Tag: writing

Revisions done, for now

Last night, I finished making my revisions to AToB.  Not only am I seventeen days ahead of schedule, but I’m happy to report that the revision process wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be.  It wasn’t as fun as the original writing, but it wasn’t the hours and hours of drudgery I’d been dreading.

I’m really glad I took the time and effort to make the corrections in longhand first.  Putting them into Word forced me to reevaluate each one of them and there were a number of occasions where I decided that the original text was better than the revision.

Now AToB is ready to enter the beta stage.  I’ve lined up a diverse group of beta readers and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say about it.

While they’re diligently reading, I’ll be shifting gears and jumping into my Egyptian project.  I’m going to start off with a short story set during the tomb robberies in the reign of Ramesses IX.  I also have several ideas for the main novel, which will probably take place several decades later in the reign of Ramesses XI.  I have a feeling that this building is going to play a significant role in the plot:

Moving right along

Last night, I finished making the longhand corrections to A Theft of Bones, thus completing Stage 1 of the revision process.  I’ll admit that I was a bit wary of printing out the manuscript and making the corrections by hand, but, in retrospect, I made the right decision.  There’s a real difference between reading something on the page and reading it on a computer screen, and I find that the former is much more conducive to the business of editing and revision.

The downside, of course, is that it does create more work since I now have to go back into Word and type in the changes.  I think of this as Stage 2 of the revision process because I’ll also be revising my revisions, so to speak.  But when it’s over, I should have a tight, clean manuscript that I can ship off to my beta readers with confidence.

Once my beta readers have returned the manuscript to me, I’ll be able to embark on Stage 3, the final stage of the process.  That’s when I go through and make the changes my beta readers have suggested.  I’m going to try very hard to stop revising after that.  It would be easy to continue revising ad nauseam, but at some point you need to close your eyes, take the plunge, and get your work out there.

I’ve been giving some thought to what I want my next project to be.  I have ideas for more Andrew-related novels, but, since they’re continuations of the story told in AToB, I don’t want to start work on them until I know whether AToB will be published.  If it’s not, I’ll have to modify their plots accordingly.

Instead of working on anything Andrew-related, I think I may try my hand at an alternate history set toward the end of pharaonic Egypt.  I have some ideas for a hero and a plot, but they’re still vague at this point since I’m trying to keep myself focused on AToB.  I’ve started a writing journal for this project and I can’t wait to see what kind of ideas take root there!

The cautionary tale of H. P. Lovecraft

A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore with a friend and he suggested that I should pick up a collection of H. P. Lovecraft short stories.  After listening to my friend praise Lovecraft, I bought the book and eagerly started reading it when I got home.

I soon discovered that reading Lovecraft could be a very frustrating experience.  There’s no doubt he was very creative.  His Cthulhu mythos is tremendously rich and I enjoyed the many cross-references he managed to work into his stories.

Despite the rich world he built, I was less than impressed with the quality of his actual writing.  His prose is filled with tortuous sentences that groan under the weight of their hyperbole.  He also demonstrates an inability to murder his darlings.  A case in point would be his (over)use of ‘blasphemous’.  The first time you come across a reference to ‘blasphemous tracks’ or the like, it’s an interesting and unconventional use of the adjective.  But Lovecraft seems rather impressed with his cleverness and so he uses the word again and again so that, by its fifteenth appearance, it’s just annoying and repetitive.

Lovecraft also frequently describes things as being too monstrous for the human mind to behold.  That’s fine once or twice, but when it’s repeated across many stories, it just comes across as something of a cop out.

That being said, there are a few Lovecraft pieces that I do enjoy.  “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” provided some of the inspiration for the plot of A Theft of Bones and “At the Mountains of Madness” does a nice job of using the Antarctic setting to convey terror and isolation.

But, for me at least, Lovecraft’s greatest value lies in his vivid demonstrations of how not to write.  A good writers’ group or a critique partner would have probably improved Lovecraft’s writing immensely, allowing him to be a great writer instead of being  America’s greatest bad writer.

Blurbage

As an aide to writing the inevitable Dreaded Query Letter, I’ve been trying to come up with a concise-yet-interesting description of the plot of A Theft of Bones (that’s the working title of my WIP).  So far, I have this:

The day college freshman Andrew Mackay is attacked in the woods by an undead creature turns out to be one of the luckiest days of his life.  That attack brings him to the attention of the Guardian Order,  the law enforcement arm of magical society.  No sooner has Andrew started training to become a Guardian than he and his new friends are confronted with a puzzling series of grave robberies where someone is using daimons to reanimate the dead.  The signs eventually point to the Children of the Emim, a fringe group of magicians that most people have written off as a bunch of cranks.  Now Andrew and his fellow Guardians must discover if the Children are as harmless as they seem, or if there might be a sinister truth behind their strange lore.

How does it sound?  If you saw this blurb on a book cover, would it pique your interest enough to buy it?

A replacement for Scrivener?

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one of the best things about having a Mac was that it allowed me to use Scrivener, a great word processing tool designed for creative writers.  Since it’s a Mac-only program, I thought I’d have to make do with Word from now on.  Now, I’m happy to report that I may have found a replacement for Scrivener that will run on Windows.  It’s called PageFour and I discovered it through a link on the Scrivener website.  Scrivener’s creator had all sorts of good things to say about it, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

My initial impression was that PageFour is basically Scrivener for Windows.  It has the same binder format that I loved in Scrivener, though here it’s called a ‘Notebook’.  It also has the snapshot functionality that proved to be so useful when I was working on the first draft of my WIP (basically, it allows you to take a ‘picture’ of the page you’re working on that you can easily revert to if you don’t like the subsequent changes you’ve made).  In fact, the snapshot tool was originally a part of PageFour and the creator of Scrivener liked it so much that he borrowed it for his program.  PageFour also has a ‘Smart Edit’ feature that allows you to scan your text for repeated words or phrases, making it easier to identify and murder your darlings.   I also think it’s easier to format text in PageFour since you have a toolbar that allows you to position text and change its attributes.  With Scrivener, you had to do all that through a pull-down menu.

PageFour isn’t a carbon copy of Scrivener and it’s missing some of the bells and whistles of its Mac cousin.  For example, it doesn’t have anything like the corkboard or the notecards.  It also doesn’t look as polished (like almost all Mac programs, Scrivener was pretty).  These issues aside, I really like Scrivener and I think I’ll end up purchasing the full version.

WIP revision update

Despite a multitude of distractions, I’ve managed to make decent progress on revising my WIP.  At first, I was disheartened at the amount of red ink I was putting on the pages.  But when I took a step back and looked at what I was changing, I was relieved to see that it was fairly minor stuff.

The majority of the changes are prose tweaks and dialog improvements.  There are also a fair number of typo corrections.  The biggest changes so far have been adjustments to some subsidiary plot points and the consequential addition of a new scene.  But the main plot is holding up well, thankfully.

One of my main priorities in revising is tightening the text by cutting unnecessary words.  I’ve pulled a lot of these little buggers from my dialog.  When you first write a conversation, I think there’s a strong temptation to follow normal speech patterns as closely as possible and have your characters begin with a greeting and some small talk.  But those things are really nothing more than a waste of space.  In most cases they aren’t going to advance the plot and most readers are going to end up tuning them out as they read because they’re basically white noise.

Another issue I’m having is tagging speech in a long conversation.  I don’t want to overuse said because that gets repetitive, but, at the same time, I don’t want to reach for the thesaurus for increasingly obscure synonyms.  So I often try to indicate who’s speaking through a description of body language or movement.  But that too can get repetitive.  I’ve already noticed that my characters do a lot of nodding, and I don’t want people to think they’re a bunch of bobbleheads.

Shifting gears

Last spring, I took a break from my WIP and wrote a short story involving the novel’s antagonist.  I submitted the story to my writers’ group and, while it received generally favorable comments, one member made a particularly trenchant criticism: he said that my writing was too academic.

What he meant was that I had unknowingly structured my story much like a paper.  I started out with a ‘thesis’ and the rest of the story consisted of the ‘proofs.’  Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for suspense and, consequently, the story kind of plodded along.

That incident taught me that I’d have to unlearn (or at least ignore) a lot of the writing skills I’d picked up in grad school.  In academia, you’re supposed to make your point as clearly and concisely as possible with a minimum of obfuscation (though I’ve read many articles where that wasn’t the case!).  But in fiction writing, you must delight in deception in order to build a sense of suspense in the reader.  Instead of giving them a road map, you’re often giving them vague or even misleading directions.

As I work through the revisions of my WIP, I’m on the lookout for any instances of ‘academic’ writing.  Thankfully, I haven’t found any yet, so perhaps I learned my lesson.

Another journey begins

It’s time.  Time to start revising my novel, again.  I finished the first draft on January 1 and, eager to move forward, I started revising on January 7.  But I soon realized that I was actually doing myself a disservice by moving ahead so quickly.  As I reread the first few chapters, I realized that I couldn’t look at them objectively because I was still so euphoric from finishing the first draft.

It was then that I realized that there’s a reason why so many writers recommend taking some time off between finishing your draft and starting the revision process.  You need to put distance between yourself and your work so you can approach it as dispassionately as possible.  Also, since your writing won’t be fresh in your mind, you’ll be more likely to see plot holes and inconsistencies (when I read something right after I’ve written it, I often miss those little problems because my mind is still immersed in the story that’s in my head, rather than what’s on the page).

Once I realized that I was jumping the gun, I put my novel away and I’ve let it sit, untouched, for 47 days now.  Of course, it was difficult to ignore at first.  I wanted nothing more than to admire what I’d done and re-immerse myself in the world I’d created.  But I held out and, gradually, the novel drifted into the recesses of my mind.  Weeks went by without me giving it a single thought.  Then today I found the manuscript sitting on a chair and a little voice inside of me said “it’s time.”

So tonight I will crack open the manuscript, armed with my trusty red pen and spiral-bound notebook.  In order to avoid falling into an endless cycle of revisions, I’ve set myself a deadline of April 17 for completing the revisions.  Then it’ll be time for my Ideal Reader to have a look at it and give his verdict.

Wish me luck!

A brief history of my work-in-progress

The initial seeds for what would become my current work-in-progress were planted in 2002.  A friend of mine was trying to join a fraternity and, out of curiosity I checked out their website.  I was amused to see that they seemed to think that they were singlehandedly saving the world through their charitable work and it struck me: what if there was a fraternity that actually did save the world?

Given that I’ve always loved contemporary fantasy, it only seemed natural that they’d end up fighting demons and other supernatural nasties.  I decided that, while this group masqueraded as a traditional Greek fraternity, they would really be an ancient order dedicated to fighting the forces of evil.  Early on, I’d ruled out any connection with either the Knights Templar or the Freemasons, since those tropes have become rather tired by now.

I then set about coming up with a suitable protagonist.  The result was Derek, an all-American guy who was descended from the Nephilim, which explained his physical prowess.  He had a best friend named Andrew who functioned as a sort of dorky sidekick.  While Derek was your typical college jock, Andrew was your typical nerd who lived for his books.  Ultimately, both of them were to end up joining the fraternity.

The main antagonist was going to be a demon that had been trapped in a mirror that was in the college’s museum.  Some students would be messing around with the occult and accidentally free him from his prison and then of course carnage would ensue.

Following advice I’d gleaned from some writing book whose name eludes me now, I made ridiculously detailed character bios for each of my main characters, including everything from their physical characteristics to their most embarrassing moments and their favorite songs.  In retrospect, I spent way too much time on all this.  Not only did it keep me from focusing on the Big Picture, but very little of it would likely be relevant to the story itself.

Once I’d finished everyone’s biography, I started writing.  I got through about a chapter before I realized that I hated my main character.  Writing him was like pulling teeth and I suspect it was because he was a Marty Stu.  He was like those strong-chinned guys that you see in the razor commercials who have an admiring female pop out of nowhere to rub their freshly shaven jaw.

I knew it was a bad sign when I as the author was bored to tears by my main character.  I was also less-than-impressed with the demon who functioned as the antagonist.  Despite his copious backstory, he didn’t really have much of a motivation beyond being evil.  And it really bugged me that he was little more than an ethereal Snidley Whiplash.

So I stopped writing for a long time and went back to the drawing board.  All was not lost.  I still liked the idea of the fraternity and I really came to like Andrew.  He was a lot more interesting to write than Captain Cardboard.  He wasn’t gorgeous and he had flaws, but he was witty and sure of himself.  Upon reflection, I decided that, since I enjoyed writing him so much, he should be the main character.

Because I got distracted by many shiny objects, it was years before I seriously revisited my novel.  It remained in the back of my mind and, off and on, I’d come up with new ideas for the plot.  Then in Fall of 2008, I started to get serious about it again and I took the disparate ideas I’d collected over the years and molded them into a new plot.  It was apparent that the story I wanted to tell was too big for just one book, so I started outlining subsequent books in the series.  By the Summer of 2009, I had a series of four books roughly plotted and I was ready to start work on the first book in earnest.

I should add here that I actually began the first book in January of 2009, but I stopped after the first two chapters.  In April of that year, I submitted the first chapter to a critique group at a local fantasy conference and was pleased that it received generally positive reviews.

Once again, I got sidetracked, this time by writing a short story involving the main antagonist from my novel.  The story had some good points, but it was ultimately rendered un-usable by changes I made to the antagonist’s character.

During the Fall of 2009, I plodded away on the novel some more and managed to get ab0ut 20,000 words done by the time winter break rolled around.  I basically devoted all of my winter break to writing and, as a result, I cranked out another 60,000 words by January 1, leaving me with a complete first draft.

So now I’m focused on editing my manuscript.  I started by rereading it its entirety about a week after I’d finished it, but I decided to put it away for a while since a lot of the advice I saw on the ‘Net indicated that you should try to push your first draft out of your mind for a while before you start editing it.  That advice chafed at the time, but I’ve come to acknowledge that it’s probably for the best.  When revising, I need to be ruthless and I can’t do that if I’m still in love with my writing.

Even though the journey so far has been convoluted and at times frustrating, I can’t say I’d want to do anything differently if I had the chance to do it over again.  My first attempts at a novel look painfully amateurish now, but they were mistakes that I needed to make.  (And thankfully I saw the error of my ways before I’d written an 80,000 word manuscript featuring a boring protagonist and a stock villain!).  This long, drawn-out process has also taught me that I really do love writing fiction.  Even if I never get published, the satisfaction I’ve gotten from inventing this wonderful world will make it all worthwhile.