Editing, editing, editing

Perhaps this is a message of hope. Perhaps it's a warning that if you're considering the writing life, then have your heart and mind prepared for the frustrations and thrills of trying to tame the written word.

I revealed my first two chapters to a friend, fellow writer and former critique group member (she's moved out of the area, we did not throw her out). I needed someone to read them, not for a line by line critique but just a general "does it work" idea and to reassure myself that I hadn't edited the manuscript into a mess that no longer made sense.

These are legitimate questions/fears.

She liked them. She had read a recent version of the manuscript a couple years ago and thought the antagonist's motives more clear and his character more believable.

These are the same changes-- to the mythical structure of my supernatural universe-- that I labored over a month ago trying to decide whether these changes would be for THIS series or a book in the future.

A writer has to listen to his/her heart, because those lingering doubts of "what if" would haunt him/her every time a rejection comes in. Maybe I waste too much time writing and editing, but if I as a person am always changing, my manuscripts must change too.

One of the first things you learn in journalism is to save everything you write and to go through it once a year and throw it all in the trash except for maybe your five favorite pieces. You grow so quickly under the routine of professional writing that those early pieces look like garbage. In hindsight, they are embarrassing.

Fiction has similar growth. Whether it be the bad poems an author wrote in high school or a first manuscript, eventually we look back and see the faults. But since I'm not published yet, I can improve these early words and make them something I'm still proud of. I'm okay with that.

Ghosts of writing past

A friend visited the other night and offer a big pitcher of my purple margaritas, we started talking about the benefits of a critique group and how writers learn from each other. We started talking about our own writing journeys, and how we have seen our styles change, and more importantly, we discussed how we see signs of that progressive journey in other writers.

Then we went into the discussion of how bad some of our drafts are.

And I bared my soul.

I went into my closet and grabbed the true second or third draft of the story that morphed into the Fashion and Fiends series. I wrote it in 1993. I used every cliché available and had the Anne Rice-style "misunderstood vampire" angst oozing from every other sentence. Now, my vampires are witches who practice blood magick.

I wasn't even 18 when I wrote this manuscript. It got shelved for several reasons.
1. It sucked.
2. It obsessed me and I could not move on with developing my real life.
3. I had no real life experience so the characters were cliché and two-dimensional.

When my friend, who is also a member of my critique group, saw this manuscript, we had a few chuckles. In the end, she recognized certain elements of my style and certain writing practices that I was good at then and how they're my strengths now.

It took me seventeen years to improve my writing, and those seventeen years brought a literature degree, foreign language study, raising a family, finding more of myself, and lots of reading and writing.

Writers who work together can achieve similar growth a lot faster, but we all travel the same road and have some point struggled with the same problems in writing growth.

Managing projects

My work on the werewolf short story was stalled by the 18-page essay I did for my take-home final in my French history class. Last night our critique group met, and it was only four of us, with three of us presenting chapters. I presented Chapter Seven of Courting Apparitions.

The beauty and agony of working with other writers in a critique format is when other people are right.

I leave these critique meetings feeling energized about my craft, but when they articulate problems that either I didn't notice or I thought I had fixed, it can be demoralizing. That is part of the process. And once you establish a relationship with your critique group, you learn to lean on certain members to find certain things.

You can rely on me to nitpick about tight sentence structure. One member of our group is what I like to call a visual reader, because she seems to visualize every detail in her mind and will let you know if anything seems out of place or confusing with the logistic flow especially with moving people from place to place. Another member seems very into verbs.

They also have opposite tastes when it comes to some things, which is good, because it shows how some readers will like what another reader doesn't.

But mostly, they start poking around in a chapter talking about the tension and the action and sometimes I realize, I've missed the boat as the author. That my text, which so clearly has a mission in my mind, has fallen completely flat on the page. Other writers will know what I mean when I say that sometimes you write something beautiful, with no particular flaws except one: it doesn't move the story forward as you intended. Then, the reader might ask, "Did I miss the point?"

As an author, I've had several experiences where people said this about a scene. So, I look at it and I read it. Removed from the creative impetus that spurred it, I no longer remember why it seemed so perfect. I cannot say why I wrote it.

And so it must go. The scene gets deleted. Or, as might happen with this manuscript, characters get deleted.

Yes, I am starting chapter 14 of Courting Apparitions, my second serious full draft, and my critique group has pointed out that some characters aren't adding anything.

So, they are between Chapters 7 & 8, and I have made the decision to remove Helen. But I'm not going backwards now. She will no longer exist from this point forward and I'll fully remove her in the next draft.

Hopefully we fix Pierre and Jules. There's been some rustling that they don't belong, they feel extraneous. They shouldn't be. They earn the right to be salvaged. But poor Helen, she's gone.

No matter what your project, you have to be willing to dismantle something that's not working, no matter how beautiful it looks.

The Power of Snow

I'm at the midpoint of the busiest two weeks of my spring. But the snowstorm allowed me an amazing opportunity to slow down... I just finished my homework (due Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon), read the submissions for my critique group (Wednesday night), and watched several episodes of LOST season five. My husband even did a good job finishing the house cleaning.

I'm going to Philadelphia tomorrow, so I feel like I can relax and enjoy myself.

But... it may actually look like I can write tonight, but I'm not sure I can. I have about three hours until bedtime. Can I conjure a writing mood after not writing creatively for a week? (And I wrote 5,000 words in the last 36 or so hours on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.)

Today was GLVWG. Our presenter couldn't get out of Manhattan, so we talked about cliché. So here's my thought for you:
If you write a cliché, that's fine, but before you leave it in your manuscript, really think about what you're trying to say and why the cliché fits. Then evaluate whether the cliché is really the best way to express it.

Who's rules are you writing by?

I finished (so I hope) two brochures for work today. Several of us had a disagreement regarding whether on-the-hour times should read:

• 8 a.m.
• 8:00 a.m.
• 8:00 A.M.

Now, the first on the list is Associated Press/newspaper style.

Which got me explaining the important of knowing what "style" we wish to convey as an organization and sticking to that style. We also discussed:

• Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., celebration
• Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration
• Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration

I felt the insertion of one comma mimicked addressing a person or an envelop, which we're not doing here. I felt no comma was best and two commas felt like creating "Jr." as an appositive phrase that could be removed...

So, who's rules were we trying to follow? Associated Press? Chicago? Etiquette? Our own?

And from there, I pondered who's rules I tried to follow when I write. We must write for ourselves, I've covered that before. But we all impose rules on what we do. First person or third. Third limited or omniscient. Can prepositions end a sentence? Show don't tell.

(Yet, many big commercial authors have no grammar skills and don't follow any rules.)

We want to write by rules of agents and editors. We worry what rules of theme and plot we can break without distancing readers. How much sex is okay?

Last night, my critique group read my new chapter one of Courting Apparitions. They thought it worked, but it raised the following questions:

• Do the frankness of the discussions between the two men, followed by the kissing/greetings rituals of the French make the main character seem bisexual?
• Would a typical American reader lose all sympathy for the main character if it is revealed that he was tricked into sleeping with a 15-year-old girl?
  

The answers were interesting, and made me realize how taboos/rules/expectations of society factor into the rules of writing...

Synopsis

Our critique group took a break from the normal 'story edits' stuff and we looked at each others' synopsis. We've been critiquing together for about six months, and in some cases, the manuscripts created confusion about what we're trying to do. We thought a synopsis, and 'revealing' the end, might help us as critiquers.

This brought up the question of what really is a synopsis. I thought, based on my experiences, that a synopsis summarized the main events and characters of the novel and told the ending. You can't hide the surprises. It's not a type of publicity blurb that might go on the back cover or the inside jacket. It's something the editor or publisher wants to read to know your concept, test your writing skills and judge how original your whole treatment is without actually taking the time to read the book. They want to judge how good your book is, without reading it.

As writers, we're also told to have a concise, ten to thirty second long elevator pitch. My elevator speech/pitch is easy. The first book is Stephen King rewriting The Devil Wears Prada. The sequel is less flashy, but is something like "Fashion designer must defeat supernatural villains to heal the fractured soul of a dead friend in order to save her, and himself."

The trick of the synopsis is to maintain your writing voice and not to write a ninth-grade book report. Sometimes, it helps to read as you type. There seems to be something conversational about this endeavor...

This is an excerpt from mine synopsis for Book Two of the Fashion and Fiends series, Courting Apparitions:

Mount Bethel, Pa., February 2003. Etienne d’Amille hasn’t felt much like himself lately—not since he suffered a heart attack after finding his surrogate daughter Adelaide Pitney dead of suicide in his bathtub. He’d always worried about the prospect of dying young like his father, but the reality of it hadn’t sunk in until that day. Five months later, the frenetic French fashion designer and his 32-week pregnant ex-wife, Basilie, return to the United States to sell the house where she killed herself.

It’s only a matter of days before they discover Adelaide left something behind—her ghost.
So, while heart medication and depression have stifled Etienne’s joie de vivre, creativity, and legendary capacity to reduce any woman to putty, he now must deal with voices in the night, eerie dreams, premonitions, and visions of Adelaide. The d’Amilles quickly learn that Adelaide did not clumsily end her own life. Instead, mysterious photographer Galen Sorbach murdered her for her magickal powers. Etienne doesn’t believe in ghosts, and he sure as Hell doesn’t believe in magick.

Etienne isn’t the only one freaked out by Adelaide’s earthly return. When Galen coerced Adelaide into surrendering her water-based elemental powers, he thought he’d gained the final segment to master his magick. But, Galen noticed his aptitude in fire magick didn’t return as it should have with Imbolc and its promise of spring. Then, Etienne saw something that had disturbed Galen for months: Adelaide’s traits surfacing through Galen’s body.

Now I'm going to skip ahead to the very end:
Each member of the d’Amille family must offer Adelaide what they carry of her, and Etienne must place the final kiss on Adelaide’s unembalmed year-plus-old corpse to give her rest. Adelaide has one last act before she goes, she reaches into Etienne’s chest and heals his troubled heart.

This particular synopsis is three pages.

Deadlines and expectations

I have impressed myself with my ability to get my second novel edited over the holidays. I shouldn't be, as I know myself and how obsessed I become when I'm in the midst of a project (plus how exhilarated I get when writing).

In a discussion last week with novelist Molly Cochran she mentioned the importance of writing everyday. When you don't write everyday, she said, you lose track of where you are and where you are going.

Oh, yeah, I agree with that. On the same token, I don't believe a writer has to write everyday, but a serious writer should. Treat it like a job. An amateur writer who wishes to improve himself/herself must follow this advice, because it takes a certain amount of focus and craft to work on a project without continuity.

I know. I know because I am a mom, a college student, a community volunteer and an employee of a local non-profit. I started these revisions over the summer and submitted them to my critique group. In early December, right before finals, I ditched the first chapter and wrote a new one. I started changes to chapter two.

After Christmas, I thought I could finish them one evening. More than three weeks had passed, and when I opened the chapter, I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I spent the entire evening reading my most recent revisions. And then I realized I didn't like the new chapter two, so I started outlining another chapter two.

Now, over the last four or so days I have fixed that chapter, cleaned up and added some stuff to chapter three and edited chapter four. But most of that success is because I have been working on it every day. Yes, inconsistently for an hour or two here or there as my family life allows.

But every day.

And it makes a huge difference in the quality.

This brings me to my blog. In talking to other writers, most are setting goals to update their blogs weekly or twice a week. I guess I'm a little nuts for doing this daily. In order to give myself some breathing room, I'm going to post entries on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

How many drafts?

Socializing with other writers-- whether it be at writers' groups meetings, open mic style venues, or more intimate critique groups-- drives home, for me, the necessity of revision. I have a gut feeling that the more you progress along the writing path, the less likely you are to track closely your drafts.

I think every manuscript requires three drafts, minimum. Now, some journalistic-style or disciplined professional writers may do it in one or two, but these writers have decades of experience that allows them to pull this off. And I also think they form their ideas very completely in their head before they begin work.

I believe a work needs three drafts before you can share it. With anyone other than close friends whose sole purpose is to keep you motivated to complete the task at hand. In my current critique group, one member has brought us a first draft. Another, a second. Another has a manuscript that seems like a third draft, and the other member has a tight manuscript that bears the marks of one of those fifth or sixth drafts.

I could be wrong, but that's my evaluation.

The first draft has the signs of a good story, but it can be painful to read as you accompany the author on their quest to find and contain the plot. There's also those vague details that don't seem fleshed out. "Toiletries on the dresser" tells me nothing. There's a big difference between lye soap and red lipstick. Which would this character have? I respond to these scenes with the same question to the author:

How does this scene and how do these details advance the plot?

Because everything must advance the plot.

First drafts are supposed to ramble, steer off course, and employ those random solutions that pop out of nowhere. (Sarah's Key used many of these convenient plot devices.) That's why the first draft, in my mind, should not be revealed. It's the childhood of a manuscript.

The manuscript reaches an awkward adolescence upon the second draft. It's 90% of the product it will be in the end, but zits and hormones blemish the text. This is when some good friends can help you find your style and encourage you and tell you what works and what doesn't. Some people lock themselves away even at this stage, reading books by other writers and pouring over their words fixing this draft in solitude. This can also work.

But the third draft has addressed these small bumps and can withstand the input of others. Like a young adult, the manuscript has its own feet, its own flavor, a defined sense of purpose. But it still gets confused.

Now, I have a friend whom I adore, and she's working on a third draft. She has already proclaimed that when she finishes this draft, she will ask someone to proofread, do one set of changes/line-by-line and never look at it again/make changes unless a publisher asks her to.

That's healthy, I guess. Not to dwell and move on. Write more and better projects. But to proclaim so boldly that she's done seems dangerous to me. What if she looks at it two years from now and thinks, after a pile of rejections, that she could fix it with another round of edits? Is that not allowed?

To me, the process never ends. Until that book is in my hands, the possibility for change is there.

Reading Out Loud

The first critique group I ever belonged to had an amazing chemistry. There were some traveling members who came and went. There were some unpublished writers who needed some polish on their craft. There was a talented reader. And a couple of English majors, one a working journalist. (Okay the last one was me.)

My current critique group has a different mix of people, and a mix of genres. In my current group, everyone sends a chapter or twenty pages. We read them all every month and discuss. We aim to keep discussions about 30 minutes and fail miserably so we have some late nights.

My old group only one or two people were on the schedule for any given meeting. Those individuals had to email their submission, so those of us who wanted to could read it in advance. Then, the writer had to read the submission out loud. This allowed people who did not have time to read it earlier to hear it.

People protested this policy at first, but I think everyone grew to like it. Not only is it good practice in presence and poise to read your work, but it's a good sign of comfort. If you're uncomfortable reading your work out loud, maybe it's a sign there's something wrong with it.

In addition, listening to the author read the piece allowed all of us to judge how we read. The author's voice could convey sarcasm in a character's dialogue, for example, that we might have perceived as mere stupidity. I remember one of my character's speech patterns coming off very differently when I read them out loud (Étienne's unnatural English became more lyrical, even if 'his' word choice was bad.)

You can fix many problems when you read a work out loud. It becomes obvious where language is clunky. You become more sensitive to the pacing.

Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group, GLVWG, tries to find venues for authors and writers to share their work. We used to host a special event several times a year with Touchstone Theatre on the southside of Bethlehem. A committee screened the applicants and then members got to read. The attendance was abysmal and I'm told no one applied, yet I know from experience that the committee rejected many applicants. Attendance waned, and location and night of the week contributed.

We have monthly spotlights at our meetings where writers have ten minutes to read. We also participate in festivals.

Some authors read the same chapter every time, whether it be chapter one or one they've rehearsed and honed. They're good chapters, but since the same members of GLVWG tend to make up the audience, I get sick of hearing them. So, when I'm asked to read, I do something different.

And some of my fellow GLVWGers enjoy the concept.

The manuscript of my first book has 400 pages. I let the audience call out numbers, and then I read the page numbers in order. I usually start on the first full paragraph and read until the end of the scene. It has never failed me. It has never landed in a chapter in the French guy's POV and it has never landed in a violent scene or a scene with sexual content. This weirds me out a little.

Tearing up a page

As writers, we can't be afraid to completely destroy our work. In my case, I'm currently working on "draft two" of Courting Apparitions, the second volume of my Fashion and Fiends series. I don't like this book as much as my other books because it's a problem child. Originally, half of the book passed before the haunting really started and it's a ghost story so this was a huge issue in pacing.

I call this my "second draft" because I've lost track of how many times I've rewritten the first six chapters trying to restructure.

As of today, my main male character, Étienne, (insomniac) French fashion designer extraordinaire, is sleeping. His very pregnant fiancée/ex-wife has woken and discovers his face bruised and swollen.

Now, this scene is from Étienne's point of view. The chapter is new. The premise is new. Last chapter Étienne got punched in the face, something that has never happened before but works very nicely now that I thought of it.

But his significant other (much simpler than explaining their relationship here) does not realize he "sneaked" to a bar in the middle of the night and got punched in the face. So, she's a little freaked out.

I escalated this into a scene, where she rouses him from sleep and demands to know what happened. Now the reader was there. And Étienne has already recounted it once to his friends. Does the reader really need to see it a third time? No. So I deleted the approximately 400 words between Étienne and his beloved Basilie. I reduced it to this:

Screams woke him at the first light of daybreak.
“What happened to you?” his wife yelled.
“Fight,” he muttered groggily as he rolled away from her.
“Very funny, Étienne. Did you fall?”
“No,” he grumbled as he returned to sleep.

I hope this works. My husband originally voted for Basilie not to notice. That she sees the poor insomniac finally sleeps and leaves him alone, all curled in the covers, and she doesn't get close enough to see.

I don't know if that would work, because he sleeps facing her... and how can you miss a purple face?

One of my girlfriends thinks she'd shake him awake and demand an explanation but in light of his insomnia, that seems rude if it's clear he's not in danger.

Because he's a bit of a carefree sort, I have Basilie think he's joking. And she'll approach the topic again at breakfast.

But if it doesn't work, I'll tear it up again...

--------------------------------------------------

Later...

I have been at work all day and haven't looked at the passage in question, but I did come up with a "typical" Étienne quip for his response when she asks if he fell. I probably won't use it, because I don't think anyone can be this witty on a couple hours sleep. But here goes.

Setup: In addition to the barfight, it is important to note that Étienne has spent the last six months walking with a cane because his leg healed crooked after he broke it in a car accident.

Screams woke him at the first light of daybreak.
“What happened to you?” his wife yelled.
“Fight,” he muttered groggily as he rolled away from her.
“Very funny, Étienne. Did you fall?”
“No,” he grumbled as he returned to sleep. "I hit myself in the face with my cane."

Reflections Upon Critique

When a writer brings a piece to a critique group, I feel it's necessary not to defend the piece.

It does not matter what you intended. It either works or it doesn't.

My critique group did not "get" what I intended from the chapter last night. I could consider them all stupid and move on, but when the general consensus consistently missed the point on why the details were there... Then the problem is obviously not them.

It does not mean my idea is bad. It just means my implementation failed.

Speaking of implementation that failed, they spent some time telling me the story/ central conflict as they understood it. Another chapter that had failed miserably was chapter one. (There's a blog entry for another day: The agony of finding a chapter one that is both captivating and effective in regards to plot.) What I found interesting of this discussion was how "close" their interpretation was to what I desired, but that they were right-- I had bogged the story down in some areas with important details that were misplaced. And I also realized that the reason my original chapter one failed is because I let the mystery continue for too long. Upon further reflection, I never resolved it at all. Bad author.

So I lay in bed last night pondering this. I wanted desperately to get out of bed and write. But it was after midnight and as a mom, I can't indulge whims like that. (I don't do well on lack of sleep.) But I developed a new concept that might work and give me the plot structure to construct AND resolve the mystery.

This is a lot of rambling. And today I have important but mundane things to do: bathe child, work for the office, study for my economics quiz, but this new concept obsesses me. I can't indulge my writing frenzy, but perhaps I can reward myself throughout the day...

My concepts for chapter one of this "sequel" book have been many. I wrote one from the bad guy's point of view, and that revealed too much too fast and didn't quite make sense. I wrote one from the good guy's point of view that was too long and poorly paced to suck you in.

My chapter one submitted to the critique group was so fast-paced and action driven that it became difficult to process, and the melodramatic nature of it lead my readers to believe my protagonist was on drugs or a complete nutcase and later chapters did nothing to explain what happened. Which made the manuscript disjointed.

So, my new concept, of which I have about 500 words is slower. The point of the chapter is to set the emotional duress of the protagonist, a character who, in the first book, was vibrant and full of life, and has now experienced a myriad of physical problems, depression, and grief that has changed his joie de vivre. And since it's a paranormal book, when the weird stuff happens in chapter one, he thinks he has imagined it all because of those things and in the next chapter, everyone around him starts experiencing it, too...

In the new chapter one, in my current attempt, Étienne begins the book in the exact physical location where the bad guy begins the first book, in a similar physical posture, doing something similar. I did not plan it or engineer it this way on purpose. But the setting is identical... and that could end up being a strength if I do it right/well...

I wrote last night

Once upon a time, a long time ago...

I was a prolific writer.

I wrote in my journal most of the day, constantly scribbling as if an observer of the world outside of it. These days, I regularly misplace my journal and write, on average, once a week. Facebook seems to have replaced those journal entries and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I used to write 10-12 articles a week for the newspaper. In those days, I never had the energy left to write anything else.

One summer, I thought I had found the best job ever. They fired me after a month, because they had hired me to be their in-house writer and the VP decided he'd rather have an artist. I boosted my confidence my writing a third volume to my paranormal chick lit series (series nicknamed Fashion and Fiends) -- 170,000 words in about 35 days.

I can write a press release in 20 minutes, but my own résumé stumps me.

I wrote a ten-page paper in French on the political parties of the moderate right in three days during my Thanksgiving break.

But I have not written a single word on my second volume of Fashion and Fiends since June? July? Whenever we launched our critique group via GLVWG. I had about six chapters then, and since we were submitting 20 pages a month, I knew those six chapters would last through December. And here I am, in December (almost), with no more chapters. This book has my favorite tentative title (Courting Apparitions) but the hardest plot. It's a ghost story and ghosts present a lot of limitations. In addition, the first draft spent the first 200 pages with the main character moping around doing nothing, because of his grief for the dead person...

Of course, Stephenie Meyer's New Moon has the main character moping for 200 pages. Maybe Étienne just needs to rebuild a motorcycle and hang out with a werewolf...

Well, last night, I wrote about 400 words. The novel I wrote after I got fired... That one needs to be split in two: one half for the ridiculous fairy plot line (which will get saved for another project) and the other half for the actual plot line where evil witches destroy the balance of the universe and a non-magical woman has to stop them. I've dickered with the plot and did a scene last night where the heroine waits for her missing husband, in a venue where she thinks he has to attend and her disappointment when he doesn't...

In my "old days," before returning to school and raising a five-year-old daughter, I could polish off 5,000 words a night, almost every night of the week.

I miss those days, but the other activities-- school, work, parenting, the non-profit boards I'm on-- indirectly do make me a better writer.