Category Archives: The Writing Process

First Drafts: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

First Drafts Kylie Quillinan The Writing Life 8 Comments

My first drafts are ugly. I have friends who talk about plotting and planning for months before they ever write a word on a new manuscript. I can’t see myself doing that. I’m getting better at plotting but even so, it doesn’t seem to matter how much I plan and ponder, dream and think, my first drafts are still rough.

For me, a first draft is largely an exploration of the plot. It’s also about me trying to get to know the characters. It’s not until I’ve gone all the way through a draft that I start to get a handle on the sub-plots and themes, and it’s only then that I start understanding my characters. So my first drafts are perhaps more what other people call planning.

I’d love to be one of those writers who can complete a manuscript to satisfaction in just a couple of drafts. It usually takes me about three drafts to really nail down the plot and it’s only then that I can start worrying about the details – sensory, emotional, visual. This is when I start looking at issues like what time of year events occur in and what the weather is like. For some reason, my characters are always trapped in an “unseasonal heatwave”. Here in Australia, we have very hot summers so perhaps this is the reason for my obsession with heatwaves.  At about the dozen draft mark, I start feeling comfortable with what I’ve written and it’s really only then that I start to feel like I have a manuscript that’s getting towards being half decent.

I’m currently working on the first round of edits for a manuscript that I meticulously – for me, at least – planned prior to writing. I even used index cards – lots of them – and I thought I did a much better job of laying out the plot than I ever have before. However now that I’m finally re-reading this draft for the first time, I’m realising all that planning has left me with a first draft that really isn’t any better than what I usually produce. There are still massive plot holes, contradictions and things I just haven’t figured out yet.

So I’m wondering whether all that planning was a waste of time. Perhaps this is just the way my brain works. Maybe I need to go through that process of laying the story out, in the form of a first draft, to get my head around it. Perhaps what I’ve been thinking of as a first draft is really my planning stage. Other people use index cards, character notes, and synopses for planning. I guess I’m doing much the same, only mine is 80,000 words long.

So I’m wondering whether I’m approaching this the wrong way. All this time I’ve been telling myself I need to plan better, but perhaps what I’ve been thinking of as a first draft really is my planning process. It’s just a little longer than what some other people do. But then again, maybe I’m kidding myself.  Am I just being lazy and avoiding planning properly because I find it so difficult? That’s the problem with writers, isn’t it.  We can convince ourselves of just about anything by justifying it as our “creative process” instead of laziness.

So tell me: what planning process do you go through prior to writing your first draft?

 

Joshua Essoe: Editing Saved My Life. And It Could Save Yours.

Editing Guest Posts Joshua Essoe Publishing Rewriting The Writing Life 8 Comments

Writers frequently ask me if an editor is really necessary. The answer is no. An editor is not necessary, an editor is essential.

Many indie authors say, “But, I can’t afford it.” The truth is, if you can’t afford it, then don’t publish a book. Something I think many indie authors tend to miss is that you guys are running a small business. You’re the boss and the employee and everything in between, and should expect a certain amount of upfront cost. Releasing a book before it’s ready because you won’t hire an editor or cover designer does more harm than good. It is better to wait and make sure that your book is as strong as you can make it before you throw it to the wolves.

Especially your first book. There are thousands and thousands of self-published books out there and they’re all inexpensive and easy to get. If a reader gets hold of it, finds a few spelling errors, a missed word here or there, and an abundance of passive voice, they’ll put your book down (or remove it from their e-reader) and just move on to the next thing. They’ll never give your potentially wonderful story a chance to be potentially wonderful—and there goes your chance for future sales to that reader. Think what your reaction would be as a reader. First impressions mean everything. That goes for your first book in a new series, your first book ever, your first chapter, your first page, your first sentence.

The New York Times has editors, TV news stations have editors, Vogue and Maxim have editors, all the publishing houses have editors. Why would successful businesses like those all use editors? There must be a reason. . . . Ah, yes. It is because they’re essential to a finely tuned, professional product.

An indie editor is different from a trad editor. The only person who pays an independent or freelance editor is you. The only person that editor is beholden to is you. Their job is to strengthen your words and your voice to help make your story as good as it can be. The way you want it. A good one will be enthusiastically in your corner, working to help make you a success. And you want them in your corner. You wouldn’t think of going into an MMA match without having had a trainer. You’d get killed. Likewise, you shouldn’t throw your darlings to those wolves without some ninja skillz.

An editor’s job is not to rewrite you. Writing is your job. Their job is to help you make that writing shine as brilliantly as possible.

And another huge difference between indie and trad editors? Between hiring your own editor and having one imposed on you? If you hate what they do, you don’t have to use it—any of it.

So what can your friendly neighborhood editor do for you? There are several forms of editing; copy or line, content, substantive, proof reading. We’ll focus on line and content which will be the most applicable and reasonable for an indie author.

A copy or line edit, as the name suggests, is a meticulous edit of each line in the text looking for missing and misspelled words, superfluous language and redundant phrases, mixed tenses, and all technical inconsistencies. Line editing is editing for tone, style and flow—focusing on polishing the author’s words to improve the overall effect and increase the impact of the writer’s message. And to make sure that horrible passive voice is not yammering all over your story. You don’t want readers to admire your writing. You want them to be so engaged by the story that they don’t notice your words.

A content edit is more involved. It is checking the story for logic holes, inconsistencies of plot and character, patching any holes in the fourth wall, finding spots in the story that are weak or don’t make sense, then suggesting possible solutions.

An editor’s job is to help you get the movie you see running in your head playing the same way in the heads of your readers. What makes a story work is an emotional connection with your readership. If you get that, they’ll love your book and they’ll love you.

A good content editor is not easy to find; there aren’t many out there who can tell you what’s wrong and offer solutions on how to fix it. So be careful. Get references, talk to people you trust or people with experience.

When you contact an editor be professional. Be prepared to send a sample. Be prepared to give the editor a deposit for reserving time for you. Be prepared to meet your deadlines so that you have time to do a couple passes on your own before handing it off. Not only will those passes make your editor happy, but it will make your wallet happy. Make sure you know what format the editor needs. For example, I use industry standard—I know how long an MS formatted to those specifications will take me to edit based on a five page sample.

What will amaze and appall editors of all shapes and sizes is that a large percentage of manuscripts submitted for review have not even basic formatting set correctly. It immediately gives the impression of laziness, that the author didn’t care enough to do a little research.

If you are curious what the vaunted Industry Standard looks like, read Vonda McIntyre’s handout. This is a good starting point, but keep in mind that the industry is in flux and many online submissions will vary from this. If they do, they’ll certainly state it in their submission guidelines. If not, always go with the old standard.

A good content editor will also be able to help you sculpt your story to best appeal to the audience for which it is targeted. Do you want to enrapture teenage girls? Or do you want men in their thirties on the edges of their seats? Knowing who you are writing for and what appeals to them is as important as having a wonderful story. Because what might be an amazing story to that thirty-five year old guy is almost certainly not going to appeal all that much to a sixteen year old girl.

So, all you indie authors out there, go out and find an editor you love (and hate—if the editor is any good you’ll curse their name more than a few times). Get that editor working for you, and let them help you and your business produce the best product possible.

 

Joshua Essoe is a full-time, freelance editor. He’s done work for best-seller David Farland, including the multi-award winning novel, Nightingale, Dean Lorey, lead writer of Arrested Development, best-seller, James Artimus Owen, and numerous Writers of the Future authors and winners, as well as many top-notch independents. He is currently the finishing editor at Urban Fantasy Magazine.

Together with tie-in writer Jordan Ellinger, indie success-story, Michale J. Sullivan, and traditionally published author and NY Times best-seller, Debbie Viguie, he records the weekly writing podcast Hide and Create. You can find his interview episode here.

When not editing . . . ha ha, a joke. He was a 2014 finalist in the Writers of the Future contest, and lives with his wife, and three horrible cats near UCLA.

 

Anatomy of a Collaboration

Craft & Skills The Writing Process 5 Comments

I recently passed a milestone in my professional career as a writer.  I collaborated on a novel with Eric Flint, and the manuscript (well, the Word file) was just turned in to the publisher (Baen).  Unless the publisher changes the title, it should see print as 1636: The Devil’s Opera.  I’ve made professional level sales of several shorter works, but that’s the first full length novel (165,000 + words) that will come out with my name on it, second billing though it will be.  To say I’m somewhat exhilarated about this event would be a serious understatement.

When will it come out?  I don’t know for sure; possibly in late 2013, more likely in 2014.  There will be both a hard copy edition and an e-book edition from Baen.

What’s it about?  Well, there isn’t a short answer to that.  It’s a new alternate history story in the series that began with 1632, the first novel in the Ring of Fire series.  There are over five million words in print in that series right now, between the novels and the anthologies and the Grantville Gazette e-magazine issues, all dealing with how approximately 3000 residents of a blue-collar West Virginia town survive and thrive when they somehow get dumped back in 1631 Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War.  This is just another episode in that extended story.  Most of the novels in the series roam all over Western and Central Europe:  large canvases, in other words, with correspondingly large time frames.  1636: The Devil’s Opera will be somewhat unique, in that it’s focused in a single location-the German city of Magdeburg-and it only covers a time frame of maybe four months.  And there’s something in it for everyone:  murder, music, boxing, financial irregularities, taverns and dives, tragedy, guns, humor, skullduggery and skullthumpery, more music, police procedural, a dog . . . oh, and a little romance as well.  If you like video allusions, there are resonances with Rocky, On the Waterfront, Wall Street, The Sound of Music, and NCIS.  Stay tuned; as soon as I find out, I’ll tell you when it’s going to be published so you can check it out.

Okay, enough about the book.  I want to spend a little time talking about what I learned during this collaboration.

Why authors collaborate should be a separate post, I think.  I will note that there are a number of different methods for collaboration in writing.  Almost all of them start out with the collaborating authors doing any requisite world building, outlining the story to be told, agreeing on major characters, etc.  Once all that preparatory work is done, the writing can progress in several different ways.

  1. For example, if sections of the novel require certain knowledge or expertise, one author may write certain parts while the other writes the remainder.  This approach seems to be most commonly used when both authors are of similar levels of skill.
  2. More commonly, one author will write the first draft, while the other author will do the second pass.  If one author is newer to the craft (like me), he will usually write the first draft while the more experienced/skilled writer (Eric) will do the final polish/draft.
  3. And sometimes one author will look at another and say, “You start,” and the story is built somewhat like a tennis match, with no prior planning to speak of and the authors volleying responses back and forth.  A lot of “letter” stories are actually written that way.

And all of those approaches require that one of the authors then do a second pass to tighten up the prose and smooth out any cracks or joints or bumps in the text.

So, yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit I was the junior author in this collaboration.  I’ll play second fiddle to Eric Flint any day.  And yeah, we used option 2.  I wrote the first draft.  I had a small group of alpha readers who I asked to give me feedback as I wrote it during a really rough spell in my life.  It took over a year to write a book that should have taken me no more than four months.  But I finally drove it to a conclusion, and gave the results to Eric.  There was some back and forth between us-he fixed some issues, I fixed some others- plus a final polish pass by Eric, and a round of beta readers in there somewhere.  I think it was the fourth draft that went to the publisher.

Now I definitely learned some things during the writing of the first draft.  I learned a lot more from Eric in the weeks that followed; watching over his shoulder as he worked and reworked the subsequent drafts.  I have a tendency to overwrite, so I expected him to throw away whole scenes and passages, but he really pitched very little, comparatively speaking.  Eric did add some new material, as well, but what he did a lot of was rearranging of the text:  moving blocks of text around, changing scene progressions and chapter structure and sequences.  For example, theoretically I knew that chapters don’t all have to be about the same length.  Eric made it real to me when he carved out single scenes from some of my existing chapters and made them chapters on their own.  Five hundred word scenes became chapters.  A single telegram became a chapter.  And along the way, I discovered this was a technique that would make a particular scene or elements in that scene stand out and be more memorable than they would have been had they been buried in longer chapters.  Just watching that exercise was worth the price of admission.

Paraphrased observations from Eric along the way:

  1. “If you’re going to write a murder mystery, it’s best to have the body on the first page if you can manage it.  It makes a great hook.”
  2. “For a modern mystery, if you want a gritty tone, the city needs to be one of the characters.”
  3. “For modern mysteries, tone down the melodramatic descriptions.  Modern mysteries work better if the descriptions and the speech tags are a little flatter than, say, fantasies.”  (I mentioned I tend to overwrite.)
  4. “You’ve crossed the line with this hero-he’s getting way too hard.  You’ll lose reader sympathy with him.”  (That one was about balance of characterization.)

Eric once told me that a novel collaboration requires almost as much work from him as if he had written the entire novel himself.  Because he’s the senior partner in most of the collaborations I’ve seen him do, that’s probably true.  However, I suspect the nature of his work in a collaboration is very different than when he is working a solo project.  From what I could tell in this collaboration, Eric spent much less time and energy in the creative part of the process and much more in the editing and revising part of the process.  And I suspect that, overall, he spends less personal time in arriving at the final product.

Setting aside polite modesty, my first draft was good.  Eric made it noticeably better.

1636: The Devil’s Opera by Eric Flint and David Carrico.  A novel that is different than either one of us would have written alone.  I’m proud of it.

Dean Wesley Smith: Stop Being In A Hurry

Guest Posts Publishing Rewriting Submissions 21 Comments

 

A guest post by Dean Wesley Smith

I’ve talked about this on my blog a few times in different ways, but I noticed a few of you have mentioned this “got to hurry” problem, so I figured it was time again.

And no doubt, as I did last week on my first visit to the Superstars Writing Seminar, I may ruffle a few feathers.

What do I mean by being in a hurry?

For some reason, almost all new professional writers have no sense of time in publishing. And no sense of the amount of time it takes to learn the craft and the business. I hear over and over again how fresh writers need to find a way to cut through the “noise” out there, how they need to “promote” their first or second novel, and how they don’t understand why they don’t sell more.

And I hear all the time how writers like me or Kris or Kevin Anderson or Dave Farland or Eric Flint have this huge advantage over beginning writers. But don’t think our advantage is because our names are known. Nope. In fact, often being known hurts us more than it helps. My bestselling novels are not under “Dean Wesley Smith” because of all the media work I did under that name. My bestselling novels are hidden pen names in both the thriller and mystery genres. Names that started fresh. Names that nobody knew.

But we do have an advantage over beginning writers.

Yes, I said it. We experienced old-timers have a huge advantage. We have taken the years and decades to learn how to write better stories and we are all still working to learn. (Do you think the only reason we teach is to help young writers? That’s a big part, sure, but mostly it’s so we can keep learning as well.)

That’s right. Shocking as it may seem, writing better novels and stories–stories that fans want to read–makes us better known. It is not promotion or some silly trick. We sell more because we write better stories.

It really is that simple.

Learning the craft of fiction writing comes from listening to others talk about their ways of doing things, or reading how-to-write books, or studying what other writers do, then putting that information out of your front brain.

In other words, learn it and then forget it. Just go back to writing, and trust that the knowledge will come out of your fingers when you need it.

Sometimes it doesn’t happen for a novel or two. And then suddenly your writing is better and you don’t even know why–but your readers will see it.

Sounds kind of silly, huh? But it’s the way it works. And that method of writing and learning how to write better stories TAKES TIME.

My first published novel was my third written novel, and by the time I had written it, I had already sold over fifty professional-level short stories. Now understand, I sold my first short story in 1975 and didn’t sell my first novel until 1987. A long twelve years, and a thousand-plus rejections.

But with indie publishing, writers today think they can put up their debut novel and sell thousands of copies in the first month. And when they don’t, they either stop writing, or get upset, or blame it on the fact that they have no name recognition. Many new writers never blame poor sales on the fact that maybe they just don’t know how to tell a good story yet.

These same new writers don’t realize that it takes years to learn how to tell a good story, a story that thousands of fans want to read.

Focus on learning how to tell a better story while at the same time learning the business. If you keep writing and learning, eventually you will be a big name writer with a lot of books out and will have to give this same advice to the next generation of writers.So my suggestion is to stop whining about how big names have all the advantages, and start focusing on learning how to write better stories. Stop spending time on promotion and spend the time on the next short story or the next novel. Your best promotion is always your next book.

Remember, every time you say to a professional writer, “The only reason you can do that is because you are . . .” then you have insulted them and all the years and years of typing and work it took them to get to where they are.

We are only better known than you because we spent years learning how to tell a better story. Nothing more. And certainly nothing less.

Focus on learning how to tell a better story. Make each story the best one you can do. Practice something new in every story. Get it on the market, then move to the next story.

And keep having fun.