Rewriting and Editing

When I handed in the King Rolen's Kin books, I'd had time to clean them up, print them, give them to my son and husband to read, then clean them up again. I'm not going to have that much time with the new trilogy.

Currently, I'm on a count-down to clean up the three books of The Outcast Chronicles and submit them by the end of May. It seems like the world has been conspiring against me. I had planned to get a lot of work done over the summer holidays but we had a major flood and I spent a lot of the holidays digging trenches in my yard to prevent the water from flowing in.

Since then life has become complicated with an elderly relative needing somewhere to stay and work taking up a lot of my time, so I am really looking forward to the next week. Because of the Easter Holidays and Anzac Day I won't be at work again until Thursday of next week. A Whole Week in which to write. I feel giddy with delight.

The funny thing is that I am up to page 430 of book one but I keep jamming up because I'll be reading away and then realise that I need to insert either a new scene or a paragraph to illuminate a character's change of heart or realisation. I do have a list of Things to Fix with each book and I'm working my way through them, but I find the things I am fixing are things that come to me intuitively. I will wake up in the morning with the conviction that I need to add a line to a scene.

I work with the manuscript open on one screen and the chapter outlines open on the other. This means I can find exactly the right scene because I know which page it's on and I have all the POVs colour coded, so I know if I have been neglecting a character. This give me the illusion that I am in control.

How do you approach your rewrites? Do you have Things to Fix list? Do you find that you wake with the awful knowledge that you need to add another scene?

Seeing Anew

Revision – should be easy, right? You take your vision and you do it again.

Well... that is actually one of the things you need to do. But to be serious for a while (and you know this kills me, right?) let’s take it from the top.

Years ago, at a workshop with Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, I was stunned to hear that while I was experienced enough to write stories, I lacked the necessary experience and knowledge to revise/rewrite/recast. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I mean, I used to teach English. And, of course, I learned English (and a few other languages) at one time. How many times had I revised a paper? Revising was easy, right? You go over your book and you change the wording and stuff...

Well, making a long and painful story short, KKR and DWS were absolutely right. I didn’t know how to revise. And I still don’t – or at least it’s not something that comes naturally. I work at it every single time I have to do it. It’s a painful process. All forms of revision.

What do I mean all forms? There are many things that get lumped in under “revision.” Some have different names but they all are, in a way, forms of revising. The ones that come to mind are: editing, revision (proper), rewriting, recasting.

To the extent they all involve taking work that could be considered finished and making it different in an attempt to improve it, they all involve re-vision – i.e., taking your vision and re-doing it. And each of them involves peculiar dangers that you make things worse, instead of better.

Take editing, which is probably the most minor of the processes – you change a word, a sentence there, move that explanation on the mating cycles of cockroaches to the beginning of the book... Simple, yes? I mean, the book remains essentially the same.

NOT simple. Why not? Because as you were writing it, you were “unrolling” the story in a certain order. If you’re like me, there’s the reminder-ticker-tape at the back of your head going “have you described him? Is this the first time we see him? Mention the thing with the hair!” While when you’re editing, again if you’re like me, you’re lost in the prose itself and it might be hard to remember what you’ve mentioned before and not or to find the exact reference back there. So in fact, when you move the thing on the mating cycles of cockroaches, it might be before you mention the villain is a cockroach and you might be confusing your reader terribly.

At the next level of invasiveness is revision proper. This goes a little deeper than mere word changes. With this one you have to ask yourself things like “Did I sufficiently describe the escape pods, so they understand the urgency of her flight?” Or “Should that second scene when he gets knocked on the head be there? He got knocked on the head once already. I need another injury. How about liver failure?” This one is proportionately more dangerous than mere editing. (And btw, I mean editing as a writer does with her own work, not as an editor does, which is more the revision proper level.) While editing can bring the reader to a dead stop at a sentence or paragraph, this one allows you to kill a novel dead, dead, dead. How?

By the time you start this phase, chances are you’ve been living with the novel for at least some months, and probably years. At this point, it’s very easy to come across a description of the character and decide that “oh, who needs to know his eyes sparkle with green fire?” and cut it out. Only your reader did not know that, and, denied the knowledge of this ophthalmic problem, will wonder what your MC sees in the guy (and why she’s stockpiling holy water.) By this process, you end up with talking heads and a nonsensical plot.

The opposite problem is trying to overcompensate for this and thinking “oh, I need to explain that.” In its extreme form, it has the author explaining how a zipper (or something else we have now) works. In its various intermediate forms, it can swell your novel to twice its size and give the reader WAY more information than anyone needs or wants. It can also bring your action scene to a dead stop, as you explain how the sonic guns work.

In a way the next level up – rewrite – is safer (As btw KKR as DWS told me they would be.) This is where you wrote the entire novel. Now you lock it in your drawer and you re-write from memory. While it will never be like writing it the first time – characters and situations are familiar, and presumably there are fewer surprises, though some minor scenes might change – you’re still telling the story anew, and that keeps it fresher as it unrolls. If you are a relative newby, this is the type of “revision” I’d recommend, for your seriously flawed stories. At least, if you suspect the problem is on the “narrative” side, rather than the story side. I.e., you have a basically solid story with solid characters, but you made a mess of how you told it. This is often the solution for stories you’ve edited to death.

And then you have recasting, which is the simplest one of all from a storytelling point of view... and the hardest too from a diagnosing point of view. This is when you take a story and you try to figure out why it was rejected. And then you play with removing/replacing story elements to make it better and/or more marketable. I’ve done this with half a dozen short stories. For instance, there is a story where a revelation of the character’s alien nature made it very icky that the Main Character had married him not knowing this. It tarnished both of them. Though the story was lovely on the word/emotion-path level, no one would touch it.

When I’d been away from it long enough to realize what was wrong, I went back and made the MC his adopted sister instead. This required recasting the story, because no scene could remain the same. But when I was done, it sold first place I sent it.

So now that I am an experienced author (G) I get to tell you – revision is hard, because it’s hard to see anew what you already saw once. This goes against the way the human mind works. It’s like playing poker with yourself. You pretend you never read this, and you write it again.

Do you understand the difficulties? Do I sound like I’m just being snobbish? What is your particular revision issue? Have you markedly improved a story by revising it? How?

It’s a difficult process. Share your pain.

Critiquing 101

Coffee and Chocolate, where would we writers be without them? Especially when editing!

Following on from Amanda's post about editing ...

I thought I'd fill you in on how Marianne de Pierres and I started the ROR peer Critique Group nearly 10 years ago.


We were looking for something to push us to the next level of professionalism. We'd done all the workshops and we'd been running the VISION writing group for several years. But we craved more. We wanted novel length critiquing. We wanted knives (in the nicest possible way).

So we contacted a few writing friends we had, people scattered across Australia, and asked if they would like to be part of a peer critiquing group dedicated to improving their writing craft. So that was how the first ROR started.

ROR was meant to stand for wRiters on the Road. Then we found out that someone had actually started a group using that name. So we changed it to wRiters on the Reisling, but that gave a bad impression, so we changed it to wRiters on the Rise.

We've done well over the years. See here.

We have another ROR coming up in late august, just before World Con in Melbourne. This is how we structure our critiques. We send out our books a month beforehand so the we can read all the manuscripts and write reports. This is a big commitments, but worth it because we are getting 5-6 reports back on our books. (There are 8 RORees but because life happens, not all of us can make it every time).

Then we divide up the 3 days or so that we have into sessions, eg, Morning, afternoon, after dinner. And we do someone's book intensively for about 3 hours. Honestly, after that you feel like youv'e been put through the wringer, but in a good way.

This is how we structure the Crit.

Novel Length Critique

Overview (How we felt the book worked, marketability etc)

Tone and/or age appropriate (eg. age –if the book is for children 11-14, tone — if the tone is right for the subgenre)

Structure (look at establishing the problem and characters in the first chapters, narrative pacing, satisfying resolution).

View Point (Look at any problems with VP. This is usually a beginning writer’s problem, but sometimes an established writer will need to add or remove a VP to create narrative tension).

Characterisation (Which characters are working, which ones aren’t. What are their character arcs? What do they learn in the course of the book. Internal conflict, External conflict).

Logic Flaws in World Building and Plot (These two are tied in because we’re writing spec fic. Even an Urban Fantasy is going to have world building because it is our world, one step removed. A flaw in world building will throw the reader out of the story).

Dialogue (Is it appropriate for the age/education of the characters)

Setting/visuals (Does the reader feel as if they are really there? Can they see the place? Is it rich and inventive, or derivative?).

General, page by page comments.

Looking back at all this, I realise that I could write a post on each of these topics and still not do them justice.

At ROR each of us would have our say and then we’d break into general discussion, getting all enthusiastic and excited about the book. The person whose book had been critiqued would come away, their head spinning with ideas and a new perspective.

Having 5- 6 people critique your book is good because if one person doesn't get something, but everyone else does, then you know it's just that person. It's not the book.

Publishing is a tough business, having a peer group who give feedback and offer support has been wonderful. I thoroughly recommend creating your own peer critique group.

Expectations, Misconceptions and Sheer Foolishness

As readers, we have certain expectations when we buy a book. These expectations influence whether or not we make a purchase. When those expectations are met, we put that author or series on our to buy list. When they aren't met -- especially if they fail spectacularly -- we stop buying books by that author or in that particular series. Those expectations have been fairly static over the years but, of late, a new set of expectations have emerged and with them have come some misconceptions about the publishing industry and who is responsible for what.

I'm going to admit right now that this blog entry is written in defense of some authors I happen to enjoy and respect. Authors who are being slammed in reader reviews and online fora for things they have little or no control over. But I'll get to that shortly.

Expectation 1: The book we find on the shelves or order online will be properly edited and proofed before ever reaching our hot little hands. Unfortunately, over the last decade or so, that hasn't always been the case. There are a number of factors that all play a part in this. The first is that too many of us simply rely on spell-check and grammar-check to make sure everything is correct. Another factor is that publishers have, in an attempt to cut their costs, let go a number of their copy editors and proofreaders. If you search the blogs of late, you'll see a number of entries about how agents are now playing the role of proofreader and copy editor. Moreover, it's a role most of them don't want because it takes away from the time they have to do their traditional duty -- promoting the authors in their stable.

The companion misconception that goes along with this is that e-book retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., have editorial and proofreading control over e-books they sell. Nope. They don't. They simply put up the electronic file they have been provided with. If you are an author putting your own work up through the Kindle store, once you upload the files, there is a way to check it before it goes live for download. I'm sure the same ability exists for publishers. Just as it is unreasonable to expect the mom and pop corner bookstore to be responsible for proofing every book that hits their shelves, it is unreasonable to expect online retailers to do the same thing.

Expectation 2: If an author starts a series, that series will be completed. The unfortunate truth is that a series will be completed only if each book sells well enough. If those books don't sell well enough to justify the continued investment by the publisher, there is a very good chance subsequent books will not be released.

Misconception 1: Authors make lots of money so they should be writing our favorite books more quickly than they do. There shouldn't be years between books in a series. The vast majority of authors don't make enough from writing to live on. Real life happens and interferes with the writing process. And, most importantly, publishing isn't a lightning fast industry -- not even if you are publishing electronically only. At least not if you want to have any quality control of your product. So, readers clamoring for more books from that favorite author, sit back, chill a bit and read another book. Better yet, send a letter or email to that favorite author's publisher telling them how much you like books by Author X and hope to see more soon.

Misconception 2: The agency model of pricing e-books will only affect Amazon. WRONG. Each e-book retailer will find, sooner rather than later imo, that they are going to be forced to either agree to the model or not carry that publisher's books. And, just to remind you, under the agency model, the publisher will set the price of the e-book and the retailer will have little control over changing that price. In other words, no sales without publisher approval. No competitive pricing. No shopping around for the best buy.

If this doesn't worry you, it should. I can see the publishers also trying to enforce this model on hard copy retailers later, as their contracts come up for renewal. If that comes to pass, gone will be the discounts at your local Wal*Mart or Target. Gone will be the discounts if you are a card holder for a certain bookstore or other. We will be back to purchasing books at cover price -- and how many of us actually do that for most books we buy these days? More importantly, how many of us will continue to buy as many books if the prices are set to cover prices?

And now for the real reason for this post. The sheer foolishness that is happening now. Readers, listen closely, when buying a book and gnashing your teeth at the price, don't blame the author. He isn't the one who set the price. This is true be it hard cover, paperback or electronic version. That is left up to the publisher. Let the publisher know how you feel by writing to them and by refusing to buy a book that is priced unreasonably. Do not, I repeat, do not give an author a 1-star review based solely on the price of the book.

That's right. There are people out there right now who are downgrading books they haven't read simply because of the price. Folks, listen carefully. This hurts the author. When people go to sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, Powells or Borders, they see the reviews. They don't have to read them. The "stars" are listed right there. And if the book has 47 starred reviews and of those 47, a large number of them are 1-star reviews, that will keep people from buying. And that is money out of the author's pocket. If you have to, note in the text of your review that the price is unreasonable. But don't give a book a bad review just because of the price.

So, what are your expectations when buying a book? What do you do when those expectations aren't met? How about misconceptions you see about the industry? Do you see any misconceptions the industry might have about the buying public?

Commas and me.

I spent the last few days going through book one of King Rolen's Kin, doing the edits my UK editor had asked for.

Before I sent off the manuscript I read and re-read it. I had my husband read it, then I corrected it. I had my son, the mad-keen fantasy reader, read it and then I corrected it. Then I printed it up and read it and corrected it again.

It is amazing the silly little things that get past you. And then there are things you could just kick yourself for doing. For instance, all these years I've been writing about oriole windows. Not oriel windows. The first one is a type of bird.

And I had everyone drinking burgundy. I thought that was a type of wine, not specific brand, named after a place in France. Well, I knew it was a place in France but I thought it was also a type of red wine. Sigh.

A big thank you to my editor for spotting these things!

Then there are commas. You might gather from the title of this post that I am rather fond of commas. I know grammatically, there are places where it is optional whether you use them or not. And I guess I was one of those people who opted in, rather than out.

I find myself mentally putting commas into the pages of printed books. I also find myself reading happily away then, when I come across something that just looks wrong, I feel like I've tripped over it. It throws me out of the story.

We've been having a discussion on the VISION list about tricky words like 'affect and effect' or 'that and which'. Here's a web site. If you scroll down, you'll see explanations for their use.

For instance I have a thing about 'lay and lie'. I keep seeing it used in books and it sounds wrong to me. Chickens lay eggs, people lie down.

Then there's the thing with apostrophes. I see them used where they shouldn't be -- on building signs, where people should know better. I get the urge to go around and correct the grammar on signs. It's really rather sad. And don't get me started on 'it's and its'.

Are there words that trip you up repeatedly? Do you have a thing about commas?

Edit this out...

Someone made this comment on my LJ (http://davefreer.livejournal.com/ the one I write about writing and politics and stuff on, not the one I write about emigrating to a remote island and self sufficiency etc on - http://flindersfreer.blogspot.com/ - honestly, this social media is killing me ;-))

"since editing basically means having another literate person look your stuff over and correct your myopic mistakes. He needs cover art, too, but this is available for under $500. Anyone literate enough to write a book should be able to proof (as opposed to editing) it himself."

Um. Now there is truth (this is the way things sometimes are), and falsehood (this is not the way things should be) in that statement.

Editing is a tough job to do well. There are probably less good editors than there are good writers of humorous fiction, and those are the very rarest kind of writers (one man's funny is another man's boring or tragedy - and this often applies to editing too). Sometimes great editing is, of course, leaving it alone. And sometimes editing can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Editing - to my limited understanding of the subject comes at two levels -- Structural editing - ie where the editor, taking a look at the book from the outside and as whole as it were, sees areas which need change. In my case that's often been needing additional POVs. Very small changes -applied in the right place and with skill can change a book entirely. The great editors of legend - Campbell, Jim Baen, tend to be this kind of editor. They're very very rare. It's quite easy to get outside a book and say that something is wrong with it. It's another matter entirely to be able to tell an author (in such a way that they listen and understand) how to fix it. Eric Flint is very good at this - maybe his union organising experience stands him in good stead. At the next level (and in some ways this is more difficult than seeing the entire picture), you need a good line-editor -- that is someone who goes through your book, line-by-line and makes sure there are no places in which it can be misinterpreted, that contuinity is correct, that there are no anachronisms, and additionally picking up bad writer habits (ellipses in my case) or things like too much use of passive tense, or repeat word patterns. That's hard, tedious work and requires a very special kind of mind and dedication. I'm exceptionally lucky that Barbara is very good at that. You also of course get editors who aren't good at either of these aspects but try to do them anyway. I've never been that unfortunate, but a few of my friends have.

Anyone who thinks editing is just getting a literate friend to read over your work should read one of my early unedited drafts! They're aweful.

Proof-reading... is something you CAN'T do yourself. Trust me: you cannot do it yourself. That too is a skill that requires dedication and an ability to divorce oneself from the content (story) and merely focus on the words.

So: what are we going to do in our new and wonderful world of e-books? If Joe's internet gateway decides to offer e-books what will they need? DIY editors, proofing, covers, publicity (after all these are the things big 5 publishing houses seem to think are worth around 55% of gross). What are they worth to you? Are the big boys giving good value?

Editors, a learning process.

Chris McMahon hasn't been able to post today, due to illness, so I've filled in).

As a newbie published author I had never worked with an editor before. The first time an editor sent me a book report and asked me to do a rewrite, I was lost. The report was rather nebulous and I didn't know where to start so I called a friend and we talked it through.

She made some practical suggestions such as tightening the first chapter, not so much back story etc. And the editor was pleased with the rewrite. In that case it would have helped if the editor had read the report and said you need to do this, this and this. As a new writer I needed some guidance. Nowadays a slightly nebulous book report wouldn't worry me, I've learnt to read between the lines.

An editor should be like a good shrink, they should help you refine what you want to say and suggest ways to do this. At the Inside View of Publishing, Alan Rinzler talks about choosing a freelance editor.

Getting useful critique from your editor feels like 'Wow, why didn't I think about that?' Or 'Doh, why didn't I see that?'

What have you learnt through working with editors?

Hack and Slash

No, its not a post about heroic fantasy. I'm in the middle of doing a yet another edit on my Science Fantasy manuscript, Warriors of the Blessed Realms. As is typical for me, the thing had bloated up 10,000 words from the earlier edits -- up to a shocking 160,000 words. That word total is like some sort of a magnet for me unfortunately.

So, my challenge has been to get this down to 120,000 words or less. Can I jump now?

I've managed to get the total down to 131,00o words so far, which seems to me something of a miracle. I have not been able to do this without removing a few incidental characters and some other scenes which I guess weren't that important to the story. It still hurt losing them!

Having said that, it is surprising how much I managed to remove by just trimming and condensing the text - at least a good 10,000 words - which is sort of embarrassing. Do I really write that sloppily? I guess its part of the process. Maybe the writing gods have seen fit to increase my skills since I did the last draft.

The thing that concerns me now is how I have started to really get into this. Chop. Chop. Slash. Slash. Everything must go. In my mania (and I do tend to extremes) a little voice in the back of my head is asking 'am I losing some essential essence from the story?'

What do people think? Can you chop too far? Make the story too spare? Too mechanical? Or is all-out war on the adjective and metaphor a Holy Cause? Clarity is King?

First, You Breathe in His Nostrils

So we’ve been talking about characters – the good, the bad and the ugly – but there is one thing that ties right back to my long disquisition on voice.

Just like I said your plot is a means to test the character (and I’ll be happy to explain that later, or the others can, I’m sure), the voice is a means to make the character live. You must have the reader present THERE, or it’s all for nothing.

I’m going on about this, because it’s all too easy to slip into what I call “sheet of glass” writing if you’re tired or sick, and then you need to have some idea what’s wrong and how to fix it.

I’m going to be insufferable and give examples from my own writing – well, one of them a collaboration with my friend, Kate Paulk who will be joining us soon.

Kate and I were working on this story (in the Valdemar Antho above) while we were both on deadline for other projects and so tired we might as well have painted eyes on our eyelids and slept through it. So the first version of the opening we came up with was this:

*Heart, Home and Hearth

The air smelled of snow to come. Ree snuggled closer to Jem in the burrow they had claimed for the night and wished he knew what to do. Summer learning to live wild, putting more and more distance between them and the walls of Jacona -- and the Emperor's soldiers -- had been hard on Jem.

The younger boy was all human, unlike Ree. He didn't have fur to protect him, didn't have the sharper senses of the rat and cat that had merged with Ree in the Changecircle last winter. Since they'd escaped Jacona and the hunt for hobgoblins like Ree, Jem had grown thinner until his bones showed under his skin even though between Ree's animal instincts and Jem getting wicked good with a slingshot they had plenty to eat most days.

But that was summer. Fall meant less to eat, and Jem's clothes weren't much better than rags. When it started to get colder at night, they'd tried scraping a deer hide clean and Jem wrapping himself in that, but it stank too much and got stiff and cracked. Neither of them wanted to leave the forest to try to steal clothes from the farms and towns they'd seen from the forest edges. *

It’s not bad, but we felt like you could hear the telegraph cables twang along the way. So we worked on it. This is the same opening in its final version:

*Heart, Home and Hearth
Sarah A. Hoyt
Kate Paulk

The air had a sharp bite and you could smell snow even deep in the narrow earthen borrow, under the roots of a great oak tree, where Ree and Jem had taken refuge.

Winter is coming, Ree thought. There’s no escaping it. He felt Jem shake with cough in his sleep, and snuggled closer, trying to keep the younger boy warm. Summer had been all right for living wild and putting more and more ground between themselves and Jacona -- and the Emperor's soldiers.

Even though Jem was all human and didn’t have the sharper senses of the rat and cat that had merged with Ree during the Changecircle last winter, he had got wicked good with a slingshot. With Ree’s animal instincts to lead the hunt, they’d rarely missed a meal. But the last few weeks, it had gotten so cold, and it seemed like all animals were either hybernating or had gone South for the winter. And you could see Jem’s bones through his skin. Hells you could see them through the rags that passed for his clothes. And he was cold all the time, and for the last three days he’d been coughing all the time, and wheezing when they walked too fast.*

Do you see a difference? Is there a difference? Am I imagining things?

Again, the same, with my own writing, the novel DarkShip Thieves coming out in January. This is the original run at the opening:
* Daddy’s Girl

I never wanted to go to Space. I never had the slightest interest in spaceships. The colonization of other worlds left me cold. I never even hankered to visit Circum-Terra or to see the energy trees up close, by the faint glow of almost-ripe energy pods.

There were people who dreamed of all of this. They cornered me at parties and social occasions -- adenoidal boys, skinny and overeager, with greasy hair and lumpy suits; and sad girls, awkward in dresses, their faces white and pasty and virgin of make up.

They talked of space-materials -- ceramite and dimatough -- strong enough to withstand travel through the void and light enough to consume very little fuel. They spoke of thrusters, acceleration, g-force, gravitation, sustainable space colonies.

Their eyes grew doleful, and their voices vibrated with tears when they spoke of how the human race had abandoned its birthright to outer space after the turmoils two hundred years ago.

In the late twenty second century, they’d tell me, their faces earnest, the mules had built an intergalactic spaceship and they’d made plans for colonizing the solar system in fifty years.*

This is the version that WILL be published:

*One
I never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. Never had any interest in discovering the truth about the darkships. You always get what you don’t ask for.

Which was why I woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in my father’s space cruiser.

Before full consciousness, I knew there was an intruder in my cabin. Not rationally. There was no rationality to it. The air smelled as it always did on shipboard, as it had for the week I’d spent here – stale, with the odd tang given by the recycling.

The engines, below me, hummed steadily. We had just detached from Circum Terra – a maneuver that involved some effort, to avoid accidentally ramming the station or the ship. Shortly we’d be Earth bound, though slowing down and reentry let alone landing, for a ship this size, would take close to a week.

My head felt a little light, my stomach a little queasy, from the artificial grav. Yes, I know. Scientists say that’s impossible. They say artificial gravity is just like true gravity to the senses. You don’t feel a thing. They are wrong. Artificial grav always made me feel a little out of balance, like a couple of shots of whiskey on an empty stomach.

Even before waking fully, I’d tallied all this. There was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet there was a stranger in my cabin.*

So, again am I imagining things, or does the second one work better? And if it does, can we discuss why? Why the character comes more alive in the second version than in the first of both of these?