Confessions of a new Editor

For those of you that heard "Something" on December 18th that you couldn't quite put your finger on but made you feel triumphant, let me say that it was probably me.

That day was the day that I wrote the two most awesome words ever in a writer's repertoire: "The End".

But it really wasn't "The End", because...

Now it's time to edit the thing.

Before I go on, though, I want to talk a little bit about Your Inner Editor.

If you're a writer (probably any kind of artist, but this is a blog about writing) you've probably heard about your inner editor and all of the various ways that you can use to silence, or turn down your inner editor.

And I used to agree with them.

Then I listened to a Writing Excuses podcast that addressed the inner editor and it was something of a game changer for me.

Mary Robinette Kowal suggested that there were two kinds of inner voices that whisper to you when you're writing.  There's an inner editor AND what she called an inner heckler.

I think that all of those articles talking about turning down the inner editor are actually talking about the inner heckler.  You know, the voice that tells you that what you're doing is crap and it'll never work and the first time that someone sees that you PUT THAT COMMA THERE?  SERIOUSLY?  WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?  YOU NEED TO FIX THAT RIGHT NOW BEFORE ANYONE SEES IT AND MAKES YOU STOP WRITING BECAUSE YOU'RE ~OBVIOUSLY~ NOT CUT OUT FOR THIS SORT OF THING...

That voice.

That's what you need to silence.  Not just turn it down, but turn it off.  As best you can, you need to unplug and toss that crap out with the trash because it's not doing you any favors.

Your inner editor (like an external editor) wants your story to be AWESOME!!!  It wants everything that you want out of your story and when it whispers to you (In a much softer voice than the heckler) it's probably got something worth listening to.  The difference is that your inner editor has something specific to say as opposed to "This sucks.  You should go play a game..."

On to Editing.

The first thing I did--which for some of you may be the hardest part of editing--was put it away in a drawer and leave it the hell alone for six weeks.  That time frame was recommended by Stephen King in his brilliant "On Writing" and, for me, the idea had legs.

Six weeks was just enough time to allow a bit of distance to grow between me and the story and it was also just long enough for me to start chafing at being away from it for so long.

Now I'm ready to sit down and start editing.  That bring me to:

Confession #1
I'm scared.

 This is my first time editing something of this scale (104,000 words.  483 printed pages).  I'm staring at a stack of pages that seems like it's a foot thick and I know that I've got more than enough rope here to hang myself.

The problem?  I want this to be good.  I want people to read this and be entertained.  I want people to not feel like they've wasted their time.

The fear is good, though, because it tells me that I still care.  It's not so good, because:

Confession #2
I let it paralyze me for a week longer than I intended.

Call it your inner heckler, call it (as Stephen Pressfield does) "Resistance", call it something else, there's a significant push back to starting something on this scale.  It's a pretty hefty undertaking, editing a novel, let alone your first novel.  And, yes, there are lots of books and blog posts (I've got several) that other folks have written to describe their process and they are quite good, but...

This is similar to reading books about performing brain surgery, or removing the engine from your car.  You can get tips and tricks enough to fill several hundred pages, but until you actually strap yourself in and DO THE WORK you're just not going to know what works for you and what doesn't.  That brings me to my next confession:

Confession #3
I'm making it up as I go.

Just as there's no one way to write, there isn't a single way to edit.  I haven't found the method that works for me yet and I fully expect (unless I'm very lucky) to have to tweak the process and let it evolve over the course of several books until I'm as effective as I can be.  That's normal and it might be part of the fun of editing, trying things to see if they work.


So, since this is a work in progress, let me share with you my plan for editing my first book.

Pass 1: Read the whole thing through just to see if it makes sense and to pick up the more howling errors.  I'm not looking at grammar, or even spelling at this point (and let me tell you, passing that stuff by is going to have to be an acquired skill for me...)  I'm going to be using a separate notebook for this and not marking up my printed copy and I'm keeping notes as brief as possible like:
Pay attention to your time line.
Make IT worse for "Character X" here...

Pass 2-X: Once I've got the biggest holes filled, I'm going to read the whole thing through again.  This time I'm paying attention to characters.  Does everyone have a complete arc?  Did anyone Disappear???  Again, I'm going to use a separate notebook for this.  This will probably be more than one pass through the book depending on the number of characters and how many arcs I can keep track of at once.

Pass X+1: Dialogue.  Do my characters sound like people?  They really should...This will be the pass that I read aloud to myself and I apologize in advance to my loved ones.

Pass X+2: I'm going to look at the actual words I'm using.  Do I use "Very" seventeen times on one page (I really hope not...)?  Am I repeating myself?  Have I fallen in love with a particular phrase, etc.  I'm also looking for places where I can clean up my prose.  Not removing big chunks of story (that will be in a previous pass) but trimming away the padding.  I'll probably still use the notebook for this pass as well.

Pass X+3: Line Editing.  I'll probably have to You-Tube most of the original Schoolhouse Rock runs before I'm ready to handle grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  I'm also looking for cases where I might have forgotten to turn off autocorrect.

That's a minimum of 5 passes or drafts.  I'll probably start looking for Alpha readers after pass 1.  I'll need to know that the story makes sense for other folks and not just me.  After the third pass, I'll start looking for beta readers.

That's the plan, anyway...

So what about you?  Do you enjoy editing?  How many drafts do you normally go through?  Did anything here sound new or different?

New Year, New Goals?

I'm not the biggest fan in the world of New Year's Resolutions.

There, I've said it.

For me, it's way too easy, once you've strayed off the path, to simply say, "Oh well, maybe next year." and be done with it.  After all, there's a gleam of glory in defeat.  You did try after all.  Some folks don't even do that.  As an added bonus, you've already got next year's resolution lined up.  You're ahead of the game.

Last year, I stopped doing the resolution thing and I started thinking about why I made the resolutions in the first place.  It came down to wanting to improve myself and, at the end of it all, I came up with three questions that I asked myself and then made a single decision around the answers (You can find them all right here).

The long and the short of it is that I came up with was a series of goals last year.  I'm still working on them and that's one of the reasons why goals are much better (and much more work) than resolutions.  Here are a few more:

Goals focus on the positive.  I've known folks (and I've been guilty of this myself) that wake up New Years Day with a checklist of everything that they don't like about themselves and they go over that list in excruciating detail, saying "I've got to change this and I've got to change that, so I will resolve to never..."

That's a bad way to begin a new "Anything" let alone a new year.

Goals are all about what you want.  They look ahead.  The hard part comes when you discover that the work involved in getting what you want means that you might not have any more room in your life for stuff that would be on a "Resolution" list, like whatever it was that you did last night that ended with you waking up half under your bed wearing swim fins and somebody else's pants.

A goal is something that you work on over time.  They don't happen overnight.  There might be simple, easily attainable steps involved with reaching your goal--there probably will be--but chasing a goal is a long-haul thing and the only way to get there is by hauling yourself there.

A goal is always there until you reach it.  You may try to impose a time limit on yourself, but even if you don't reach your goal in that time frame, the great thing is that you're closer to your goal than when you started.

Reaching your goal will often show you another goal. You don't make it to the top of the hill unchanged and, when you get there, who knows what you'll see up there.

Here are a few of my goals this year:

My goal is to write more.  Yes, I don't think I've ever met a writer that told me "I think I've written enough" so why is this a goal?  Well there's always room to improve, isn't there?

My goal is to read more.  I put away 68 books last year.  That's better than one a week and, still, my To Be Read shelf is groaning under the weight.  Not that I have a problem with that (Sorry TBR-shelf).  The focus here is on honing my critical reading skills.  Learning what works for me and what doesn't and understanding why stuff either works or not.  The only way I can do that is by reading.  The payoff?  What works will make it into my own work and I'll be able to see what isn't working when it's in my own work before any of you do.

My goal is to find a balance with it all. Work, writing, family, myself.  It's all got to fit in there and it's way too easy to let something important slide in favor of other, lesser, things.

My goal is to keep track of how much I'm writing.  For starters, I can't write "More" if I don't know what my "Average" is.  This year I want to keep better track of words written so that I know what I've done at the end of the year.  I'm including the Blog here in those numbers as well as any short stories, novellas, etc.

And from last year, you ask?

I did manage to read 68 books last year.  Not too shabby, and...

One of my goals from last year was to finish the first draft of my first book and I DID IT!!!  I had a lot of unexpected time on my hands at the end of the year and I finished it up just before Christmas.
Right now, I'm calling it "The Flight of the Kestrel" but I can already feel that the title doesn't fit quite right.  I expect that when I start editing, a better name will come to me.  When it does, I'll put it here...and everywhere else I can manage.


What about you?  What are your goals and your plans for getting there?

Finding Your Way

I had a post all ready to go for this week and I decided to hold off on it because something came up.  I'll put it up next week.  It'll be called "What's your Point (of View).  Please stop by and check it out.

Now, on to the something that came up.

About two weeks ago, I think I found it...I found: The Way.

More specifically, I found The Way that works for me when I write.

There are countless books and blogs and forums dedicated to finding The Way.  Stephen King, in his brilliant "On Writing", says that whenever he gets asked about how he writes, he replies "One word at a time."

While this may seem like Smart-Assery, if you've read the book (and I highly recommend that you do) you find out that's exactly how he writes.  He doesn't hold to outlines or advance plotting, he just sits there and lets the characters tell their story one word at a time.  It's called "Seat of the Pants" writing and it's a very viable writing style with its own set of strengths and weaknesses.

Rachel Aaron (the creator of a Wonderful character named Eli Monpress--you really need to check him out) has a fantastic series of blog posts about how she writes.  You can find them here...go ahead, I'll wait.

Good Stuff Huh?  Outlining is another good writing style that has its own peculiarities.

There are more variations on those themes than you can shake your writing stick at.  What's more, they are all perfectly valid styles.  Remember, there is no "Magic Bullet".  No one right way to do this.

There is, however, only one right way for you.

This may sound contradictory, but I'm speaking from experience here.  I've tried Seat of the Pants writing, and I've tried outlining.  I've grabbed at as many straws as there are methods and, in one way or the other, they've all fallen short.

That's not to say that I'm incapable of outlining or just writing from the hip, but after a while, it starts to feel like a pair of shoes that are just a bit too small.

When I write by the seat of my pants, I get off to a really good start (minus my tendencies to try and slip back and edit...but that's another post) up until I don't know where the story is going to go.  That hits me like a wall and I'm stopped.  I start thinking of ideas, and discarding ideas and not actually writing and it gets frustrating and it becomes work and then I notice that the dishes need doing or I really need a snack, or I need to clean the dog, walk the house, etc.

Initially, for me, outlining is a lot of fun.  You're creating a story and worldbuilding and getting down there in the dirt of your universe designing swords, magic, technology, spaceships, psychic abilities, time travel, and politics, and religions and...and then it gets to be too much.  I get hung up on a name for somebody, something, etc and I'll start kicking ideas around while another part of my brain is scratching at the door, wanting to be let out to play.

Eventually, for me, it becomes a "You've got to eat your veggies before you can have dessert" kind of thing.  It becomes work, and I suddenly remember that I've got to go water the truck or mow the goats, or milk the garden, etc.

The funny thing is, I don't really know how The Way came to me.  At one point, I was tinkering with a story and I just said to myself," Why not write the damn thing like you were telling it to yourself, or a friend?

So I did.

I called it a synopsis, but it isn't.  For one thing, if I turned in this 3000+ word monstrosity as a synopsis, any editor or agent would probably return it to me wrapped around a brick.

What it is, is me sitting down with myself and saying "let me tell you a story..."  Its a word of mouth kind of thing.  I don't bother with the details, just the broad strokes.  And it works.

Yesterday, I finished the "Synopsis" of my book.  I didn't let myself get bogged down with names, or complexity, but what I did end up with is the essence of a complete story.  I've got a beginning, a middle and an ending and a fairly good idea of how to get from one to the other.

Now, I can sit down and start writing the actual prose without worrying about what comes next.  I already have a good idea of what comes next and that's all I need to keep me going.

And now, I'm going to tell you the same thing that everyone else that writes about their writing styles will tell you.

This is what works for me.  No Magic Bullet, sorry.

If anything in here helps you become a better writer, then I'm glad to have helped.  This is what it's all about for me here.  If it doesn't work for you, then it doesn't work for you.

What I want you to take away from all of this is that if you keep looking and keep trying things, eventually, probably when you're not really expecting it, you'll find what works for you.  You'll find Your Way.

Now go write...