Tag Archives: #betterwriting

An Analogy of Sorts

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This is the second of three posts dealing with approaching the problem of sizeable revisions. The first post offered some straightforward methods to help you tackle the problem. This post takes a more whimsical approach. And for the professional’s opinion on handling developmental problems, please check out the post after this one. All three posts will go up on the same day.

This material also appears, with a slightly different introduction, on my substack: “Do you know where YOUR story is?”

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So, we’ve discussed some steps to take to get to work on making big revisions.

“But, what,” you say, “if this is a really big, extensive revision with tentacles of related material all over the place? Where do I start?”

Okay, this may seem weird, but it’s the analogy that occurred to me. Bear with me.

When I houseclean, it tends to be in giant gulps. Things being in the wrong place seems to be my biggest–and to be honest, easiest to solve–problem. But the idea of sorting out the belongings of seven rooms and getting them to their rightful places is daunting. For me, the general process goes like this.

1.   I start with one room, and I remove everything from it that doesn’t belong. Some items, the easy ones, I immediately put away. But others are not so easy. For those, I have to answer some questions.

  •    Who do they belong to?
  •    Does the owner want to keep them?
  •    If not, which trash disposal method is needed (regular or recycle)?
  •   If they want to keep them, where do they go?
  •    Do I need to put them away myself or create a pile for the owner to deal with (usually under threat of dire punishment if they don’t)?

These items usually end up at a neutral location, waiting to be sorted as these questions are answered. Some of them I already know are my responsibility, but I also know that more items like them await me in other rooms, So I hold off putting them away until I have them all together.

   2.   I go to the next room and repeat.

   3.  As I accumulate what I believe are all the items in a category (let’s go with socks) that go to one room, I take those socks to the room where they belong and either put them away or leave them there for the owner.   (Re #1.e, items like socks I might put away myself.) The items collected for someone else at the neutral location that I don’t handle remain in a pile for the owner to deal with upon notice.

   4.   Items that I know I’m putting away are piled until I need more sorting space, or until I am pretty sure they are all the things in that category. Or some other reason. This sounds a little capricious, but changing up how I work occasionally makes it easier.

  5. At last all items have been dealt with and put away, and all that is left for me to do is to nag someone else to take care of their stuff.

Tackling any big chore is tough. And of course, we were discussing changing and sorting story segments, not socks. The processes can be similar—start with the easy stuff, where you know what to do. Make decisions about where the words belong and which characters are responsible for them. Keep putting things where they belong until you are done.

The key is to organize a large task in a fashion that suits your mental/emotional needs and then go at it.

Apply the cliches if you want:

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” 

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” 

“There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.”

And how long did it take to build the pyramids anyway? Don’t despair, revision won’t take you that long. You can conquer it, and it actually does get easier. I have even heard writers say that revision is their favorite part of writing, because the words are already there and simply need to be fixed.  Good luck!

Be sure to read the previous post and the following one for more on dealing with Major revisions.

Treating Your Manuscript

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by guest poster Mackenzie Minnick

This post is the third of three dealing with approaching the problem of sizeable revisions. The first post offered some straightforward methods to help you tackle the problem. The second took a more whimsical approach. Here, the final post in the series, is writer and freelance editor Mackenzie Minnick’s opinion on handling developmental problems. All three posts will go up the same day.

This material also appears, with a slightly different introduction, on my substack: “Do you know where YOUR story is?”

You’ve taken the big step of completing your first draft. Maybe you even have a couple readers who have taken a look and provided some feedback. But now, you’re tasked with revision, and you don’t know how or where to start. The feedback doesn’t directly tell you anything, and the suggestions the readers had don’t work for what’s in your head. What do you do?

You need to treat your draft like you are a doctor and the book is your patient. A patient doesn’t visit the GP and have the doctor immediately schedule a gallbladder surgery. Instead, ask your book questions. Diagnose the exact problem, and work out a treatment plan.

Start out with your feedback. Where do the problems appear to reside? What are the symptoms? Even vague responses of “I didn’t get this” can be helpful. I often discard my reader’s direct suggestions of “What if your character did this instead” in favor of “I’m confused as to why your character didn’t perform this action.” This means either I did not characterize my protagonist correctly, or that I didn’t build the surrounding events to make that choice realistic.

Once I have the problem diagnosed, fixing it should seem relatively straightforward. “I need to build up my character’s flaw so that this inaction seems reasonable” “I need to change the response my character has” “This scene needs to be removed”. As with all aspects of writing, remain flexible. You may hit upon a solution that is messy to implement, but strengthens the piece overall.

Here’s a short list of questions to ask yourself as you go through.

  •         What does this scene do narratively?
  •          Is my character behaving how I want them to, or am I forcing them to act out of character?
  •          Does this scene move my plot forward?
  •          What would happen if this character didn’t exist?
  •          Could this scene occur in another setting, at another time, or can it only happen here?
  •         How does this scene serve my dramatic question?

Be sure to read the two previous posts for more on dealing with Major revisions.

Time Sure Flies When You’re Having Fun…

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…or when you’re supposed to be writing!
4–6 minutes

When I started this blog, my intent was to share knowledge about the noveling process with my readers. I work on multiple projects at a time, so progress in any one can seem to plod. The pandemic slowed me down, particularly as I had to devote much of my personal bandwidth to my part-time job. Towards the end of the pandemic, I was also preparing to leave said job, and I wanted to leave the office in good shape.

Add to that time spent worrying over family and working on our home, and I discovered that not only was I not making much progress on writing my novels, but I was also ignoring that facet of my blog. While I’ve kept up with sharing advice and good ideas, and I’ve continued to work in INKAS, advice specifically geared towards novel-writing has been missing. What has especially been missing are posts about finding my story.

This is partly due to a reluctance on my part to share too much of the book’s content publicly, but I think it is time to do a little of that. After all, I’ve been working on this novel for nearly 15 years!

To dive right in, let me show you the ‘cover’ I created for the work-in-progress. This is not a suggestion for the real cover, but a piece of inspiration and a cover for any hardcopy draft I might maintain.

I sometimes make up book covers as inspiration to keep me writing. When I am planning on self-publishing a book, the ‘inspiration piece’ contributes to the final cover design. Since in this case I am aiming for traditional publishing, this cover won’t make it to the bookstore, but it does keep me working.

When I write, I often have a title first. It may last, it may not; it depends on how they came about. For my MackenzieWilder/ClassicBoat mysteries, I’ve tended towards titles that have a rhythmic pattern and are reminiscent of existing songs. Something no knows is that Where the Bodies Lie Buried came to me in sing-song fashion, patterned after “Home on the Range”.

C’mon, sing it to yourself, just once….
“Where the Bodies Lie Buried all day”…..

I’ll let you figure out where Sweet Corn, Fields, Forever came from; Flying Purple People Seater is obvious.

Finding Shelley’s Shoes began life as “Who’s Gonna Die?”, a reference to a group exercise Shelley uses to block out the mysteries she writes. While a recurring scene, this title didn’t have a lot to do with the overall story. As my writing progressed, the subject of where Shelley leaves her shoes becomes a sort of running theme, symbolic of the problems she faces. So the story became “Finding *insert name here*’s Shoes”. My problem was that I couldn’t decide on her name! For reasons of the story, I was locked in on certain styles of names. I made list after list of qualifying candidates before I hit on Shelley. Hedy was one, and Vivian–although I called her Vivvie. There were several others.

All of these things may feel like window dressing, and to an extent, they are. However, titles and character names should be thought out carefully, just as carefully as baby names. A lot can be conveyed by the sound of a person’s name. You want to plant the right image in your reader’s mind so that–regardless of differences in our imagining of physical characteristics–they have a feel for the character you created. Names can affect that. While a Francis might resemble a Seymour, or a John might pinch hit for a Jim, you would likely never equate a Larry with a Benedict.

By the same token, War and Peace is not the equivalent of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, nor is it The Hunger Games. [ I’ll be posting a more focused column on creating titles in “Do You Know Where YOUR Story Is?” Please stop by and check it out.]

Writing Finding Shelley’s Shoes was well underway when I attended a workshop that featured Larry Brooks, author of Story Engineering (Writer’s Digest Books, 2011). One of the items he brought up in his presentation that day was: “What is your book’s premise?”

I was flummoxed. I needed a premise? I thought I just had to write the danged thing!

Larry explained how the premise targets what the book is about in a succinct sentence or two. Its purpose is to help you pitch and discuss your manuscript in a meaningful way with other writers and publishing professionals. It also keeps your writing focused.

I devised a tentative premise and with great trepidation shared it with the group. So, here’s my first Sally Fields moment–Brooks liked it; he really liked it! Furthermore, it really worked to serve both the purposes mentioned above.

Premise for “Finding Shelley’s Shoes“

Five sisters set out on what may be their last road trip; one of them shares that she may have a serious disease, and the resultant furor unleashes a lifetime of secrets and emotion that could upend their relationships.

As my story and my characters evolved, I’ve had to struggle with keeping it all under control. Even five fictional sisters can be hard to handle at times. My critique group has caught me out at being over-descriptive, over-enthusiastic about sharing backstories, and completely confused over the proper use of en-dashes, em-dashes, and the occasional hyphen. Like everyone else, I’m learning.

At this juncture, Finding Shelley’s Shoes has been done once, then undone, and is now being redone. I have finally solved my biggest plot problem and am incorporating new scenes into the old and handling the repercussions. There is now a deadline for completion.

In future posts, I will deal with individual problems I encountered while writing this novel, and how I handled them. I’ll also post about the grant I received and how it enabled me to recreate the road trip the sisters took. The trip was an eye-opener, and it greatly affected the writing of Finding Shelley’s Shoes.