Merinda's Meanderings

Monday I talked about writing, today I’m talking about rewriting. This is something else that’s up to to the writer, to some extent. But I’ve found the method that works for me:

One chapter at a time.

Well first I let the story sit for at least a week. Then I go through and give it a read, making notes on it of things I want to change, chapters or scenes I need to insert, things like that. Then I sit down and go through one chapter at a time. Depending on how much I’m working on it and how much needs to change a chapter can take me from a day or two to a week.

For instance, in my current main project, Grace, I had to rework the beginning quite a bit. Of course some of that was due to things I found out at the end of the book, but it was also necessary to set certain things up better.

Something else I do is I have a couple of people that read behind me. Now a lot of authors say the 1st draft should be some hidden thing, done in secret; like a mad scientist working away from prying eyes. I can’t do that. I almost always have to write to an audience of some kind, even on a first draft. It gives me motivation to know that someone besides me wants to know what happens next. And I’m confident enough in my writing to not take all of their suggestions.

This is even more important on a second draft. My current two main readers get the story chapter by chapter, as I finish them. They help clean up my inevitable then/than mistakes, missing words and point out awkward passages. Hopefully by draft 2 I don’t have so many of those, but especially on sections where I’m adding a lot it again helps to have a second set of eyes.

They also help reassure me regarding the question I try to keep most in mind: Does all this make sense? After all, if a character does something, well, out of character, they better have a good reason!

I don’t mind rewriting, for the most part. Of course there are times when I want to throw up my hands and be done with it, but that happens in all the drafts. Like I said on Monday the important thing is to just put one word in front of another, push on through no matter how much you want to give up. After all, when flying an airplane, the way to get out of a stall is to drop the stick and dive.

A friend of mine asked me the other day about how I write my first drafts. The answer isn’t just in the how, its in the why. After all, technically speaking, writing a first draft of anything is simply putting one word after another, stringing sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters. Ultimately, I suppose I write because I have a story to tell; characters and an interesting setting.

I frequently don’t know how a story is going to end when I start. And if I know the end I certainly don’t know everything in the middle. Usually my stories evolve as characters face various challenges. The story lies in their reactions to those challenges. It’s my job as a writer to know the characters well enough to know how they would realistically react. And sometimes they surprise me, which is almost always wonderful and scary.

The method of writing is pretty much personal preference. For me, I have to write linearly, even if I have an awesome idea for a scene later on. I’ve found, in my experience, that if i skip around, I never go back and fill in the missing scenes. But again, thats up to the author. Besides, for me, if i write in a linear fashion I get the experience of finding out what happens next as I go along. I also have the probably bad habit of keeping most of the stuff of a story in my head, instead of taking notes.

Let me leave you with a link. This is one of the best songs out there about being creative. It’s “Die, Vampire, Die” from [Title of Show], an off Broadway musical. Song has profanity.

Die,Vampire, Die

I finally made my way through that last chapter. I’ve once again throughly traumatized my characters, but what else is really new? At least this chapter has done what it was designed to do and pushed both the characters and the plot a little further along.

A friend of mine pointed me at this “100 Most Important Things to Know About Your Character” questionnaire. Its maybe designed a bit for role-players, but it works just as well for writers. I set down with it last night and today and got into the head of one of my MCs and learned a lot about her. I’m going to do the same questions with my other characters too, I’m pretty sure. Even though this is a second re-write, I’m finding you can still learn things about your characters. And of course characters can still surprise. Heck with the answers to some of the questions I found myself going “well then no wonder she reacted this way to that.”

I’ll be adding this to my Tools under Links as well. There are other things there that I’ve found useful, take a look!

I’ve been working on this rewrite of Grace for a while. The first part hummed along pretty well, even with new stuff I added in. Now though I’m in the doldrums of the middle of the story and in need of adding another chapter. This particular Sargasso Sea is starting to drive me a bit batty. It’s important that this chapter happens and its important that I try and describe the situation this character is in and how they are feeling, but I’m tempted to metaphorically crumble up everything I wrote yesterday and toss it in the bin.

Show don’t tell, right? But its hard to do that when the character is trying to be numb and apathetic. Maybe I need to come up with something so awful that they have to react, but I kind of have that already in the next chapter and I’d like to leave that where it is. Basically several months have to go by with little happening. As tempting as it is to just write “and nothing of any importance happened”, that won’t exactly work. Maybe something awful happens and they don’t react. That would at least show some of their state of mind.

And I think I’m babbling a bit. Sorry, readers. Everyone has walls from time to time, thats for certain. The good thing is this story is already done, it just needs work. The most important thing about hitting blocks though is to just work through it. Sometimes all you can do is write junk until the right words come along.

Sometimes as writer you just get stuck, especially on names. At least I know I do. Your characters ride through a vicious storm until they see the comforting lights of an Inn. But whats the name of it? Or the barkeep? Or whats the name of stock character #5, the one that’s been sitting by the fire all night?

That’s where Seventh Sanctum can be a huge help. And not just with names. They have generators to help with plots and characters too. In fact I just tried the Envisoner and now the wheels are turning…

Seventh Sanctum is a very useful site, that is adding new stuff all the time. It can also be an amusing distraction if you’re just bored. Who knows, you might find something that sends you in a direction you never expected!

Okay, Remember the Milk isn’t really a writing tool. But it’s one I’ve found so useful that I felt I had to mention it here. The picture is pretty much how it looks on my iGoogle page. Now you are wondering, “what is this Remember the Milk thing?”

Basically its an organizer/to do list. I’m someone who happily makes lists, then loses or forgets them. Or things don’t get done. Remember the Milk (rtm for the rest of this post), however is starting to change that. The main way is by plugins that go into my gmail and iGoogle. I leave my gmail open all the time. So whenever I click on that tab to read mail or anything, the list is there. It’s also in my iGoogle, which I use less often. In addition I have it set up so rtm emails me every day with that days list. And I can add and complete tasks from either tool.

As you might be able to see in the picture, rtm give you three priorites you can use, each with their own color. You can also set things to repeat as needed. There is also a map feature so if you know you have to go to a certain location you can add that to the task, so you aren’t looking it up at the last minute. If your task is somewhere on the internets, you can include the URL. Plus you can email tasks to rtm. You still have to go in and tweak things (least I did), but the body of the email is contained in a note on that task.

As I said, this is something I’m finding extremely useful. Also, it is free, though you can go “pro” for $25. The only real difference I see on the pro version is iPhone support, which I don’t need. Still since this is something I use every day I might very well go ahead and pay for it.

The other day a friend of mine encouraged me to go back and list all of the major writing projects I’ve done. I took that to mean novels and listed out all the ones I could remember and find, with a little help from the dark corners of my hard drive. I have to say, I’m pretty satisfied with the list. There are eleven “novels” that I listed, most in some form of completion, a couple of them not, going back to my high school days.

One of the things that has certainly helped is National Novel Writing Month. Most of the “novels” from before that barely reached 20,000 words. Now, at least the first draft, is usually around 50k, whether they are a nano novel or not. NaNoWriMo has also helped me to take my writing much more seriously. I noticed when I was listing things that there was a drought of about five years where I hardly wrote anything at all. Now though, writing is very much a part of my daily life.

I also can see a definite improvement. Which is a very good thing! If I still wrote the same way as I did when I wrote Star Trek fanfic in high school (and that was basically when the internet was just starting, so I had no one to share my fanfic with), then I’d be in a lot of trouble. I went back and read what I had for my first nano-novel, which I never finished. Wow, it’s some awful stuff. The idea behind it is still somewhat solid, but the writing is downright laughable in many places. It’s rushed, the dialogue is ridiculous, and the characters are cardboard. But it was a start.

One of these days, if all goes well, I’ll be a published author with my name on the spine of a book. I’m sure it will be billed as my “first novel.” But I’ll know that behind whichever one goes to press is a long line of stories probably best left in the drawer. But each of those has taught me something and each of those has helped me improve both my craft and my imagination. After all, we cannot grow unless we stumble and fight our way through whatever troubles stand in our way.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

Neil Gaiman-”The Sandman”

Looks like I’m getting past the easy editing and into some of the tougher stuff. I just demolished a section I really liked in the first draft. Half of it I switched to the other POV, and the other half I just deleted, because now it’s not necessary; I already show the same thing earlier.

It’s rarely fun, or easy, to hack at your own work. I find I enjoy editing other peoples stuff more, probably because I can be as liberal with the delete key as I want to be, without feeling attached to the words. Of course this is also why I save each draft as its own file, so the scene I liked still exists in its old form, as well as its newer one.

I suppose thats one of the things to like about modern technology. It’s easy to copy and paste from one draft to another, and to save things without taking up copious shelf space. Of course on the downside if your work exists only as bits of data there other hazards.

Which reminds me, I need to do a through backup.

Although one thing I’ve learned, since I habitually send parts or whole copies of my stories to my friends via email, is that (at least with gmail) a copy remains in my sent folder. I actually not too long ago recovered part of a story I’d feared lost because it was in my sent emails. Yay for technology!

And now this post about editing has wandered into technology. Lemme just grab the wheel and get it back onto the road I started down.

Editing is one of those things that isn’t fun, but must be done. But it’s also rewarding when you step back and look at your work and realize that it’s better now that it was. Friends are also useful for the process, especially if you’re like me and have constant then/than, your/you’re, its/it’s problems. Least once you are aware of those things you almost always get wrong it makes it easier to catch them!

When it comes to editing remember: Omit needless words.

Those of you who read this on RSS you probably haven’t noticed, but I changed the theme and did some tweaking on the page. I think this is a much cleaner, easier to read version. Also most of the links are now on the Links page, aside from the blogroll and my other website. If you know of any good links that aren’t on the Links page that I should know about/share feel free to email me or leave a comment.

Writing wise I’m still editing Grace. Both my short stories have returned, so i need to find more markets for them. I also need to either finish or write another First Line story, as the May 1 deadline is rapidly approaching. I’m also considering going to an Editors and Agents conference in June, if I can convince myself the price is worth it.

When it comes to magazines about writing, there are, like most hobbies, several to choose from. To my mind, the two main offerings are Writer’s Digest and The Writer

I much prefer The Writer.

Take for instance this months (May 2008), which I read cover to cover yesterday: There are tips for completing screenplays (which might be useful if you were doing Script Frenzy), an interesting interview with Barry Levinson, a couple of articles on finding inspiration and a list of 82 contests. And of course thats not all of it.

Among the things I like is their monthly Archive section. This month it was really inspiring article by Sloan Wilson. Past articles have been from such greats as Ray Bradbury. Another good thing, in my opinion, is that it tries to touch all aspects of writing, although it does tend a little more towards freelancing. Still, even in those articles I find things of use to me as a fiction writer.

As someone trying to be serious about their craft, this magazine is an invaluable resource for me. It’s also the only writing magazine I subscribe to, and one I usually read cover to cover.