Editing - What's Working for Me So Far

Not sure if anyone out there would find this helpful, but I do. It's often said that when editing, try reading your work aloud or print it out -- do something that sets it apart from what you're used to staring at day in and day out while you wrote the thing.

Now, I'm not going to waste money printing out my 300+ page novel, nor am I going to risk getting in trouble and print it at work. And printing it out in a point size of 6 just to cram the words into a fewer number of pages? Well, that Hell would almost be as bad as the editing process in general. So I do this, and it has been working so far.

I export my WIP as a .mobi file (easy to do when using Scrivener) and save it to my Kindle. Not only does it give me a different way to perceive my story, it allows me to TAKE NOTES! I use my finger to highlight everything wrong and jot a small note that I'll go back to later after I've been through the whole damn thing. That's actually where I'm at now: I marked over 600 things and am going through my WIP in Scrivener, fixing what needs fixing. Luckily these are all little things -- removing passive voice and rewording clunky sentences.

Wait, What? Er... I Still Have a Blog?!

Yeah, I know. I am a horrible, horrible blogger. There's not much I can say to vindicate myself, but I'm going to try like hell anyway.

Not Much to Talk About (until now)
The main reason is that I don't have much to promote at the moment. A few short stories, sure, but they've been out there for several years now. The other reason is that I figure any time spent writing on here would be better spent on my novel -- 'Walk a Web of Spiders'.

Yep, that one. The one I've been working on for forever. Well, it's not for a lack of discipline or motivation. I've maintained the same writing schedule every day since I started writing it -- 2 - 3 hours every morning (holidays, weekends, vacations be damned!) But on the weekdays, I have to stop and go to work. On the weekends I stop when my kids and wife wake up so we can hang out and do stuff.

But I'm updating the blog now. So there must be something worth writing about, right? Yaasss! 'Walk a Web of Spiders' is so close to done it's ridiculous. In fact, I'm giving it one more spit shine and then it'll be ready for querying. I'm really excited about it. Just to get it to this point is amazing to me. I've learned a lot in the rewrites/drafts since.

The biggest thing I've learned is that so much time is required AFTER you think it's ready. Ready, to me, was the state it was in in November -- a 140K suspense story that had gone through 5 drafts, followed by two read-throughs by me on my Kindle to fix glaring mistakes,  followed by a beta read by 20 or so people, and then followed by another draft to fix the mistakes found by my beta readers.

I then tackled the query (took a day or two. not bad). And the synopsis (a week, and man that was a sucky week... but I did it). Feeling smug with myself, I sent my query to queryshark, expecting Janet to tell me how great it was. NOPE. Not only was the query shredded but, more importantly, Janet told me what I kinda already knew but tried to ignore anyway -- 140K is too long for a suspense story. So I cried got out the ax and started chopping. Let me take a second to say how great the queryshark website is. The advice is invaluable. For as bad as my initial query was it would have been twenty times worse if I hadn't gone through the queryshark archives. So anyway, yeah. My query sucked. My novel was far too long.

Stephen King has a quote that I latched onto during that time: “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”

Oh it hurt, but it felt right too. November was basically dedicated to this process and by the end I was down to something promising -- a 108K suspense novel that flowed a lot better. Still not as slim as I wanted, but (at the time) as slim as I could get it.

Then the query. I rewrote it and tried again. QueryShark also offers a paid service, where she'll review not only your query but the first five pages and help you revise it up to two times. I took her up on it and holy hell... Janet cut about 350 words of fat from the first five pages. And I saw it. I saw what she did, the tone she set. So what I did next was carry it on throughout the rest of the novel. Guess what. I am now staring at a 98K word suspense novel that freakin' hums, and it's accompanied by a kick-ass query.

And now? Well, again, I thought I was done. Stupid me. I threw the MS on my Kindle and started my reread. I'm about 60% done with the reread and so far have marked over 200 separate things to change -- little things like removing passive voice and random bits of clunkiness. I'm hoping this is the final pass. I'm actually pretty confident that it will be. Then onto querying for realz.

Wish me luck!



-- Tim

Why, Hello There!

Damn, it's been quite some time since I've posted. As promised, I'm bad with keeping a regular schedule, especially when there's not much new going on with my writing. I'm still writing every day, usually in the morning before I go to work. I'm still working on the same novel I've been writing for quite some time.

Unfortunately, I had a little setback with the WIP, a story that I'm calling "Walk a Web of Spiders". I was hoping to have the third draft done by now. If you've been playing along, you'll say, "Hey...weren't you working on something called 'Air'?" Yeah well...I was...I am. The set back was that I got about halfway through with the third draft of my WIP, and realized that I wasn't happy with the direction it was going. The first half was fine, but the main plot really started kicking in during the second half, and that (I think) had the potential to sink the whole damn thing. Therefore, I pretty much scrapped the main plot and started rewriting the second part from scratch. Luckily, it didn't impact the first part much at all. So all of you beta readers who read the first part of "Air", you'll be happy (I hope) to hear that what you read won't change (except for the feedback I'll incorporate). So currently, I'm about 3/4 of the way done with the story's 2nd half, which... if my math is right, is ... ah nevermind.

One thing I've been having a lot of fun with is Google Plus's #SaturdayScenes, a community started by +John Ward where writers can share their work with fellow writers and get very useful feedback. This feedback has been so helpful with my writing. Case in point, I've been sharing the aforementioned WIP scene by scene over the past few months, and the community members really seemed to respond well to one of the subplots... So well, in fact, that it made me rethink (and eventually rewrite) the rest of the story.

As I said, the first half of the story won't change too much, except for the normal progression through the revision process. That part of the story I'm comfortable calling the '3rd draft'. I'm going to periodically post scenes to Wattpad. Feedback is always welcomed and appreciated!

That's about it. I'll try to keep up with the blog more, but again... no promises.

Thanks for reading!

-- Tim.