by Unknown
Then come Micro Rewrites:
1. Do my character’s emotional arcs flow? Which brings us to transitions . . .
2. Transitions . . . also called "arcs," but I like transitions better. Everything in your book has to follow a logical ebb and flow. If you have two characters in a shower-room in a gym after a workout, arguing, we need to follow not only the argument, but the shower stuff. Is the floor wet under their feet? Is the scent of the place moldy or full of chlorine? Are the characters too mad to dry their hair (great for chick lit)? Do they drop their towels? Do other people come in and out? A lot of this is scene setting, but it contributes to the immediacy of the character interactions, too. Then: how does the argument contribute to the overall progression of the book?
3. Do I use powerful action words with strong emotional overtones? I just had the privilege of reading the first page of David B. Coe’s new novel. OMG! Every word was filled with action and emotion. Very gripping! (Thank you David for letting me see it. I am honored.)
4. Do I spell well and punctuate properly? Do I make emotionally gripping paragraph changes? Don’t laugh. Where a writer breaks a paragraph can strongly impact a scene.
I admit that I don’t always do this stuff consciously anymore. I seldom pull out the pens and pencils, but I have used sticky-notes to mark and track plot changes in the last few books. I’ve got a lot of books under my belt and that makes rewrites easier, but I do still run through a book three times when I rewrite, and I pretty much do it by the Macro, then Micro method.
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David B. Coe
I find that my macro-editing often takes place while I’m writing. I’ll do something with a scene or character in, say, chapter 15, and realize that I need to go back and fill in earlier occurrences of that place or character to make the development consistent. For this reason I always write with what a house contractor might call a punch-list next to me. When I think of these things I jot them down on my list—AND THEN I KEEP WRITING. I do not stall the momentum of the book to retreat into rewrites (as one of the few good writing teachers I ever had put it). But at the end of the book, I have a list of macro issues to address, which provides me with at least a starting point for revisions.
On the micro stuff, I read through the manuscript out loud to catch transition issues, syntax problems, dialogue issues, etc. Reading out loud, as if for a conference reading, makes me conscious of how stuff sounds—and that, for me, is the best way of determining if it reads well.
I’d also add here that it’s taken me a long time to learn to edit myself. I feel comfortable doing that now, but I’d written three or four books before I reached this point. This is why having a friend or partner you trust to read your stuff can be so valuable. And when I speak of trust, it’s not always a matter of trusting them to spare your feelings by offering criticism gently. Sometimes, it’s trusting them to be honest with you, to be willing to risk bruising your feelings in order to make your book as good as it can be.
Faith Hunter
Thanks, David. I agree totally about the punch-list and I keep one going, with and without sticky-notes, in the after-the-book-is-sorta-kinda-finished stage. I tend to keep a running outline going (as a computer file) and add the changes to be made into that—in bright color, usually red, which I change to teal when I have made the changes.
My pal Kim Harrison used to have sticky notes all over her desk with her punch list. It looked like she was decorating for the holidays!
There is no right way to do anything in writing.
Turns Out, Length Really Does Matter . . .
David B. Coe
Writing a novel is difficult enough; how am I supposed to write my book to a specific length? How do I know before I start writing whether my book is going to be 90,000 words long or 175,000 words long?
These are important questions, particularly in today’s market, where book length has once again become an important issue for new authors and experienced ones alike.
Let me begin with an anecdote from early in my career. I was fortunate enough to contract my first novel on the basis of five completed chapters and an outline. When the contract arrived I read through it and laughed at the clause stipulating that upon completion the book would contain "approximately 100,000 words." I passed 100,000 words in chapter ten of a book that was more than twenty chapters long. I barely paused to wave at 100,000 words as I cruised past on my way to 200,000+.
When I finally sent my editor the completed first draft of the novel, it was 206,000 words long—well over 800 manuscript pages. He contacted me immediately to say that he had started reading it and it seemed pretty good, but that I should expect to have to cut the thing by approximately one third. Now, it turned out that the first draft had some serious flaws and I had to do extensive rewrites, but all of them had the effect of lengthening the book, not shortening it. Later in the process, when I asked my editor about the cuts he mentioned, he said that he hadn’t seen anywhere to make significant cuts and we’d go to press at its current length. The finished book came in at just under 211,000 words.
That was only a dozen or so years ago, but in terms of the evolution of the market, it might as well have been a century. Unless your name is George R. R. Martin, you probably aren’t going to be publishing many 200,000+ word novels, particularly if you’re a first-time author. Brick-and-mortar bookstores want shorter novels for a number of reasons: limited shelf space, a desire for lower price points, and concerns about shipping costs, to name a few. Standard lengths for epic fantasy are now closer to 120,000 words. For urban fantasy the number is closer to 100,000. The third book in my Blood of the Southlands series came in at 140,000. The book I just wrote for my new project, which is not quite epic fantasy, but not quite urban either, came in at 107,000.
So, if you want to get published for the first time, those are probably the numbers you want to shoot for. As the example of my first book shows, editors will be flexible if they feel that a book works at a greater length, but those instances are the exceptions, and if you try to pitch a manuscript that’s 225,000 words, you’re going to have a hard time getting someone to read it.
Okay, so how do you write a novel to a certain length? (And please, let’s keep in mind that all these numbers are approximate—you should aim to get within five to ten thousand words of these numbers. You don’t have to hit them dead on.) There are two answers to this. The first is, "You don’t." After thirteen novels, I’ve gotten to the point where I can write to a certain length and pretty much get there as planned. But I couldn’t do it early in my career, and really there was no need for me to. The easiest way to get your novel to a desired length is to write the novel as it needs to be written first. Don’t worry about length. Just write your book. Get it finished, then edit for length.
Let’s work with some hypothetical numbers. Let’s say your epic fantasy comes in at 180,000 words. Ouch. That’s about 60,000 words longer than you want it to be, or half again too long. So you need to cut your book by one third. Looked at another way, if your book has, say, twenty-five chapters (this is another way in which dividing your book into chapters helps), you need to cut 2,400 words from each chapter. At 250 words per double-spaced manuscript page, that’s about nine pages per chapter that you need to cut. Daunting, yes, but not impossible. Okay, maybe impossible. But let’s say you do your best and you manage to cut five pages or 1,200 words per chapter. That’s certainly manageable, and you’ll get your word count down to 150,000 words. Not ideal, but certainly better than 180K. At least now you’re far closer to the target length than you are to 200,000 words. More to the point, you’ll probably improve your manuscript in the process. Cutting your word-count can force you to find more concise ways to say what you want to say. Or . . . Cutting your word count can force you to be more concise. See? I just saved eight words.
Going back to that question again—"How do you write a novel to a certain length?"—the second answer is, "You don’t." Okay, I’m getting annoy-
ing, I know. But what you do is you write your chapters to a certain length, and you plan out your novel so that you have the right number of chapters. It’s much easier to write a shorter piece to a certain length. If someone tells you to write something that’s 120,000 words long, you’ll laugh in his face; if someone asks you to write something that’s 5,000 words—well, that’s easy, right? Twenty-four chapters at 5,000 words comes to 120,000 words. You prefer shorter chapters? Fine, write 3,500 word chapters—about thirty-five of them. And if in writing your novel you find that you need one or two extra chapters (or one or two fewer) you’ll be all right—if your 120,000 word novel comes in at 127,000 or even 132,000 no one is going to mind.
"But I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer!" you say. "I can’t plan out my thirty-five chapters or my twenty-five chapters or even my next chapter!" Well, at the beginning of your career, as you’re trying to get that first novel published, you need to try. I started out as a dedicated outliner; now I’m morphing into something of a "pantser." You can change, and if you’re finding yourself writing novels that are forty or fifty thousand words too long, you might want to consider a new approach.
Even as I’ve come to rely less on outlines, I continue to use the chapter by chapter approach to estimating book lengths. I said from the outset that I wanted my Blood of the Southlands books to come in at around 140,000 words each, and I got there by planning each book at about twenty-five chapters. My chapters were coming out between twenty and twenty-five pages long. So if you do the math, twenty-five chapters times an average of twenty-two to twenty-three pages, times 250 words per page, equals about 140,000 words.
This isn’t a very romantic notion, I suppose. We like to think that books just flow from a writer’s imagination, word counts and chapter numbers be damned. But the fact is that we are not only artists, we are also business people. Our art is subject to the limits and trends of the market. I love to write and I want to continue selling books. So I do what I can to make my books as marketable as possible, including writing my books to specific (approximate) lengths.
The first five books I published were all over 200,000 words long. The next book I sell to a publisher will be slightly over half that length. And it is probably the best thing I’ve ever written. If I can learn to write shorter, more marketable books, so can you.
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Mark Wise
I worry about coming in under limit, rather than overshooting. Is there a problem if a fantasy comes in at 80K instead of 120K? Would an editor come back and say, "This needs to be longer. Add more."
David B. Coe
Mark, it is possible that an editor of epic fantasy would look at an 80,000 word manuscript and think it was a bit thin. You might want to see if there is another thread you can add to the plot to make the book a bit fuller. On the other hand, it’s your first book, and the market is looking for leaner and tighter, so 80,000 might be just what some editor out there is looking for. Also, is it adult or YA? If it’s YA, 80,000 is perfect.
Slotted Spoons and the ABC(D)s of Beta Readers
A.J. Hartley
I was serving peas with dinner the other night, using a slotted spoon to get them out of the pan, and I had one of those moments of wonder at the sheer usefulness of the utensil in my hand. I mean: it’s a spoon—and therefore excellent for collecting things—but it has holes, so all the unwanted water doesn’t wind up on your plate. Brilliant! Simple but effective, requiring no skills or training to use. And who invented the slotted spoon? We know not. If we did, we’d put up some kind of spoon-shaped monument. With holes in it.
My point. Some things are so fantastically useful that you just stand in awe. Today I offer one of those things. First off, let me say that this is not my idea and you may have come across it before. I heard it at a conference and, though I can’t for the life of me remember who said it, I feel sure that she wouldn’t mind my reiterating it here. So here it is, a slotted spoon for writers.
Specifically it’s for dealing with beta readers. Most people to whom you give your manuscript, give you advice which, though well-intentioned, is muddy, self-contradictory, or platitudinous. Worse, some beta readers really want to be alpha writers, so their advice is colored by The Way They Would Have Done It. So. The slotted-spoon idea is designed to take much of the waffling out of the process, making it as easy as possible for your readers to clearly convey their experience with your manuscript.
You ask them to read the manuscript (hard copy or electronic: doesn’t matter) and ask them to periodically mark any passage that strikes them with one of the first 4 letters of the alphabet. This is not a ranking system, and you might prefer to leave the A out entirely. What it stands for is this:
A = Awesome. Something about this just blew me away. Excellent.
B = Bored now. Ten pages on minor character’s lineage? I’m sure it’s really clever and all but . . . I’ve got QVC to watch.
C = Confused. He said what? The people of Anth believed in what? He can get out of the rabbit burrow because . . . ? Huh?
D = Don’t believe it. His horse just happens to be exactly where he needs it? He’s never picked a lock before but he manages it in 30 seconds? No way. Sorry. Not buying it.
Exactly how you spell them out doesn’t really matter, beyond the key word (bored, confused, don’t believe). Use this and you’ll discover two secrets of the beta-reader universe:
1. Giving readers nothing but one of four letters makes them more honest. They don’t have to explain or be polite because they know you don’t expect them to.
2. The Slotted Spoon works for both you and your reader. The reader doesn’t have to worry about how to phrase (or remember) their thoughts (esp. their critical thoughts) and they don’t have to keep extensive notes. You get clear, precise feedback which—whether you agree with it or not—will help you address potential audience response to your book.
Without other clutter to think about, your readers get better. They can go with the flow of the narrative without getting bogged down—pausing only to scribble a letter periodically—so what you get is much closer to actual reader response rather than Attentive, Thoughtful Beta Reader who Must-Think-of-Something-Smart-To-Say-If-Only-To-Prove-I-Really-Read-It response. Put a few of these marked-up narratives together and see if patterns begin to emerge. If reader #1 gives an A to what reader #2 gives a B or D, chances are it’s a wash and you need someone else to break the tie. But if reader #1 and 2 both say it’s a C, you know you still have work to do. In the end, it will come down to your instincts anyway. But where patterns do emerge, you can concentrate on figuring out what’s wrong and how to fix it.
One final note. If you find yourself disagreeing with the patterns that emerge, you have one of two problems. The first, and easiest to deal with, is that some or all of your beta readers are wrong for this book and don’t reflect your target audience. If so, fire them politely. You don’t have time to be polite with readers who wish your dark urban fantasy was Jane Austen (the original, not the one with zombies). Find the right readers for your genre and move on.
The second problem is more serious. There’s no point having readers of any kind if you don’t listen to them. If you can’t find readers whose input you value, and you persist in giving your own writing A’s where your readers give it B’s, C’s and D’s, you need to seriously re-evaluate your work and your goals. It’s fine to write for yourself, but if you want to be published and read by others, you have to pay attention to what people think of your work. If you have to explain to practically everybody why your book (or chapter or sentence) is actually good, it probably isn’t.
And that’s it. This will be my shortest post ever on Magical Words, because if you over analyze a slotted spoon, the thing loses its mystery, and no one wants that.
Revisions: When is Enough Enough?
Stuart Jaffe
I had planned to write something else, but I’ve come across several discussions (including a few here at Magical Words) concerning wh
en to stop revising. Revisions are a necessary aspect of the creative process, but how do you know when you’ve gone too far? Where is the point when you’re doing more harm than good?
Of course, there’s no easy answer to this. There never is. It’s mostly (but not entirely) subjective. And yet, we authors have to get a feel for this mystical demarcation point or else end up ruining our manuscripts with infinite revisions.
Well, just as the writing process is unique to each writer, so too is the revision process. There are those who are methodical and meticulous, just as there are those who play it fast and loose. However, if you’re just starting out (and thus don’t have a process firmly in place) or if you’re looking for a new tactic, here’s my suggestion: Make a battle plan. With this technique you’ll address everything in a manner that will leave you feeling you’ve left no stone unturned, yet you won’t feel the need to keep going over the same territory again and again. Here’s how it works:
Decide which key elements you want to revise in each pass through the manuscript. Perhaps you want to focus on a particular character. Perhaps the plot doesn’t feel strong enough. Perhaps you want to make sure your dialogue is tight or your metaphors and similes are the best they can be. Perhaps you simply want to make sure all the core elements are working effectively. Whatever you feel is important, list it on a piece of paper. It’s okay if it’s a long list—it probably will be.