Tag Archives: novel editing

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Something new for the new year

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Happy new year!

Holy moly, I have absolutely sucked at blogging this year. This might be my second or third post? I don’t even know and I’m way too lazy to even bother checking. Anyhow, for the past few new years’ days, I’ve taken a few minutes to ‘burn’ a work that seemed to have died the previous year. I’m not doing that this year. In part because I haven’t actually finished anything new and in part because The Dark Queen of Darkness didn’t die this year. Last year at this time, I was pretty sure that’s what was going to happen. My wife, however, convinced me to just get off my lazy ass and just self-publish the damn thing.

I made the decision to go forward with Self-Publishing back in August as a 40th birthday gift. While this is proving to be a little bit on the expensive side, it’s still cheaper than trading in my car for a faster model or other similarly foolish mid-life crisis activity.

The status so far is that developmental edits are back from the editor (The extraordinary Jettimus Maximus) and I’m working through them. The suggestions she’s sending along are thoughtful, helpful, and very much in-line with my vision for this story. As I write this, I’ve worked through roughly the first hundred or so pages of the book a couple of times. What I’ve got revised so far still needs a lot of work, but I’m liking the changes so far. The narrative does feel tighter.

This is my first time working with an editor for creative work. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the developmental edit. What struck me about it so far is that it isn’t anything like a critique. We’ve all done those and they definitely serve a purpose, but that’s not what this is about. It’s structural and focuses on things like themes and character development, plot and pacing. To be honest, it covers the ground that a typical critique or beta-read is going to miss. Those often recommend suggestions to tighten up your writing or will help you find issues, but won’t necessarily provide you with concrete strategies for correcting the issue or finding larger problems that aren’t obvious.

Sometime in the past, I wish I could recall when or the actual context, I read a blog post posing the question: Do I need a developmental editor? I don’t recall the conclusion, but it seems like it ran something like: It’s a nice to have, not an essential. At this point, I think that my conclusion is that this is an essential cost. No, many of us can’t afford to hire someone. It’s not free, nor should it be, but there are editors out there who will do this for a reasonable price. What’s more, if you intend to sell your book and it’s been well polished, you’re going to sell more copies, thus the cost of editing should pay for itself.

If you’re considering a developmental edit, and you should be, but don’t know who to go to, I would recommend Jette.

In any case, I’ve got a tremendous amount of work still to go on this book, maybe even more than it took to write to begin with, but I’m now convinced that it’ll be money well spent and readers will find this story a page-turner with endearing characters and at least a few laugh-out-loud moments.

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Progress Report – Wine Bottles & Broomsticks

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I haven’t made nearly as much progress as I’d have liked after the first full draft was completed. My goal was to have it revised by last week, but that just didn’t happen. Work, side projects and working-out have gotten in the way. This weekend wasn’t any different. Yesterday I spent two hours at the gym, then we did a family day – movies & dinner. After a gentle prod from the twitterverse, I got kicked into high gear again and sat down to continue revising. So far, I’ve written 3 new chapters and extended another one by about a thousand words. Today’s goal, after laundry, shopping, and cooking is to work those three chapters in and finish revising and first-round editing the final third of the book.

Considering that the last book I tried to write took about 10 years to finish and I haven’t even thought about hitting it again for revisions, this is excellent progress for me. For those interested, I am planning a second book and there is a lot of material in this one that will feed into the second. For the second, I’ve got a basic outline, a few scenes have been sketched and there’s a theme I’m working around. So, all-in-all, not much to show, yet, but I’m working on it.

When I get this one buttoned up for a 2nd full draft, you’ll hear me crowing all about it. So, back to it…

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The anatomy of a re-write #2

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I wasn’t going to post another one of these, but as all my writing time, precious little as there is at the moment, I’m lacking in other observations or problems to rant about. So, last night (last couple of nights really), I’ve spent most of my free time watching Doc Martin and flipping through stuff on the interwebs. Not the best use of my time, I know. One of the things I came across is a series on Kristen Lamb’s blog (https://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/), called Anatomy of a best selling story. There are six parts to this, and I’m not going to bother trying to summarize, you can read it. Instead, I’d rather talk about the few things I took from those blogs.

Kristen Lamb started out by saying you should be able to give a synopsis of your book in 1-3 sentences. There’s no way in hell I could do that. After reading that series, I think I know why. My WIP isn’t about anything! – Ok, that’s not true, it’s just muddy, making a synopsis difficult. I’ve been much more focused on the plot of the series, leaving the plot of this book limp.

She pointed out a few things that got me thinking, and consequently helped me identify some weak points. Stripping away all of the pizza analogies, and sponge-bob pictures, I came away with the following:

Each scene, chapter, and the entire book needs to follow this basic pattern.
1.) MC has a goal
2.) MC is prevented from reaching goal by ‘antagonist’
3.) MC prevails over antagonist and reaches goal

On point 3, this is where the rule-breaking starts. You can always write a chapter where an MC fails to reach a goal. In the end of the book however, your MC must reach some goal, defeat some antagonist. An important thing to keep in mind, and this is the ‘bar’ for me, is that the MC’s success doesn’t have to mean saving the world from destruction. This can be a problem in fantasy. There’s this series I love by Bernard Cornwell called the Saxon Tales. At the end of each book the MC defeats the Danes, but at the beginning of the next book, there’s a new pile of, slightly more dangerous, Danes waiting to make their attack. It’s historical fiction, so it grounded on that score. The point is that the MC is not saving the world each time. The only important thing is that we are rooting for the MC, because he’s likable, and the story is written so that we care about the stakes. So, when the Danes are kicked out of Alfred’s Wessex, after a long and bloody fight, we’re satisfied with it.

Point #2 is, I think, what I learned the most on. It’s a simple thing, and it’s the root of conflict. The key here is that the antagonist, and this is exceptionally important, can be ANYTHING, Including the MC him(her)self. Kristen Lamb has some guidelines on this as well, but I’m not convinced. Done well, anything works – just keep in mind that certain situations are damn hard to pull off. The Antagonist for a chapter, scene, hell book for that matter, doesn’t have to be a person, it only needs to be something that prevents the MC from achieving his or her goal, and each of those layers in your book needs to have an antagonist.

Point #1 has the least wiggle room. If your MC doesn’t have a goal, you don’t have a story. Again, depending on the circumstances, the goal can be anything. It just has to be something the MC feels s/he must do or is somehow obliged to do. Turns out lack of a clear goal is a major problem in my WIP. It’s not that there’s not conflict, it’s that the antagonist of the book is not what I had originally imagined. For the broader series, however, the main antagonist is clear in my mind. I’ve written the book such that the MC is dragged along into a course of events (aren’t all heroes?) and so his goal isn’t always so clear. Without a clear goal, it’s hard to pinpoint what’s preventing him from reaching that goal (thus no antagonist). This lack of a clear antagonist makes some of my chapters, while interesting, lack purpose and punch, which leads into issues with the overall plot.

All that said. I’ve found a problem and some of the causes of the problem. Now what?

First off, the realization that I’m missing some important structure had me asking who is the antagonist of the book? Well, it’s not who I thought it was. Furthermore, it’s not even a person. It’s a bit more obscure than that. While my main ‘bad guy’ certainly helps kick off the action, he’s not defeated in book 1. Not only that, he’s not standing in the way of any particular goal for the MC, at least not as far as this book is concerned.

With that in mind. I’ve decided that revising the last few chapters might be a waste of time until I go back through and revise the entire book to highlight the real ‘antagonist’ of the book. Many of the early chapters should become stronger and give the MC an opportunity to come out stronger as well.

To bring this around, how does this get me to describing my story in one sentence? I still can’t quite get id down to 1, but I can distill it. Provided I re-work my story well, it’ll read something like like:

The road of shadows, abandoned and quiet for over five hundred years, haunted by the ghosts of long dead soldiers, has awoken. In an effort to seize control of the kingdom, Lord Feorun has begun to muster the evil of the road. Neoth the Rogue, exiled son of a duke, has been drawn into the fight, the untapped power within him is the only thing standing between Lord Feorun’s army of ghosts and the fall of the kingdom.

Meh. Needs work, but Rome wasn’t built in a day either, and I’m still editing anyhow.

photo credit: Don’t be afraid! via photopin (license)