Editing: The Saga Continues

Editing. That is what I have been doing for the past couple of months. A necessary evil, but ultimately worth the trouble.

And for this one I really needed it. I didn't have too many issues with grammar or tense. A few issues with word choice: but & and & well. (I blame my love of Doctor Who for that.)

My two main problems: character that disappear in the middle of the book and a character that I originally had alive but then killed off.

The first one is not difficult to deal with. Go in and find where you left off with them, and see if they fit in any other place. If not, give them a rousing exit. The second one though, wow. I obviously missed chunks of this character. The reason I had the character alive to begin with was to show a couple of things. I write urban fantasy, so with the characters I am dealing with run the gamut from demon to elf to Elementals. Long story short: I had two Elementals kidnapped by demons, leaving behind their two year old daughter that saw everything. Now, some 300 years after the fact, the daughter is looking for her parents. When I first wrote about the parents, this is 300 yrs later, I had both of them still alive. Then I thought that was too clean, too easy, so I decided that I should kill the mother. Not a problem. Until you miss scenes in the rewriting process, keeping her alive.

This is where a REALLY good reader/editor/person that won't hold back come in handy. I sent my novel to a friend to read. She is brilliant, and caught what I did wrong and offered suggestions. She knows these characters, because she has read everything I have written about them. She pointed out the glaring mistake, and then said that she liked the character I killed off.

Hmmm. What to do? After months of thinking, I figured it out. I will keep her alive, but have her separated from her husband. Thereby leading to more angst and motivation for various characters. Problem solved, more avenues to pursue, more headaches...

Editing, though a pain in the butt, can be very rewarding. And having someone you trust give you feedback is very important. The point, no matter what you write, be it UF, SciFi, mystery, non fiction, find someone that knows how you write and what you write. That alone makes a world of difference along the editing path.

Grammar Corner: Forget Grammar

That's what the editor is for! Not to mention the second draft.

Now this grammar suggestion, this one is quite controversial in the writing world, and has been a point of contention between authors and the different schools of writing. However, as far as I am concerned this is one of the most important rules. Allow me to explain.

Grammar is a necessary and innate part of our culture as a writer. This we know. The key word in that phrase is innate. If we want to call ourselves writers, something we are already quite familiar with is the English language (or any language in which you are writing in), and how to use it. We have a lot of practice in the realm of grammar just out of practice alone. We know simple sentences have a noun, verb, and predicate, and end in periods, questions end in question marks, and exclamation marks can be an eyesore when there are too many in unison. We get this and our hands and brain know how to deal with it naturally.

So what do I mean when I say forget grammar?

Simple.

I mean literally, forget it. Not in the sense where you completely disregard it, or go out of your way to make every sentence you write a grammatical fallacy. No, nothing like that. What I mean is simple. Do not let grammar dictate your writing. Do not spend hours and hours letting the sentence structure of one section of your prose keep you stuck for hours because it's just not right. We're all guilty of this, I know I am. When a sentence doesn't flow right, we fixate. Every writer is a little bit OCD in my opinion, and like any OCD it starts to interfere not only with the writing, but the life of the writer.

So forget it.

Now this is easier said than done of course, as is anything with writing. Because we've been trained, no conditioned from a very young age to be very attentive to grammar and grammatical fallacies. We've been taught to worship the academic essay and the 9 sentence structure.

Stop! Right now! Just throw that all out of your mind, because if you're here, you are writing for pleasure, you are writing because it's something you enjoy, because you're embracing something deeper than the academic essay. Any manual can teach you how to write a good research paper, but no manual in the world can tell you how to properly break all the rules and become a New York Times Bestseller.

One of the greatest things about being a writer is the freedom we are given. When we let go of the mental constraints that grammar puts on us, the need to make sure we always use the right word at the right time, the right, right or write, then or than, or even where we put a comma in a sentence. Constantly watching for little mistakes that are easy to spot and edit later, we are inhibiting our natural writing process, and inhibiting our ability to write all together.

And sentence structure, that's another matter all together. We are given all these rules that tell us how to write a sentence, but those rules often lead to dry and frankly boring commentary that wouldn't be fit in a 'How-To' manual. So forget about those rules. Writing is an art form, and one of the greatest achievements an artist can make evolving the art. Many authors have adopted a lyrical or poetic approach to their writing, replacing periods for commas, or quotations with never underestimating the intelligence of the reader. Play with your writing, build on your writing, and worry about grammar later.

Those little mistakes that everyone nags and nitpicks about, those can be edited in the future. But losing your story because you're not able to focus because all the rules are holding you down, that can sometimes be devastating. So just write, and enjoy what you're writing. Grammar, sentence structure, rules; all of those can wait until later.



Note: This is merely the thoughts and ideal expressed by me personally and may not be shared with other contributors on this blog. And remember, editors are there to help you.

The Road Ahead

I recently finished writing the second draft of a novel. It is the third in my series so far. It deals with my favorite character, my elftacular Zel. The problem I had with finishing this book and handing it off to someone to read through was that I thought that I had built Zel up so much that I would never be able to do him justice in his own book. Turns out that I was wrong. I nailed Zel perfectly. The person who read this book really knows her stuff, and by extension, she knows my stuff. She knows the characters and said that it felt as though she was in my head while she read it. She answered the questions I had about the book - too many new characters, characters that disappear in the middle, too little action. She also was able to hit on a character that I killed off in this draft but was alive in the first.

This leads me to a new goal that I have for myself. Having faith in what I write.

I have a problem with perfection, I have mentioned that before. But I almost always think that whatever I write is not that good. I don't know why that is. I know that I can write. Other people - professional writers, professors, writing group members - say that I can write. But why is it that I have little faith in my abilities?

For the upcoming year, I plan on doing a couple of things:
     1 - rework Zel's book, fixing the little grammar and tense errors that were found. Flush out characters      that seem to disappear in the middle of the book. Really, not all that hard to do.
    
     2- start a new book. The NaNoWriMo group in Grand Junction is going to attempt a new writing project. The write a complete novel in 9 months, sort of a lead in for NaNo. But, do I continue with the series I know in and out, or do I start a new idea? I have been thinking about writing a steampunk novel.

Those are my writing goals for the new year - so far.

Craft - Revise - Revise - REWRITE - Revise

Something that has been mentioned in my Intermediate Fiction Writing course, and something I've come to learn as an increasingly important truth in the dogma of writing, is the importance of rewriting.  We all know that we have to revise a draft, one time, thirty times, sometimes a hundred times before it is worthy of being sent off for submission.  In our day and age, with technology to assist us, it's much easier to go through the revising process. However, something that is often neglected is rewriting a draft entirely.

In the past it would take years and years for authors to finish a manuscript, sometimes having to stop and rewrite the entire thing thing from scratch, not once but up to ten times. Since drafts were written on typewriters or in journals having more than one copy at a time wasn't exactly a viable option. To revise authors would need to cut out sections move them around, and examine the.  This could obviously create an astronomical mess and a lot more confusion. With word editors we don't have to worry about that so much now. Yet something that may afflict the 21st century writer is laziness.  With all these technological advances to help us, why should we go through all that effort?

Maybe it's time to drop the computer, leave the cellphones, and take a pen and paper out into the woods for a few days. What do I mean by this? I mean that we as writers in the 21st century would be well off (in my honest opinion) to just walk away from all our helpers and handicaps and explore our craft in the ways of old.  Hemingway and Dickinson, Thoreau and Emerson.  They didn't have word processing, they had time, patience, and an uncanny connection with nature that made their writing something unique and pleasant. Their writings are filled with imagery, characterization, and what many authors lack now, philosophy. Something was written because it was meant to be written, every word had room on the page, worked for the page, and the entire narrative arc. And writers from the 1900's and earlier, they had to depend upon their patience and whit to become published.

They rewrote, and they rewrote everything over and over before it was ready to send off to a publisher. Hundreds and thousands of pages of the workings and reworkings of their craft.  Perhaps we should follow their example, to take a short story, and just put it away, leave it for a month, maybe two, and then rewrite it without ever looking at that old draft. Once rewritten, pull out that old draft, and see what works, then revise and revise some more.  Many authors attest to this being a fundamental step in their best work.  So I would challenge all of us to do this. To consider rewriting when we make headway into our revision process.

Since it is hard to do this, I would suggest, write a one to two page story. Put it away for a week to start. Rewrite it, and just see what happens. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.