I ‘finished’ the latest edit of TFR today. Finished as in got to the end of the book fixing passive voice, pov issues and a few grammatical issues. I also chopped over 16000 words from the manuscript, which I think is pretty damn impressive.
I also fixed an unusual problem that I don’t expect a lot of writers will have to deal with. The book takes place in Canada, and the main characters are both pretty young, so I had to make a decision whether or not to use the metric system for lengths, distances and weights. I opted to go for it in almost every case, though in some, I went to a more generic term instead of an actual measurement.
What I expect to happen is that if the book is published in the US, I will need to go back and find all the instances of meters and kilograms and swap them back to imperial. I prefer writing in imperial because the notations are less territorial. You don’t notice the word foot, but you notice the word meter when it is frequently used.
I did leave two chapters unwritten that I must now go back and write, which should add between 3000-4000 words back into the book. Right now, I’m sitting at about 77,700 words. The 3000 words is about right. I skipped writing them at the time because I had a little bit of writer’s block, plus I wanted to figure out what would get cut in the rest of the book so I could use those chapters to fill any gaps. I definitely fear creating wedge chapters – ones that are obviously pushed in after the fact – but they are in places that need more content, so I think, with a little planning, I can make it work.
Once those chapters are written, I’ll let the book sit for a few days, then do another quick read through, and send it to be printed for my readers to review. Should be right on target for the end of September.
I’m about halfway through this edit of The Forgotten Road. It has gotten painful, and I’m fighting despair. Somewhere around Chapter 12, I switched into passive voice, and every other sentence for the last 10 chapters has the word ‘was’ or ‘were’ in it. It’s incredibly hard to fix that because eventually you run out of verbs.
So far, I’ve chopped about 8000 words and added 2000, which isn’t bad for the halfway point. I haven’t outright eliminated any chapters, but I know there are one or two upcoming that will probably go away. I’ve been working at it now for 2 straight weeks, and I’m tired of it, and I don’t think I’m doing as good of a job now as I was a week ago.
Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson. Plan better at the start. Keep your viewpoints straight. And for the love of god, don’t use passive language in the first place.
I had high aspirations of blogging daily, but I’m going back to a weekly promise, because, well, I am working on a book, and that sucks every living word out of me, and by the end of the day, there just aren’t any left.
I’ve spent the last 8 days editing The Forgotten Road. So far, I’ve completed work on 13 of 34 original chapters. There’s one new one in there, written from scratch. I’ve trimmed about 4500 words out of the existing manuscript. I split one very long chapter into two. I’ve completed fixing the POV issues in my flashbacks (that was a killer), and have been rewriting anything that seems even remotely passive.
I’m currently working on a new chapter for one of my characters. It’s a bridge chapter, all emotion and fear, and it’s hard to write because the next chapter for them already exists with some of this emotion and fear, and my additions here are going to require some changes there, but so be it.
The editing is going really well. The completed chapters of the manuscript feel much more ‘DONE DONE’ than they ever have before, and I can’t wait to put it back in front of readers and agents. I think I’m still on track for the end of September for completion. Maybe even a little bit earlier. A lot depends on this new chapter I am writing, and one more new one that has to come a few chapters from now. Stripping words out is actually the easy part of this edit, and I am being brutal.
I want to do a really good job on this revision because I know this one is make it or break it. But I also want to get this out there and get the feedback from agents. There are some major decisions pending in my life, and everything is on hold until I really feel that my writing has a commercial future.
One of the biggest changes I have to make to The Forgotten Road is to fix a few POV issues in a couple of flashbacks. The problem is that one of the flashbacks is by far the most emotional moment in the book. Unfortunately when I wrote the entire scene, I wrote it through the eyes of the wrong character. My main character is in the room, but he is an emotional wreck, devastated by a death in the family, and he is being consoled by another character. He can’t bring the emotion to the surface like this other person can.
Rewriting this section is so much harder than any other section I’ve come across because the damn thing made me cry every time I read it. Yet the POV doesn’t fit, and it has to change. I briefly thought about going back and bringing a third POV into the book just to support this scene, but I have to believe I can recreate this magic without resorting to that.
I’m going to resort to subtext and senses other than sight. Sound, taste, pressure, smell. I know the scene is still there, and I know that there has to be a way to bring all of it to life. It’s just going to be very hard. I think it’s a true test of a writer. We’ll see how it goes.
One of the books I bought at the recent PNWA convention was Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyon, a very well known editor, and one of the lecturers at the convention. It was particularly timely for me because I am, after all, in the middle of a major revision of The Forgotten Road, and I need all the help I can get.
One of the biggest issues I have with editing is that there are only so many things I can look for on each pass through the book. I figure I can do 3-4 major things at a time if it is something new, like a new technique for showing and not telling, or if it is something major like checking for point of view. While Lyon’s book doesn’t magically make you able to handle 20 things at one, it does provide you with numerous check lists of specific things to look for. I like that. I just wish they were all in a single spot in the book or somehow detachable in a poster I could hang on my wall and check off each time I finish an editing pass.
Her coverage of Point of View issues was excellent. I have never really understood the very subtle differences between 3rd person limited and 3rd person omniscient. It just was never clear in my mind what to look for when readers said I had those types of POV breaks. She explains this really well, and I put that new skill to the test early yesterday morning on a flashback scene that had numerous subtle POV issues.
I read this book a little bit at a time over the past couple of weeks while commuting, but I read the last 200 pages in the last two days. I was stuck at the car dealership for two and a half hours yesterday getting work done on my truck, and I did learn from Stephen King that you should never go anywhere without a book readily available. Reading a book like this for hours straight is not the most productive method for me. My mind wanders and I may turn two or three pages without my brain really having read what my eyes have seen. It’s another one of those books, like The Last Five Pages by Noah Lukeman that I will need to go back and reread down the road. I know my brain didn’t capture every lesson there, and it usually takes me a year or two of use to polish a new skill to the point it is second nature so I can move on to a more thorough understanding of another writing device.
This was the perfect time to read this book for me. I am deep into this edit, and fixing POV and plot issues, and the tips she provided and the samples in the book were very easy to understand. If I wasn’t so completely happy with my current editor (Jason Black at Plot to Punctuation), I would be looking in to Ms. Lyon’s rates. Probably too pricey for a new writer like me, but the book was certainly worth the money.
I’ve been working through the easy parts of the recommendations I got from the book doctor… typos, grammar, comma issues. Basically I did the easy parts because they were on specific pages, and since the hard changes are going to dramatically change the page numbers, now was the best time to do it. Still, a lot of what he pointed out were samples of common issues throughout the manuscript, so my hope is to find the rest as I go.
I also spent my train ride making a list of ever chapter in the novel and what is going on in each chapter. Just doing that pointed out some major disconnects in chapter sizes and how many different ideas were in each.
The next task is to go back through the chapter list and decide what I am going to add and where. I need to add about 17000 words or so to one of the story lines, and chop out 25000 or so from the other to balance the book. Cutting is always harder than adding, but if I have a plan for what to add, hopefully I can combine the two efforts.
Tomorrow is a planning day. The fun part (writing new stuff) starts Friday. Three weeks to write new. Then the hard part starts. Two weeks to chop. A week to edit the edits. Then back to the printers and to the personal reviewers. I won’t touch it for a couple of months then while I work on my next novel. Editing should be complete around Sept 24, September 30 at the latest. That’s my goal.
Today was a pretty big day for me: I got the feedback regarding ‘The Forgotten Road’ from the Book Doctor (Freelance Editor) I hired. Jason Black (@p2p_editor on Twitter) or www.plottopunctuation.com is the man behind the report, and I must say I was very impressed.
I was a little nervous at first about having a professional look at my work. Lots of people have read various iterations of the book, but I’ve never had a trained eye looking for everything from punctuation to plot devices to point of view deviations. The report he generated was a whopping 26 pages (he admitted it was the longest he had ever written), and it is chock full of ideas and pointers to improve the story.
What I was most impressed with was the way he conveyed the suggestions without doing any damage my fragile writer’s psyche. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to get this report from a hard-nosed editor at a publishing house. One wrong word from someone without the patience and the tact that Jason has, and I would have gotten defensive and not listened to what they were saying. I didn’t feel defensive at all in reading this. I felt energized and had I not been at work when I read it (sorry boss), I would have sat down right away and started writing. I was jazzed. And the report wasn’t long because the book sucked, but because Jason saw enough promise in it that he really dove deep into it and covered a lot of very advanced ground.
This week has been a big week in general for my writing, and it seemed like I turned a corner on Monday. I felt it. I was staggering under the story I was creating with my newest novel, and unsure if I was going to be able to finish it. Then I stepped back and started writing character biographies for every character in the book, and the details I needed to complete the plot started to fill in. Motivations and fears and history and conflict all came out as I riffed (I’m stealing that excellent word from Elizabeth Lyon). The characters began to drive the plot, they weren’t just holding the name space between actions anymore.
And then today I got this report back, and I was filled once again with enthusiasm for a book that was, just a few weeks ago, not just done, but dead to me. I didn’t want to touch it. I was tired of it. Sick of it, and wanted the characters to go away. Now I want to bring them back, get to know them again, and put them into even more harms way.
I’ve got some hard choices to make in the Forgotten Road, and even though I’ve got a bunch of agents and editors who said they wanted to see it, I’m going to do the full edit, let it breathe for a while, and then edit again, and send it out. It could be Christmas before it is ready to go. But it will be ready this time, and much, much better.
Okay, this is a Young Adult book, and I am only reading YA, because apparently to get better at writing YA, you need to read a lot of it. James Patterson writes about a book a day, splitting his time between the adult mystery genre and this extremely popular YA series. How do I know it is extremely popular? I asked my 13 year old niece Morgan, and if she goes on for more than an hour about a series, I figure there must be something to it. Morgan is you pretty typical 13 year old girl, though very into writing, and will probably be published before me (her 8 year old brother is going to be published this fall by Scholastic, but I’m trying not to let that get to me).
With all that said, I am not a young adult anymore, and since this is only the fifth or sixth YA book I’ve read in the last 2 years, it is still hard for me to judge whether a book is actually good or not for that audience. But here is what I picked up, as it pertains to adults reading this.
1. The book moves fast. It almost seems like there are more sentences than words. Go figure that one out.
2. Patterson plays fast and loose with things like physics and research and words. I actually found a spot in the book where he used the wrong word for something. I knew what he meant, but it wasn’t what he said. Bad editing, or just a writer who couldn’t think of the word, put another one in it’s place to continue writing, and forgot to come back and fix it.
3. Patterson switches points of view a lot, and even he got confused a couple of times. Shame. But I guess when you are rich, publishers don’t throw your book away because of it.
4. The action is good, and there is a lot of it. If there was one thing I learned about writing for YA from this book, is you can never stop the action. Perhaps that’s the video game society. Kids have changed since I grew up. I don’t remember that much action in the books I was when I was YA, but I went from Encyclopedia Brown to the Three Investigators to Tarzan and Steven King. YA kind of didn’t exist back then.
5. This is not a book for adults, unless you want to know what your kids are reading. If your kids are grown up, and you don’t yet have teenage grandkids you want to ‘connect with’, this probably isn’t the right book for you.
The book is a fast read. 400 pages in about 5 hours for me I think. It keeps you reading, and I wouldn’t mind reading another one, but since I’m reading YA to sample it to see if I really like YA or am just writing it by accident, I probably won’t read another one right now. Lots of other stuff to read first. And if I read too much of this and all the teenage angst, I might, you know, like die or something.
I finished the book I had to read for work, and can now return to my regularly scheduled writing. Today I finished my theme document, which is a really good thing to have, then went back to the book and began to reread from where I started having the issues that stalled my progress. It’ll take me a couple of days to get back to writing completely new material, but I’m in a better spot now.
I’m writing this from my home office, and we have a plan to completely redo this room (paint and furniture) in the next few months, and I can’t wait. It’s a mess, and it’s about as comfortable to write in as a school bus is to ride in.
If you followed my old blog at Cranium Outpost, you might remember a post I did about having to make some hard choices about my latest novel, The Unexplored Territory.
The hard choices have been made, 10,000 words were removed, and the writing has begun again. But it came to a stop over the weekend as my brain tussled with something, and this morning, I figured out what it was.
My last novel was a fairly simple thing. It has three key themes: survival, coming of age, and making a choice. But the story line and the character scope is small, and it was fairly easy to stay on track, even when I didn’t know enough about writing to worry about themes.
My latest story has a theme. A big one. A grandiose one. One might even call it epic. It’s been sitting there all along in my brain, but in all the planning for the book, I never stopped to write down what it was, and I never stopped to figure out how the characters played into the theme. I knew I wanted to work in this underlying current, this allegory, if you will, but it wasn’t until I started writing it down this morning, that the plot freed up in my head, and what was stuck became unstuck. Even with an outline, the book wasn’t fully developed in my head until I wrote down the theme. I still have more work to do on the theme document, and I need to do a little background research to make sure I’ve got a few metaphors clean, but things are definitely back on track.
My goal is to do a short blog entry every day about how many words I’ve written. Today, the word count in the book was a big fat 0. I probably won’t get to write for the next 3 or 4 days as I have a book for work I have to read (that is really pissing me off right now – 350 pages on Microsoft SharePoint. Yippee), but the story is calling to me again, and I can’t ignore it for too long, or the muse may leave me forever for a more attentive writer.
Joe Beernink 