THE FIRST DRAFT IS NOT 'THE END'

 

Ever had a great story idea and can’t wait to tell the story? You work hard on getting those words down and the images on the page. There are notations in the manuscript to research A, B, and C and hours are spent checking the facts. There’s a good plot and some cool characters. The story makes you laugh and cry as the characters play out their story before your eyes. Finally, you type; The End. There’s a feeling of elation because you finished it, but there is also a sense of loss because the story is done.

But is it?

Realistically, you know there are some sections that will need some work and probably words that need culling. You pare it down, polish up scenes and word choices but still…something’s not right, it feels a bit choppy and so you still continue working on it. You tackle the grammar check and spelling. It’s done, right? Finally you print it off and read it.

That’s when you realize a couple of things; one, it doesn’t read smooth like published novels you’ve read in that genre and two, there are still some off spots but you can’t figure out what exactly or how to fix it. Then you tear yourself apart: you’re a horrible writer and what possessed you to think you could write a book? The published authors out there are just smarter and better writers than you. You’re about ready to throw the manuscript across the room and swear off writing. 

 

A couple of writing friends and I were talking about this and what we had all gone through—most before we had writing friends and critiquing readers. We learned from it. I’ve learned so much!

I learned the meaning of the term first draft. Once you’ve typed The End, it’s only the first draft of the story and going through it to clean up grammar and spelling, doesn’t make it a second draft—just a cleaner first draft. Of course it doesn’t read as smooth as a finished novel because it isn’t finished. Not really.  It hasn’t been edited by anyone other than you, the writer. And that’s when I learned, or at least began to see, what editing really meant. And the value of having experience writers or critique partners read your story.

As a writer we are too close to our work to really see all the obstacles blocking that smooth sounding story. We miss weaknesses and errors in our writing. I don’t think there is a writer out there that masters all aspects of telling a story or the writing skills needed to do so.

It taught me that there is a lot of work (not at all as much fun as the initial writing) between the first draft and the finished draft. It’s not always small stuff. It’s cutting those words and scenes you thought were so good and you start to hear terms like ‘info dump’ and ‘backstory’ which lead to the 4^th draft, where I basically rewrote the first half of the book. 

But, to be a good writer and tell a good story, you need objective readers to spot where the plot or a character is weak or where the flow and tension of the story is interrupted. Or a scene is out of place or where the story actually begins (I’ve learned it’s usually a few moments before all hell breaks loose in the character’s life or the event that changes their life).

You also need thick skin.

Why?

Because the editing and critiquing process can sting the ego. Especially when you have to lose some of those lovely words or a scene (or three) you loved, which might be well written but, don't add anything to the story or dam the flow of the story.

Friday, I’ll be talking about what I've learned about objective readers (and being one) and a good editor.

• What have you learned about the writing process after you wrote, The End, on your first draft? 
• Was it hard to let others read your story?

 

IWSG—GETTING THE PATTERN STRAIGHT

  

I've been looking at a manuscript I wrote as the first part of a series several years ago. I really like this story. The quality doesn't fall into the, oh my god, how awful category—those stories are long ago in a galaxy far away, um, that would be in a hidden box. It’s full of old manuscripts written through the years and won’t see the light of day anytime soon. 

I digress. This story has good bones but could be told in a better way. I knew that four years ago, when started editing it. There are two editions both a bit different than the other the original and #2 is from my first pass of edits. It still wasn't quite right. Editing is not my favorite part of writing.

To make it what it needs to be will take some pretty ruthless work. The third file of this story has pieces spread out everywhere. It's kind of like having all the pieces of the fabric for a quilt but no pattern handy to reassemble it so it looks like a quilt and not a stack of bright colors. It's daunting. There are pieces mixed in that aren't necessary in creating the quilt.  

In writing I need to know many things that my reader doesn't. To complicate things more the story starts in the wrong place—cut about 5 chapters and you have the true beginning. I also know the plot needs tweaking. I have the main story and a couple of sub-plots. I need a clearer picture of where I want this story to go. Need to get rid of those things that don't move the story forward and add other scenes that will.

When I look at the mess of pieces it overwhelms me. Where the hell do I start?

I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Just as with creating a quilt (which I've done) or any art form  you first have to have a pattern. The base pattern has to be a clear picture in your mind. The shape and scope of it. That clarity determines what sort of accents and in what material and textures are needed to compliment the pattern. Make it pop.

So, I have my answer. I need to start with the pattern (plot). Get a clearer picture of it in my mind and then set out the pieces (chapters and scenes) that fit the pattern and baste them together. I need to decide, once that's done, what will add better texture to the story. Adding more layers of emotion and motivations. Add the contrasts of environment and description to match the picture in my head.

Easy-peasy right? Pfft. Not hardly.

It’s still in pieces and I don’t kid myself about the time involved to take this story from okay to great. Even after I have the pattern clear and the pieces and accents where I want them I know there will be several more editing passes after the beta reads.

But that’s for the future. Right now my focus is on getting the pattern straight. I’ll worry about the rest later.

Bear with me folks, I had a severe allergic reaction Monday evening and I'm still weak and wimpy. I will get around to visit but it will be in ;-) bits and pieces. 

The Xs of Fiction - Guest Editor Beth Hill

We’re getting close to the end of our A-Z Challenge! Unless we want to discuss xylophones or x-rays or x-rated books, we needed to cheat a bit on the letter and make an eXception. Our guest today is one of our blog favorites, editor eXtraordinaire, Beth Hill, to talk about the “Xs” of writing fiction. ~Kat

Fiction writers face many rules, some detailing what to do, others detailing prohibitions, maybe even exclusions.

Some rules come from the wider world of writing, proven rules that make all communication easier. Some rules come specifically from the world of fiction. And many rules come from the experience gained by the long chain of writers who wrote before us, shared so we can call on the know-how of those who’ve already made the mistakes and learned how to correct them.

I don’t want to lay out rigid rules today, certainly not all the do’s and don’ts of fiction. Let’s instead look at options to strengthen both story and story-writing skills. Consider these the Xs of fiction.

Gain experience

Write often. Write more than you’ve written in the past. Read in the genre you want to write. Read in genres you have no familiarity with. Study successful fiction.

Become an expert

Master an area or a topic that you like and then master an area or topic that gives you fits. And then master a topic you know nothing about. These areas can be writing related—dialogue, pacing, subtext—or simply topics that appeal—landscaping, the Boer Wars, space travel. Expand your knowledge.

Explore
Follow links from one topic you study to the next. Don’t always be content with surface knowledge, though that may be all you need for a writing project. Give yourself the opportunity to delve deep into topics and follow even the most tenuous of links between topics.

Don’t explain

When you write, don’t insist that characters explain why they do a particular action. Simply show them in action and allow the reader to draw her own conclusions. Keep readers actively involved by giving them just enough so they don’t get lost and enough that they’re tempted to figure out what’s going on before revelations are uncovered.

Go easy on the expletives

No, not the cussing kind, the grammatical kind. There or it followed by forms of the verb to be can leach power from a sentence, especially when used again and again or to open new scenes or chapters. They can also add unnecessary words. Example: There was a boy racing down the lane vs. A boy raced down the lane.

Expose character weaknesses

Show characters’ limitations in action. Make fictional people real by giving them weaknesses that work for the story, that add to the story.

Express emotion

Show characters as emotional people touched by what happens around them. Show that actions have impact, that they change characters. Show that actions and the words of others touch characters’ hearts and drive them to respond and maybe even retaliate.

Extend invitations to the reader

Hook the reader on page one, giving her a reason to read the opening pages, and then keep her hooked. Make your story opening an invitation to your fictional world. Entice and intrigue.

Create extraordinary characters

Make your main characters memorable. They don’t have to be a Superman, but they should have quirks or behaviors or emotions or desires that make them stand out from every other fictional character.

Write extraordinarily well

Learn the basics, learn more than the basics, and don’t be satisfied with being mediocre at any of the writing elements. Expand your skills.

Take some scenes to the extreme

Push events, reactions, and emotions. Surprise characters as well as readers. Be bold and not timid.

Exaggerate

Exaggerate character problems and solutions, but without falling into obvious caricature.

Exceptions

Keep in mind that there are always exceptions to every rule. Figure out how and when to break rules in ways that create memorable fiction.

 

Beth Hill is a freelance fiction editor who loves the creative power of words. You can find her online at A Novel Edit and read other writing and editing tips at The Editor’s Blog.

 

Kat's "X" Book List

 

 

 

Strapless by Deborah Davis: Biography. The story behind the famous Madame X painting by John Singer Sargent, a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.

Three Weeks with Lady X: Eloisa James. A duke, a lady, a romance

 

Author X: The Inner Secret. Click the "author X" link to learn more about the mystery of who this author was.

 

 

Cartoon Pencil With Cross Mark Image courtesy of chanpipat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Abstract Colour Pencil Image courtesy of tigger11th / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Man Writing With His Pencil Image courtesy of Boians Cho Joo Young / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

WHAT I WANT AND WHAT I GOT...

Due to circumstances beyond my control this will be a late Monday Musings and early IWSG (click to get a list of other participating blogs) I just combined the articles. I'll be visiting blogs over the next few days and cracking the whip to get back into blogging after some much needed time off.

WHAT I GOT THIS MORNING AT THE FEEDERS AND
WHAT I WANT IS THE LAST PICTURE.

I've noticed a difference in what I'd like to see happening and what is happening—what I want and what I got. For instance, my editing tasks. I've been helping hubs edit his book. It's a good story but lord have mercy, the man is heavy into he said/she said. That drives me nuts. He's actually very good with dialog but when he wrote these stories they were done with old school tags. Pulling his mind from then to now has been...a struggle. Magnum PI and Spencer meeting Burn Notice. Don't get me wrong, Magnum had some great story lines and some great oddball humor (and my husband loves oddball and corny humor) and Spencer did as well, but if they were written for today's market they'd have to have some major updating to grab the audience. Same genre different methods of telling. 

What I want is someone who likes to read those sorts of detective stories read for story content and word usage. What I got is me. 

Then there is my writing. Talk about insecurities and frustrations. I have two manuscripts completed in a series I wrote. Mine had to go on a major word diet. In fact the first in the series lost 10k. I was very proud of that. Now it's in pieces—kinda like Humpty-Dumpty with all king's horses and all the king's men at the ready to put it back together again but they've all gone into stasis waiting for the orders to proceed. Sigh....

What I want is free time to concentrate on that and what I've got is itty-bitty sound bytes of time to do it.

Then there is the weather. 

What I want is green and flowers. Like my brother Rob’s house in early May.

What I got is the heaviest snowfall in our area since 2002 and minus 2 this morning.

Hey, the sun is shining on this bright Monday and that’s good. It’s actually beautiful but wicked cold even with the temps up to almost 15 degrees, but the wind bites hard.

Hubs is bundled up in multi-layers of clothes (he loses 10 lbs and 10 inches once he peels that bundle off) and you can see how much we've accomplished after a couple hours of work. We haven't even started on the driveway to the road—which is also unplowed and likely to remain so, unless our neighbor decides to run his tractor over our road a mile down to the blacktop which is also not plowed. They rarely plow it. Getting anywhere is problematic.  

Then there is the driveway. 

What I want is a nice cleared driveway. What I got is this—can you even tell where the driveway is?

Uh, no. 

Just in case you're curious, curves around the little oak tree and out the break in the hedges. I'm standing in the cleared area to take this shot. 

We've already been out two hours this morning and barely have made a dent in clearing the snow from the garage so we can open the doors. It’s several more hours of shoveling time to get down to that break in the hedges.

And then come Wednesday afternoon we get more snow and sleet (I much prefer the snow over icy slush) and again over next weekend.

There you have it. The battle of wants and gots. I suspect it will be an ongoing battle this year, especially with writing.

What's your ongoing battle right now? 

Happy New Year!

WHAT I WANT TO SEE. TOMORROW WOULD
BE GOOD 

MONDAY MUSINGS—I WANT THAT SPARKLE!

One of the good things about editing, especially when it’s a story you wrote several years before, is you can read it with a critical eye. There are parts that blow me away because they’re good (wow, I wrote that!) and then there are other parts that have me cringing over word choices or the over abundance of adverbs, backstory, or passive verbs.

I've done more reading than writing the past couple of years and while I can read a book critically, I usually don’t. I’m a beta reader. I read those stories and proposals with a different eye. When I pick up a book to read it’s for story’s entertainment value. Kind of like movies—some are good, some are just okay and they entertain, some movies are fabulous in their storyline and execution. Do I see flaws, sure, but unless they’re really bad and the story has huge holes in it (at which point I don’t read any further ‘cause you've lost my interest), I tend to gloss over all the little nits and concentrate on the adventure, solving the crime, falling in love, or kicking ass.  But, when a story is done very well, I do take note of how an author handles certain components in the story. I’ll mark it and then go back late and analyze the why and how. 

Recently, I've read several stories with a good plot but what made the story outstanding to me was how the characters (even the villains) just sparkled. They were so real and the dialog was excellent as were the reactions and interactions between those characters. Their dialog and reactions add excitement and fun to the story without a lot of narrative. It takes skill to do that.  A few authors who have a knack of writing good characters like that are Carolyn Brown, Julie Ann Walker, Lori Foster, Olivia Cunning, Karen Foley, and Susan Sey, to name but a few. Carolyn writes some fabulous characters that use regional phrases and colloquialisms—I love the richness and the humor of her stories.

As I read over my stories one of the things I’m paying attention to is how I've written my characters and their dialog. I want them to sparkle, too. I want the layers touching on the senses that put the reader on the spot and in the action. Right there on the center-line  They hear the grunts, smell the sweat, feel the

excitement, and hear the whistle of the ball in their ears and the smack it makes when it’s caught. I don’t want them to just be spectators in the nosebleed section.

I've got some work to do and that’s a fact. But, I’m not groaning over it all. Instead there is a sizzle of excitement as I look at better ways to put my reader on the spot. 

MONDAY MUSINGS—DISTILLING THE ESSENTIALS

DISTILL: to subject something to or transform it by distillation; to extract the essence 

Have you ever watched an herbalist make essential oils? It’s a fascinating process and one that I will be the first to tell you I know only the basics of the process. I've watched a friend of mine make batches of essential oils.

There is a chamber or pot that holds raw plant material—flowers, leaves, wood, bark, roots, seed, or peels (which is yet another process). The chamber is then placed over or above a pot of water. As the water heats, the steam passes through the raw plant material, and allows for the vapor to flow into a coil where it condenses back into a liquid, which drips into another container. This is what you would call an essential oil. That means it carries the distinctive scent, or essence, of the plant. The oil is then allowed to cool and is poured into storage vials. Later, my friend will bring out her ‘recipe’ book and mix the oils to create certain scents or properties for herbal medicines. It’s a time consuming process and take much more raw plant material than one would assume to create enough oil to fill a little vial. After watching the process I now understand why essential oils can get pricey.

If one is doing peels or fruit to make oil it is first pressed into a paste (that takes some work unless you have a press to do it for you) and then put in the chamber over boiling water and the same process ensues to collect the oil into storage containers. Some fruit/peel/pulp is cold pressed—meaning no heat. The pressure from the weighted press causes the oil droplets to separate from the raw plant material and drip into a container. Olive oil can be made this way.

My mind always jumps to correlations when watching a physical process. I've had a story I wrote on my mind. I know it needs editing. As I watched this process it got me thinking about my rather fat story. I realized that I needed to do some distilling. All those words, scenes, descriptions, and characters (raw material) need a heating chamber so the essence of the story could be condensed into a purer form. Once I had the essential oils of the story distilled I could then mix them to give impact to what I wanted my story to be—much like my friend getting out her recipe book and adding tiny drips and drops oils to make something new and wow. More than a drop can create an overpowering mess.

I’m no different than any other writer. I have attachments to certain phrases and scenes but unless that scene is moving the story forward there is no place for it. I have to detach and let it go. I’m not saying my scene is worthless—it’s not. There was a purpose as I wrote it and that function could have been a necessary ingredient to define a character or back story in my mind so I could find the path to move the story from point A to point B. It was something I needed as a writer but not necessarily something that the reader needs. I want them focusing on the distinctive characters, events and the emotions of the story.

I need to put away the cups and tablespoons and get out my dropper and add some drops of the essential oils to enhance the punch of a scene without losing the story. I want wow in the now.

• So, how goes your writing this week?  

MONDAY MUSINGS: IT DON'T COME EASY

Writing a story is capturing the vision and sounds in our minds and putting them into words.

                                                                                                                                                

My husband has been editing the first of several books of a detective series he's written. Hub's has had two skilled writer/editors look at the first manuscript. One loved the smart-ass character and his corny jokes as well as the premise of story, except for a few things which take up a couple of pages. The other wasn't as enamored of the politically incorrect, smart ass character, but also gave several pages of story fix-its. 

Dan has been groaning. A lot. 

Writing is a love/hate relationship. As Ringo Starr once sang, "You know it don't come easy..."

The writer that tells you that the words always flow and the stories are easy is either lying or living in an alternate universe. We all hit spots that required discipline and yes, work. Even when we get the essence of the scene down, the editing of the word choices, the phrasing and descriptions, and the action and emotion, is work. Hard work. You strive for painting each scene as clearly as you can and giving it the most impact so it flows seamlessly into the next. That may take several revisions.

Revisions and editing are not easy. Or at least they aren't in my world.

Some writers tend to write the initial draft of their work in bare bones scenes. I’d compare it to an animator who does the preliminary pencil sketches. They capture the essence of the scene with dialog and action and leave the fill in work for the first pass. Others write fairly detailed scenes of the vision see in their mind and then go back and cut out the superfluous details to bring into focus the core of the story.

My husband has also been researching query letters. This morning he asked me, "Do you know how many conflicting ideas there are out there on writing a good query letter?"

Yes, dear, I know. I know.

• Do you have a style of writing your first draft or does it vary with the story?

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