Work In Progress Report

I realized the other day that it had been a while since I'd done a work in progress update, and thought it was probably time. So, here goes:

The King's Falcon (fantasy) -I finished editing in the wake of Dave Farland/ Wolverton's suggestions from his Novel ReWriting Workshop. One of my challenges on this one was that I needed to pull a plot line that hadn't started until after page 100 into the first fifty pages and blend it into the story structure better. Fingers crossed that I did this well since this story is currently out with an editor for review.

New Bohemia: Just One Night (Romance). The first draft is saved. I had a heart attack moment a while ago when I was posting this story in 1,000 word chunks to one of my writing groups. I hadn't realized that Word was pulling up the file from the remote backup device. So, when it opened on the screen the story only had 50,000 words rather than the 105,000 it should have had. Panic set in. About 20 minutes later I realized my mistake. Hands shaking, I saved a backup of the file and closed the computer for the night.  I haven't looked at this one in six weeks so it's about time to start edits.

Schrodinger Effect (Urban Fantasy Thriller). A wise friend, Lisa Scottoline, once said the difference between a murder mystery a thriller is in murder mystery someone is dead when the story starts, and in a thriller, someone dies after the narrative starts. By that definition, this WIP qualifies as a thriller. I tried picking at this story without the color wheel done, but kept having to stop to figure out the emotional resonance of what Vonna was seeing. So, I've finally finished my emotion color wheel, and outline. Now if I can keep the cat off my magnetic white board (although she's done some interesting things rearranging my outline), I should be able to get this one written. I'm about 5,000 words into it and so far so good.

Thanks for stopping by.

Editing versus writing

I'm currently editing two novels. It struck me the other night how fundamentally different the process of writing is from editing in one aspect. When I write a story, I'm always looking at my increasing word count. My goals are based on how many new words I add to the story each week. There's that moment of excitement when a story passes the "short" length and into novella. Then there's the sheer joy of crossing into novel length.

But then, I type "The End" and panic sets. One of the down sides to being a discovery writer is that I write long. Too long. I might have 50 pages before I figure out where the story starts. As I start to push the upper edge of genre appropriate word count. I start thinking about how much is left and how much I'll need to cut in the edit phase.

When I switch hats from writer to editor, I reverse the process. I have a minimum number of words I need to lop off. It's a bit disheartening when I start the process, but then just like the moment of watching the word count rise, watching it decline becomes a thrill. Not only am I  bringing the beast into genre acceptable limits, but I'm watching the story lines tighten, making my prose cleaner and meaner. Once I chip away excess words, I find themes I hadn't realized I'd written in.

So, right now I'm in the process of taking a 130,500 word behemoth back down to something closer to 110k. Three thousand words to down, seventeen thousand to go. Oh yes, and did I mention I wanted this edit complete before I leave for Superstars Writing Seminar on Sunday (May 12)?? Well, I do. So it's back to work for me.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Backwards Outlining or How I Kill My Darlings

I've said it time and again on this blog and elsewhere, I'm  a pantser or discovery writer. I often start my stories (whether short or novel-length) with the main characters, the main conflict and a proposed resolution, and that's it. I love the joy of taking the trip with them. The downside, of course, is when the characters get distracted, so do I. I tend to write FAR more than I really need to as a result.

I've floundered around a lot with how to take a 200,000 word novel and cut it down to something that's traditional NY publishable. Note, I say traditional NY publishable. Electronic publishing, theoretically, has changed what we can sell as completed novels since the cost issues are radically different when you don't have to print the text on paper. Still, the NY houses still set the guidelines. Will that change? Probably, but for now, being publishable means sticking within "normal" word counts for your genre until you reach a certain level of success. No one is going to tell Stephanie Myer, or Brandon Sanderson to cut 80,000 words of their novels to meet the "guidelines." Given the caliber of those writers, it's really unlikely there are 80,000 words that could be cut from a 200,000 word story without harming it. Sadly, I'm not there yet.

Where does that leave me?

Cutting words and strengthening the ones I do use.

Since going to Dave Farland's Novel Rewriting Workshop in August, 2012, I've become aware of a new metric I can use to edit my novels in a way that doesn't harm the story. I've talked about Dave's Million Dollar Outlines and Blake Snyder's Save the Cat before.  It's these tools I'm using to "outline" my completed novel as part of the editing process.

Right now I'm working on the novel I took to Dave's workshop, The King's Falcon. Let me give you

a bit of background so this makes some sense.  I've been working on it for far too long. Originally the first draft was a whopping 300,000 words. Yup. That's not a typo. I realized that I'd actually written 3 books and started breaking them up. The first story was heavily character driven so while technically fine, I'd get comments back that "nothing happened." Not a good comment. So, I took the second book, which focused on the civil war and started merging it into the first so the looming battle actually occurs in Book I. I wasn't really successful at doing this on my own. Enter Dave's workshop. I knew going into the workshop that I had, at least, a pacing problem - too much of the character stuff still happened at the front of the book and too much of the action was stuck in the second half of it. Dave showed me how to pull the two story lines through each other and merge them.

Guess what? The end result of that process is a story that needs its word count trimmed, again. But what to cut? What's a "darling" and what's really necessary?

I've started a process that I call "backwards outlining" using Dave's Million Dollar Outlines and Snyder's Save the Cat, I'm outlining the completed story. Each scene must justify it's existence. What conflict is there? Do the characters change emotional beats within the scene? What information is being imparted that is critical to the forward motion of the story. Am I hitting the right emotional beats or story turning points at the right time?

Let me give you an example:

There's a story beat that Dave labels the "Call to Action" and Snyder calls "The Catalyst." Regardless of what you call it, it's that moment when your hero's world changes and propels him into the story. It happens at the 12 minute mark in a 110 minute movie according to Snyder (he's right, by the way).  That's just a bit shy of the 11% mark. In a 120K word novel, its approximately word 13,200 or page 52 (250 words per page). 

Again, I know my story drags. I'm going to be missing beats somewhere and adding them other places they don't belong. So where did my "Call to Action" fall?

Page 32. 

But wait. I'm 20 pages early, that's good right? Nope. It means my next section (the "Debate") drags on far too long because my midpoint is spot on half way through the text. Now I know where at least one of my pacing problems is. I can go back in and fix it. So, I'm moving a scene from the "Debate" section that doesn't fit forward to the set up phase where it belongs.

Let's go back to my "Call to Action" scene again. Here's the diagram of that scene:

Location: Interior, Sabryna's chambers
Falcon learns that Sabryna is dying. She wants Falcon to marry her widower to reclaim the throne and unite the kingdoms.

Emotional Beat: +/- Falcon starts curious as to what mission Sabryna will send her on, and ends up devastated by news of Sabryna's terminal illness.

Conflict >< Falcon wants everything to stay the same; Sabryna needs Falcon to be more than she is and accept her responsibilities.

That works, I have emotional change and a conflict. I also impart a lot of plot relevant information in the wrestling with the conflict. It's a scene I can probably leave alone other than to punch up verbs and tighten the prose.

What about a "darling" that I need to cut then?

"Coffee Clach" with Leesan and Iestyn
Location: Interior castle kitchen
Falcon catches up with her foster mother and best friend, and learns more about Mordent.

Emotional Beat: +/+  Falcon starts content and ends up curious.

Conflict: Ahm, I don't have one. Lessan wants the veggies cut up, Falcon and Iestyn do that. Leesan and Iestyn want to hear information about Falcon's trip, she tells them. Falcon wants to catch up on Court politics and they tell her. Everyone gets along too well.

Yawn.

So while there is needed information here and I love the relationship between the three of them. I can do a quick two or three line recap of the information needed in the next scene. This is a darling, not a required beat. It needs to go or it needs a major rewrite.

Anyway, that's my new take on editing. I'll let you know how the process works for me.

Finished!

This weekend saw me typing "The End" on the first draft of my work-in-progress: New Bohemia: Just One Night. About a year ago, I put another WIP on hold because this story kept interrupting me when I sat down to write. I figured New Bohemia would be a quick short story or a novella, at best. Boy, was I wrong.

One of the down sides to being a pantser (a writer who doesn't outline the story in advance but writes by putting the characters in a terrible situation and asking what would happen next) is sometimes a story will take a turn onto a different road. Well, that's what happened with New Bohemia. For this romance, I'd gotten the two characters together and now needed an obstacle. What happens when you need an obstacle? You hit your characters where it hurts most. For Maysoon, the female main character, that meant forcing her to give up her career as a lawyer for low income individuals in the worst section of Washington, DC to accept a position in the family business. Their overcoming that fairly huge obstacle, and coming together again changed the story from a novella to a full length novel.

As you might have guessed being a discovery writer has its downsides. If I'd had an outline worked out in advance, I would have realized the commitment I was making to May and Pete much sooner than I did. But, there are some benefits of pantsing it too. One is that I get to experience the happily ever after moment (a must in a romance) when the characters do. Typing "the end" is as fulfilling for me as it is for the characters.

What happens next for New Bohemia? Well, it gets to sit in the proverbial drawer for the next month to "cool" before start on edits. During that month, my plan is to work on edits for my other novel (The King's Falcon), and finish the preparation and research work for the urban fantasy WIP that was pushed aside for New Bohemia.

My goal is to have both New Bohemia and King's Falcon ready for the submission rounds by summer. Although given that it's snowing in Virginia today, summer may be a long way away. I'll keep you updated on my progress.

Novel Rewriting Workshop Roundup

I've been attending David Farland/ Wolverton's Novel Rewriting Workshop in St. George, Utah this week. According to Dave, "[i]n this intensive five-day workshop, you'll learn how to revise your plot, rewrite and strengthen the prose in your chapters, and how to pitch your novel to agents and editors." It's all that and more.

A bit about how the workshop is set up. Before you can attend the seminar, you need to send Dave the first 100 pages and an outline of your novel. If you are accepted, you are then sent the first 20 pages and the outlines from the attendees' novels, and a list of writing books you need to have read before the seminar to get the most out of it. You need to read and comment on ways the other stories and outlines can improve from good to excellent. Daily sessions starts at 9am and run until 3pm. During the time, we share our comments on the stories, and Dave talks about an aspect of editing, rewriting or the business. He gives us homework which was designed to make us use the concepts discussed in that day's session.

You can't have a thin skin. While no one is mean, they do give their opinions about what worked or didn't work for them in your story.

I brought the manuscript for The King's Falcon. It's a fantasy story I've been irregularly working on for a long time. I knew I had what I called a "pacing" problem, but couldn't figure out how to resolve it. What do I mean by a pacing problem? The first third of the novel is very character driven. This means that while things happen, there isn't a giant battle scene in the first half of the novel. I wasn't meeting my audience's expectation of what and when action occurs. The threat of war doesn't appear until page 100.

In addition to feedback from the 10 other attendees, Dave gave me detailed suggestions on how to improve the story generally, and editing notes on the 100 pages and outline. While it wasn't surprising how insightful many of the comments (made equally by attendees and Dave) were, the suggested fixes were often not all that complex. We all have weaknesses in out writing. It hurts to have them pointed out, but once they are, we can being to heal and improve our writing. One suggested change will take a lot of time to implement because it added a new level to the story. The rest of them were as simple (and complex) as set the scene up better, and provide more detail when describing a character.

The nightly writing exercises allowed me to immediately implement the suggestions and get feedback on the revised sections. One exercises was to describe a static item like a building in active terms. Now, we've all heard about the writing exercise where aspiring writers are told to spend 5 pages describing a brick wall. We did none of that. Dave had several ways of bringing life to an immobile object. Once these techniques were pointed out to me, I knew what to do to enrich my storytelling, and how to find these weak spots in my manuscript.

On Wednesday, we had movie night. We watched a popular movie and dissected the story-telling elements. Again, it was amazing to see the complexity layered onto a story that, at first blush, didn't appear to reference other movies. Yet, over the course of the fantasy genre film, we found references to Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Roman Circus and Colosseum, the Bible, reality TV shows, the fay and other fairy legends, and politics. So much for the movie telling a "simple" story.

Attending the workshop will turn out to be one of the turning points in my writing career. The sections I've already rewritten are much stronger. The friends I've made are already dear. If you're looking to take your writing to the next level, I whole-heartedly recommend Dave's Novel Rewritng Workshop.

Now it's time to get back to revising.

Dave Wolverton/ Farland's Novel Rewriting Workshop

This week I'm attending David Farland/ Wolverton's Novel Writing Workshop in St. George, Utah. During the week, I'll take my WIP - The King's Falcon - and try to iron out the last bugs. King's Falcon features an older version of Falcon from Lightning Strikes  in  Paths Less Traveled. Now working as Queen Sabryna's agent, Falcon's latest mission runs her afoul of a mage king, and thrusts Falcon ever closer to her own unwanted and abandoned throne. 

The workshop is intensive, and even had homework. The ten of us had certain books on editing, story craft and outlining to read before we arrived. We also had to review the first 20 pages and 10 page outline of the other writer's books. We'll spend the morning in "class" and discussing the stories, and the afternoon working on our homework assignments. This week is likely to be exhausting, fun, and hugely helpful. 

I also turned in the edits for Apollo's Rising, which releases from Musa on September 10, and I'll post a bit more on that later this week.

That's it for now. I'm off to class.