reductive editing. This is when we’re cutting things, usually to tighten up dialogue, descriptions, and maybe even to simplify larger elements a bit. Sometimes, in all honesty, we’re just cutting to get closer to a certain word count.

Third is copyediting. This is when we’re correcting things throughout the manuscript. Formatting. Spelling. Grammar. The nuts and bolts things that are still important because they’re holding things together.

You may notice there seems to a bit of overlap here. I’d say it’s a little less “overlap” and a little more “weaving between lanes in high traffic,” as we’ll see. You may have also heard different names or definitions for these. Look, I never claimed to be an English major or anything. If you’ve heard it called something else, cool. I’m just trying to make this easy to distinguish.

Anyway… let’s go through these in a little more detail.

We’ve kind of talked about story editing already, in a sense. When we first had that pile of ideas and notes and we started sifting and arranging them into an outline—that was story editing. Trying to find the best order for things, the best way to introduce different elements, and so on. That’s what this is—taking what we’ve already got and figuring out if we can make it even better.

Yeah, we’ve already done that. But now we’ve written everything out. We’ve got a better sense of the characters and the size of the events and how they’re going to land with my audience. Maybe that needed a little more description than we thought and that bit needs a lot less. And maybe we’ve realized some of this… doesn’t really serve any purpose.

This is one of the reasons we want to look at this with fresh eyes. So I can see where problems have developed. Or maybe they were there all along, but I couldn’t recognize them until it was all here in front of me.

F’r example, now that I’ve looked at all of this again, does it have a good dramatic structure? Does the tension start low and rise throughout the book (maybe with a few dips and drops here and there for our heroes)? How’s the pacing? Does it feel like there are any slow parts that just stretch on a little too long with nothing actually happening?

That’s a good one right there? Are things happening? Are events pushing the plot and my characters’ stories along? Or are they stalling out in places. Are people talking or thinking about doing things more than they’re… y’know, doing things?

This is story editing. Taking an honest look and deciding what story elements do and don’t need to be there. Or maybe just need to shift to somewhere else.

Also—don’t get scared here if it looks like you need to make big changes. If it turns out my outline was wrong, then it was wrong. So what? The first draft’s done. Make a new outline if you want and then write to that one. I’ve written a complete first draft and then gone back and completely rewritten the ending, or ripped out whole chapters. It happens. Don’t worry if it does.

Next up is what I’m calling reductive editing. This is something I’ve talked about a lot here on the ranty blog. We all get a little wordy in our first drafts. We use a few too many adverbs. We describe things with a bit too much detail. We let conversations go on and on. And we also tend to…

Okay, a thought exercise for you. If I said you no-questions had to get rid of three characters in this book—three characters with names and/or dialogue, who would you pick? Why did they jump right to mind? Is it because you knew getting rid of Wakko wouldn’t mean too much rewriting? Or because Dot and Yakko could be merged into one character (Dakko? Yot?) pretty easily? Because really… they don’t do that much.

We all do this. We bulk up characters and their descriptions and subplots, letting them take up a lot more space on the page than their actual contributions might warrant. I’m not saying every single character has to be a vital linchpin to the plot, but… well, how fast did you come up with three characters you could cut?

And I’m sure some folks reading this are thinking “Ha ha, good thing there’s absolutely no literary fat in my manuscript. Every single element is perfectly balanced and artistically necessary.” Which, yeah, there’s a chance it is. Maybe.

But remember this. As a first time author—hell, even as a successful one—the odds of a sale are better with a smaller, tighter book. No one’s saying a publisher won’t look at something big, but if I can trim two or three thousand words off my manuscript it can make a difference. Even just a psychological difference, when they look at that cover page and see 98K words instead of 101K words.

Finally, there’s copyediting. The often long and painful process of going through a manuscript line by line, word by word, and making sure everything’s correct. I’m using the correct words, spelled the right way. I’ve got commas where I need them and all my dialogue’s got quotation marks at both ends. Indents and spacing and page numbers.

People get contentious about this for a few reasons. Some folks will declare writing doesn’t have rules and they can do whatever they want, however they want. Others say it’s irrelevant because the genius of their writing will shine past all that to illuminate the heart and soul of the reader. And still others say, well… I mean, isn’t that the publisher’s job? They’ve got people for that, and they know this isn’t going to be perfect.

There’s a bunch of problems with all these views, biggest among them… what if I plan on publishing it myself? If I’m the publisher I need to be able to do all of this. And if I want someone else to publish it… well, why would they bother to look at it if I can’t be bothered to give them my best work? I mean, if they get those first fifty pages and it’s clear I didn’t even bother to fix my spelling mistakes, what else didn’t I bother with?

And to be clear—there are times my story might require typos and odd grammar. I occasionally spell words in odd ways. I sometimes take certain stylistic liberties with commas when I write. So do a lot of writers I know. But it’s always very clear this is a deliberate thing—I know I’m doing it and why I’m doing it. But these are exceptions, and exceptions by their very nature are rare things.

So there’s a bunch of editing thoughts. Let’s apply some of them. Remember that first page and a half  of our werewolf novel I wrote last time…?

Let’s talk about some of the tweaks.

As far as story editing goes, you’ll notice I changed “mom’s old armor” to “hand-me-down armor.” Now it feels less sentimental and more a necessity from lack of funds—a subtle hint at their financial status.

For reductive editing, I snipped some adverbs and redundant words. Only seven altogether (when we count what I added in). Doesn’t seem like much, but this was only a page and a half. At that rate, we’re talking about 1,400 words cut out of a 300 page manuscript—closer to 294 pages at that point. And those were really minimal cuts, weren’t they?

There wasn’t a lot to copyedit because, well, I checked it all as a regular part of the blog post last time. But I remember there were two or three typos in it, because I scribbled that all out really fast. One of them was my thumb not hitting the space bar hard enough so two words ran together.

Also worth mentioning you don’t have to do all of this at once. Some people like to just work in a single document through the whole process. Others write, save it as a draft, do an editing pass, save it as a draft, do another editing pass, save a draft, and so on. I’ve talked about my own method before, but figure out what works for you.

Y’see Timmy, that’s one of the toughest thing about trying to explain editing—even just these small tweaks. A lot of it does just come down to figuring it out. Yeah, we can study grammar, but so much of the raw art of it is just experience. Being honest with myself about my own work. Writing a lot. Reading a lot. Making mistakes. Learning from them. It’s how we get a sense of which words fit and which ones don’t. And like so much of this, it’s a flexible thing. Just because it worked last time doesn’t mean it’ll work every time.

In the end, the goal is to make this the best I possibly can. Not the best first draft or the best it can before I get bored. Ugly truth is, it’s going to be work, it’s going to take time and there’ll be points when you go back and forth about cutting or keeping things. That’s just the way it goes. But it’ll get slightly easier every time. I promise.

…at least, until you try to write a more complex book.

But we’ll get to that another time.

I think I’ve still two or three post left in this whole big process thing. Hopefully you’re still interested to read them. But next time I may take a quick break from the A2Q to talk about some related ideas.

Until then, go write.

And edit.

And here we are once again. Or maybe we never left. Maybe we’ve been here all along, obsessively reading news articles and checking on friends in hotspots.

No? Just me? Really?

I find that hard to believe…

Anyway, it’s back to the A2Q, this rambly, sprawling series about how to write a book from bare-bones idea to finished manuscript. And it’s the day you’ve all been waiting for. We’re going to start writing. Finally! I mean, this is what the whole A2Q thing was supposed to be about, right? Writing a book. And yet, for some reason, we’re not getting to “writing the book” until part eight. EIGHT? What the freakin’ hell?

Hang on, though.

There’s a reason we took the long path. Well, I took the long path and just sort of led you along with little bread crumbs and Reece’s Pieces and maybe shots of whiskeys. Trust me, I lured you out this way for a reason.

Remember how I compared outlining to road trips? We can make a very loose, bare-bones plan or we can map out the whole thing and schedule every stop along the way. There’s plusses and minuses to both of these, but for the moment I want to flip this idea a bit and compare it to something else.

Have you ever needed to go somewhere you’ve never been before? Not wanted to go—needed to go? Maybe a doctor’s office or a job interview or a bar where that person is waiting for you and you really want to be there and make a good impression? And that place is… six or seven miles away? Maybe ten? Google gives two or three routes and it doesn’t seem quite sure where you’re going but you’ve memorized the names of a couple cross streets and maybe two stores that are supposedly nearby.

What’s that drive usually like? Overly-focused? Watching the clock a lot? Maybe a bit nerve-wracking because you thought you left early enough but you still haven’t found it and you’re watching the clock tick closer and closer to the time you’re supposed to be there and now you’re doing mental calculations about how far you think you’ve still got to go and find parking and… look, you know this feeling, right?

Compare that to the last time you drove to your significant other’s place. Or the grocery store. Or the mall. Did you think about street names? Did you even notice any of the stores along the way. No, of course not. It was familiar and easy and you barely thought about it at all. You just did it.

That’s why we’ve been talking about all this stuff up front. So you’ll have the characters and the setting and the plot and the story solidly in your mind. Heck, maybe you’ve got some bare-bones thoughts about theme. And because we talked about outlines and you moved things around a bit on paper—or even just in your head—you’ve got an idea how all these things fit together. Most importantly, you know what happens next. You’ve got an endpoint you’re aiming for, which means you can always keep going.

So, let’s get writing.

No, seriously. That’s it. Dive in. You’ve got the story in your head, so start writing.

Okay, fine. Here’s some more advice. Just because I like you.

First, dump any idea you have about art. Throw out all those books. Don’t even mention your muse. We’re not making excuses, we’re writing. The only way this happens is you pick up a pen or sit down at the keyboard. That’s the biggest thing. You just need  to do it.

Second, think of this a lot like NaNoWriMo, just without the time limit. If it takes you six weeks or three months or half a year to do this… so what? You work at your own pace. You’ve probably got other stuff going on in your life and sweet jeebus there’s a lot going on in the world. Right now you’re under no time limit and nobody’s expecting anything from you.

More importantly, just like NaNoWriMo, absolutely nobody’s going to see this. Seriously. It’s a first draft. It’s going to be messy, you’re going to change a bunch of stuff as you go, and it’s definitely going to need editing. So much editing. Don’t worry, we’ll be getting to that point soon enough.

If it makes this easier, I forbid you to show it to anyone. Just like that. Forbidden. It’s going to be awkward to explain to your friends, I know, but it’s a little bit of a relief, too, isn’t it? Now you don’t have to worry about it being perfect. You can just put a bunch of words down on the page. And then do it again the next day. And the day after that. Are they all the right words? Probably not. Good thing you’ve been forbidden from showing it to anybody.

Third, don’t judge your process off anybody else’s. Some people can do a first draft in weeks, some need a few months, but like I just said up above—none of them are you moving at your speed. Don’t worry that he turns out great first drafts or that she claims she doesn’t even do drafts(that’s usually a bit misleading anyway). This is your book. It’s just about you. I absolutely, hand-on-my-copy-of-On Writing swear your editor or readers will not care in the slightest how long you did or didn’t spend on this. Unless I tell them I wrote my six-hundred page masterpiece in a week, in which case… they’re going to go into it a little leery.

Fourth, because it bears repeating, please remember nobody’s going to see this. You can’t disappoint anyone. No one will know about those typos. That big plot hole is going to go unseen. You can’t even disappoint yourself. It’s all my fault. I forbade you from showing anyone, remember?

So for now, forward motion. Just get it done. We’ll clean up that other stuff next time. Honest.

I’ve got nothing to back it up past my own gut, but I think readers can tell when the writer is bored. If I’m not enjoying writing it, they’re not going to enjoy reading it. My lack of energy for a character or a point of view or a sequence is going to be clear. Again, just my opinion, no hard research behind it, and there are always exceptions to the rule. But I really think it’s true.

So for now, just write. You’ve got the story in your head. Put it on the page “good enough” for now, we’ll make it better later.

That’s a rough, first-draft, off-the-top-of-my-head page and a half. It’s not great, I’m probably going to tweak the dialogue, and I already have some thoughts on word-choice. But the point was just to get it out.

I’m a big fan of exploring and learning stuff in a first draft. But I think a lot of people get caught up because they don’t have a good sense of their characters or the world, and they don’t know where they’re going. They’ve got too much to explore, and so a lot of their first draft gets eaten up dealing with… well, all that stuff we’ve been  going over for the past few weeks.

But when you’ve got enough of it in your head, you can just go.

Will it be perfect? Definitely not. But that’s okay, because we’re just doing a first draft.

So get to it.

Next time… should I keep going with the A2Q? Or should we take a break and I could talk about something else for a bit? Let me know what you’re thinking.

Until then… go write.

Write like nobody’s going to see it.

Hey, everybody. Hope you’re all safe and, y’know, not bored out of your mind. Social distancing can be a pain, but it’s better for everyone in the long run.

Time for the A2Q again. Thanks for following along so far. At this point, we’ve talked about plot, story, characters, and setting. I want to go over one last thing before we dive in.

And that thing is theme.

Yeah, you just felt a chill, didn’t you? I think we all have a kinda instinctive revulsion to theme because of high school classes where it was sort of parroted out to us and not really explained. Or explained very poorly.

I’ll also be honest—I almost didn’t include theme in this little series or workshop or whatever we’re calling this. Theme is tough. It can be hard to grasp. It’s also one of those things that sometimes happens even if we’re not thinking about it. Likewise, some folks think about it too much and end up driving their story into the ground.

So… how to explain theme?

Okay, look at it this way. You know how I’ve talked about plot versus story? It’s a topic that’s come up here once or thrice before, and I’ve discussed both of them in earlier parts of the A2Q. Plot is outside your characters, story is inside.

Simply put, in the Venn diagram of plot vs story, theme is where they overlap. It’s the common bond between external and internal that ties things together in my manuscript. If you asked me what my story’s really about, my theme would be the answer that covers the most bases.

F’r example… some of you may have heard of Solomon Kane, an old Robert Howard character who’s been in books, comics, poems, and even a pretty solid live action movie—which is what I’ll talk about here. Kane’s a bloodthirsty pirate who finds out he’s actually damned to hell, repents, and ends up becoming a devout Puritan with a vow of pacifism. Problem is… he keeps finding himself in situations where the good guys really need somebody nightmarishly violent and ruthless on their side. So he has to go back to his old ways to try to stop assorted bandits, warlords, evil sorcerers, and even full-on demons.

So we can say the theme of Solomon Kane (the movie) is “fighting evil,” or maybe a better way to say it would be “fighting against the darkness.” Kane is constantly battling evil in the world, in all its many forms. But he’s also battling the evil within himself, trying to redeem himself and not fall back into old habits and attitudes.

Of course, it’s easy to identify themes in things that already exist. Trying to make them from scratch, to weave them into this story I’ve been planning… that’s a lot tougher. I mean, this is serious writing stuff now.

But it really isn’t. Honestly, I think one of the reasons we all kinda fear theme is because it’s been made into this sort of literary boogeyman—this thing that looms over the story , and also over the author. What themes is the writer trying to explore? Does this book have a simplistic, common theme? Should we discuss the novel’s theme? At length?

Deep breath. It’s not that bad. Really. In fact, it’s a lot easier than your sixth grade English teacher made it seem.

(yeah , that’s right Mrs. Goodell—I’m calling you out)

Here’s a couple things I think we should keep in mind while we’re talking about theme.

First, at this early stage, it’s okay to only have a general idea what my theme—or themes—are going to be in this book. It shouldn’t be too hard to come up with one or two. Just look at a lot of the elements we’ve been gathering up so far and see what the connections are between them.

In fact, doing this as an exercise can be kind of a test. Or maybe an early warning system. I might have a bunch of really cool elements, but if I can’t find any connections between any of them… well, that means I’ve got a bunch of unconnected elements. Which is, y’know, sort of the opposite of a book. So I might want to reconsider some things.

Second, I should be aware my manuscript might have multiple themes. Not a problem. I mentioned before that there may be multiple stories within my book, so it only stands to reason they’d all intersect the plot in slightly different places on that Venn diagram.

Look at Solomon Kane again. It has the theme of fighting against darkness, but there’s a good argument to be made that it also involves the theme of redemption. It’s an active plot element as Kane tries to make up for his past, and it’s also a story element as he realizes that A) he needs to redeem himself to save his soul and 2) his redemption may need to take a more aggressive form then normal. And that plot-story overlap is a theme, so… hey, there it is.

Third is kinda the flipside of that first one.  Again, just my opinion, but… don’t worry about theme too much right now. Definitely have it in mind. Don’t willfully ignore it. But also don’t stress over it. Just write your first draft. Worry about balancing the plot and story you want to write. When I put a lot of advance work into my theme, I run the risk of structuring things to the theme. The plot and story stop being neck and neck out front and the theme becomes the priority. Which is when my theme starts turning into more of a message. And messages can get awkward and heavy-handed really fast.

Again, just my personal opinion, your mileage may vary.

Once that first draft’s done, guess what? The manuscript exists now. And it’s easy to identify themes in things that already exist, remember? I can look back over my first draft and I’ll probably see a theme or three poking out.

Now, again, I don’t like to do too much beforehand, but… let’s look at our werewolf book.

I can probably guess survival is going to be a major theme in the book, or perhaps “what are we willing to do to survive.” After all our main character, Phoebe, hunts werewolves for a living. And her little sister Luna is a werewolf, a fact she’s trying to hide from Phoebe and their lodge on the off chance they, y’know, kill her. And there’s also survival in the larger sense, that both of them have been doing a lot of things to try to hold their lives together, as individuals and as a little family. And we’re probably going to find out that the lodge is thinking about what they’ll do to survive, too—in the sense of both humanity’s ongoing struggle against werewolves but also the lodge itself as an institution.

Phoebe and Luna are also both going to be dealing with the idea of family a lot. It’s a motivation for them and a regular thing they’re dealing with—something they’re acting on that’s also acting on them. There’s also this family legacy hanging over them, and the fact they the two of them are the broken remains of a family since their parents’ death.

Which leads me to one last possible theme. The idea of moving on with your life, of getting past things. Both of my main characters want their lives to progress—Luna wants to head off to college and Phoebe wants to get her own life back on track. As I’ve mentioned before, Phoebe’s struggling with a lot of repressed resentment, too. And they’re also going to need to get past a lot of the baggage and preconception their parents left them with if they’re going to deal with Luna’s ahem condition and how it affects both of them.

Again, though… I’m not going to worry about this too much up front. I’m just making the observations now for the A2Q. I’m probably going to worry more about plot and story on my first draft, and later I may come back, look at these early thoughts, and see how they may shape later drafts.

And if you want to think more about these things now, that’s cool, too. As I’ve often said, we all have our own way of working, and what works for me may not work for you. The important thing, for now, is just to be aware of it and have it in that pile of ingredients in your mind before we start cooking.

Speaking of which… it’s probably time we start arranging all these ingredients and get ready to start cooking. So that’s what we’ll do next time. Yeah, next time—let’s just go straight to the next part of the A2Q (unless somebody has serious objections and wants to see something else first)