Despair And Why We Love Editors

June 13, 2017 / Lisa / 5 Comments

A couple days ago book four went blithely sailing off to the editor. After revising, it was pretty dang good.

Yesterday, listening to beta readers catching a few typos, the certainty hit that I’d made a huge mistake. Sent it off to the editor way too soon. This was followed by the typical ‘should’ list that follows self-doubt.

Should have read it one more time. Should have spent a few more months, or maybe years, revising. Should just give up. Should have stayed in bed.

Today, the first chapter came back from the editor. With lots of little green comments. Let’s repeat that, shall we? LOTS of little green comments.

Worry and self-doubt was instantly replaced with that common ailment of all writers in the process of editing: despair.

I knew I should have quit writing when I was ten years old!

Of course, I’ve been through this process often enough now to know that being at the bottom of this dank, dark, writer’s pit is only temporary.

Tomorrow I’ll be excited to start work. Because in all seriousness, the little green comments are spot on.

Right at the moment though, I’m going to writhe around in self-pity thinking about what a horrible writer I am, for just a bit longer. It’s an excuse to sit in the hot tub.

Okay, that’s over with.

Because the story is going to be much stronger in a few days.

I swear though, if the husband points out one more typo, I may just take away his scotch. This was last night’s conversation as I was falling asleep:

Him: ‘You do know the women’s state prison in Idaho is in Pocatello, right? Not Wallace?’

Me: ‘Of course.’

Him: ‘You know that’s a seven hour drive, right? She can’t just hop in the car after work and make it there before the end of visiting hours.’

Me: ‘That’s why they call it fiction! If I want to move the whole prison to Wallace I will!’

And I did. The whole prison. Just picked it up and took it with me.

Hope the editor doesn’t catch that…

Goals, Motivations, and Action

May 28, 2017May 28, 2017 / Lisa / 1 Comment

I’m using Janice Hardy’s wonderful Editorial Map for revising the first draft of book four, found in her equally wonderful book Revising Your Novel. But I got hung up on a few things.

The map asks specific questions for each scene or chapter. By answering, you see where you’ve gone astray. After mapping out the whole draft, you have a snapshot of where the story needs work.

One question has you list out the goals and motivations for each scene, and one question asks what the point of view character is doing in the scene.

How are they different? Isn’t what the character does, her goal?

So I did what I always do when I have a writing question. Went out to dinner with my friend, author and editor Susan Schreyer. (It’s our excuse to eat out.)

What I realized while talking to her is that the ‘goal’ question relates to the over-reaching goals and motivation. The internal goal, so to speak, which ties to the theme or premise. What the character is doing relates more to the physical, immediate goals and motivations attached to a specific scene.

Of course I knew that.

Right, Susan?

I then talked to Susan about a couple of scenes I found that didn’t have any goal or motivation, whether out there in the ozone or right in the character’s lap. I knew the scene had a purpose but it wasn’t quite fleshed out enough to make that purpose clear.

Susan, of course, had a great suggestion. She said to go back to the previous scene and see what the decision was. This doesn’t mean a physical decision made by the character like deciding to get tea instead of coffee. It means the conclusion of the scene.

Not to confuse that conclusion with the ‘sequel’ which should follow each scene. In other words, the scene is me finding an earwig in my hair, and the sequel is lots of yelling and thrashing about. You can’t have a scene without a sequel. Think ‘action/reaction’. The decision is what the character does after the sequel. Like washing hair for three hours.

That decision should always tie to the next scene. The decision causes the next step in the plot or the character arc to happen.

And in the scenes I struggled with, I realized they didn’t tie to the previous scene or decision. They were just kind of hanging out there on their own. No place in the story arc.

It’s going to be a fairly simple thing to revise them to find their place in the story. Right at the moment, I love this revision process. We’ll see if I feel the same later.

And I already knew that about scene/sequel/decision.

Right, Susan?

Dahlia_concours_international_2012_Parc_Floral_3

Dahlias (aka earwig flowers) from By Dinkum – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21343403

When You Write Slow

May 20, 2017May 20, 2017 / Lisa / 7 Comments

Someone once told me that my books start out like an easy ramble through the woods and you don’t realize you’ve been sucked in until it’s too late.

How long did it take this tree to get like this?

I liked that even though I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if it was a nice way of saying I better work on pacing. Well, okay, I still wonder that.

It takes me a while to write a book. I firmly believe that if I outlined in a traditional manner, I could publish books much faster. But that type of outlining has never worked for me. I prefer to amble along daydreaming the story.

On the positive side that means I usually don’t have a lot of revising to do at the end (unless my editor asks me the ONE question I never thought of that impacts the whole story…thanks, Susan Schreyer). It also means I’ve given characters plenty of time to show me who they are and how they fit in the landscape.

Mountains – my favorite story landscape

But on the not-so-positive side, it means two things in particular for the story I’m writing now.

I’m working on the ending currently. And one of the characters finally decided it was time to tell me about family relationships. Really? You wait until NOW to tell me? Yes, okay, that makes sense as I think about it. Yes, okay, it ties perfectly to the theme of family angst in my stories. But still, NOW?

I started Sunshine On My Shoulders almost three years ago. At that time certain things were going on with the Sunshine mine in Wallace, Idaho. Now that I’m almost done, those things have changed so the story is now out of date. Some of the plot moments can be left because this is, after all, fiction. But as I revise, I’m going to have to bring several things up to date or the book will be ‘old’ before it’s ‘new’.

Does all that make me feel pressured to write faster? Not really. I enjoy the slow ramble through the woods. I love the process of the story unfolding in its own time.

I saw an article recently that questioned whether slow writers could survive in this day and age of everything delivered instantly and the vital need to stay in the public eye or be forgotten. I didn’t read the article. Why? Because the purpose of writing isn’t to quickly shove product into humanity’s hands. It’s to tell a story. And any story, in any writer’s hands, will reveal itself in its own time.

My stories just happen to be a bit shy.