Tag: editing

YA Rebels: Tuesday Loves Up Scrivener

I thought I would share today’s YA Rebels vlog in which I walk you through how I’m using Scrivener. Feel free to ask me any questions you have! I’m not an expert, but I’ll do my best to answer. For those who don’t know, Scrivener is an amazing application for writers that takes you far beyond Word or other word processing apps.

Editing and Pre-Birthday News!

Oh, hi, world. That’s what you look like again. *blinks*

I know, I know. I’m slacking on the blog, but I have a good excuse. I’ve been editing, and last night I turned in my edits for IF I LIE, and my stomach kind of clenched after I hit send. I kept wondering if I did enough, too much, or was completely off base with what I did. Time will tell.

So what’s next, you ask, now that I have all this free time on my hands? This is where I laugh hysterically. Next month, I’m going to Italy for two weeks for my MFA residency. Between now and then, I have lots of homework to do, including books to read and workshop pieces to crit. All things I love to do, which makes it less homework and more fun. On top of that, I am hard at work on the sequel to TOUCHED. I’m so glad I get to write this book and revisit these characters that I love, but man, oh man, am I going to torture them. *rubs hands*

With everything on my plate, I am in a conundrum with this blog. I’m not really sure how to fit writing posts in with everything else. For the near future, it looks like my posts are going to be infrequent at best.

In other news, today I get to send a huge shout out to Taryn Fagerness, my translation rights agent, and Laura Bradford, my agent, because my TOUCHED trilogy will be published in German, with TOUCHED set to debut in 2012. What can I say, ladies, except to express: Ein herzliches Dankeschön!

BTW, for those following along, I think it’s important to note that the offer came in on my pre-birthday (which is a holiday in my family). That means that my holiday luck is holding, and every holiday is like my birthday.

Speak It! – A Great iPhone App for Writers

Thanksgiving weekend I drove 6.5 long hours from San Francisco to my sister’s in Southern California. The idea was to pick up some of my belongings that I left behind when I moved to the Bay Area. Since I was making the drive alone, I decided to find something to listen to so the hours would fly by. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could listen to my manuscript like it was an audiobook? That way I could drive AND edit.”

After testing a few free online text-to-MP3 options, I found they all sounded mechanical. To get the natural sounding voices, you had to pay money, which I wasn’t willing to do. Then I came across an iphone app – Speak It! This awesome app is a writer’s dream. I was able to listen to my MS – in a brilliant British accent no less. It offered up a different kind of editing experience. I have a tendency to constantly wordsmith and massage my text. It’s difficult for me to read for the larger picture. Since I was listening and unable to make notes, I was able to edit with a different part of my brain. I started picturing the characters and I really heard my MC’s voice. Not as it sounds in my head, but as a reader would hear it. Quite an educational experience.

Some things to note:

1. It’s not a one-step process to get your text into the app. Here’s what I did: (1) emailed MS text to myself in the body of an email, (2) opened email on iphone, (3) selected all text and copied, (4) closed email and opened Speak It app, (5) pasted text into app, and (6) listened to text in my chosen voice!
2. Since I pasted a huge body of text, the app had issues saving it. A couple of times I had to repaste it back in, but it was worth the hassle.
3. The voice is a little mechanical and has trouble on some words (the funniest was that it kept pronouncing M-I-A as in Missing in Action as Mia, a girl’s name), but I stopped noticing it after a while as I got engrossed in the story.

I highly recommend trying Speak It, especially if you have trouble writing dialogue.

Battle of the Betas

We have a new guinea pig…This week Alicia Gregoire volunteered to have eight writers beta read a single page of her urban fantasy “Phoenix Rising” so readers can compare and contrast beta styles. Below is her text with my line edits inserted in brackets and italics. I also included summary notes at the bottom as I normally would with a beta. As last time, my notes are a little lengthier than they would normally be for a single page, but the idea was to let you see my beta style.

And onward!

20 Years Ago

[Is this a prologue?]

Ianos studied the chimera pride that roamed the foothills outside Timmons for months in search of the runt.

[Cool name. Also on first read, I thought the pride was searching for the runt and not Ianos.]

With a pair of large males and several females, it took him longer than he wanted,

[Took him longer than he wanted to what? Study the pride? Find the runt? Could be more clear.]

but once discovered, he kept his eye on it. In a final attempt of

[at]

self-preservation, they abandoned it weeks ago. Each day it grew weaker,

[I know the “it” is the runt and the “they” is the pride, but I think you could make this more clear by actually calling out the subject instead of using the pronoun.]

languishing without the companionship of the pride.

[If the pride abandoned the runt weeks ago and it is languishing without companionship, how is he having trouble spotting it amongst them?]

On the fourteenth day, Ianos executed his oh so easy plan.

Armed with nothing other than his knowledge of spells, he made his final trek to the foothills. He was much closer than he’d been in his previous visits to the chimera grounds and

[insert “had” after “and”]

never seen anything like the beast before. It

[The runt]

lay in the sun, with only one head awake, but not alert. The lion head mewled, mourning its fate. Its paper lantern thin wings stretched on the ground while the dragon and goat heads slept.

It was awing.

[awe inspiring?]

The lion head despondently watched Ianos’ approach but roared to awaken the other two heads when Ianos crossed some unknown border. The beast rose to its full height, stretched its wings wide, and bellowed—all three heads created a cacophony of rage.

[what does this cacophony sound like? I’m trying to imagine a lion, dragon and goat roaring at the same time.]

Ianos snarled and crouched, ready to strike. Electricity spurted from his palms towards the chimera. It dodged at the last second and ran head-on towards the sorcerer. He ran into a cave to his right; he’d have better luck surviving the fight if he was able to corner the animal. The beast skidded, turned, and charged again. Ianos leapt onto its back. He held tightly onto the lion’s neck scruff and struggled to pull a lasso out of his jeans.

[Interesting combination of the mythology and the revelation Ianos is a sorcerer in juxtaposition with his jeans and lasso.]

Thanks for sharing this piece, Alicia! I included notes in the text, but here are some gut reactions overall.

Mythology: If I recall right, Homer described a chimera as having a lion’s head, snake for a tail, and a goat somewhere on the body. Your chimera sounds very different which is 100% cool. I think it’s awesome to describe it differently, but the key is to describe it in more detail so I understand how your chimera differs from the current mythology. I really want to understand what this creature looks like, how the muscles ripple under its fur or scales, how it moves with all these various heads,

Pronouns: There is some confusion happening with the pronouns. I kept having to reread a sentence to figure out who the “they” and “it” were. This is easily fixed by working in the subject more often in place of the pronouns.

Imagery: This page relies heavily on sight. I think this could be so much more powerful if the other senses were engaged. Is it hot? How does the sun feel on Ianos’ skin? How does the lion’s scruff feel to the touch? Is there a sulfur smell since this creature breathes fire? And what does this creature sound like – cacophony is not descriptive of this particular creature?

I think you have a good start. I’d love to see more detail throughout this to really establish your world and ground me in your particular setting. Thanks again!

Check out what the other beta readers had to say!

Kate Hart
Meredith Primeau
Windy Aphayrath
Sarah Enni
Raven Ashley

Battle of the Betas

The lovely and brave Sarah Enni offered herself up as a guinea pig for a little beta experiment. Six writers will take on beta reading a single page of her work “The Flute” so readers can compare and contrast beta styles.  Below is her text with my line edits inserted in brackets and italics. I also included summary notes at the bottom as I normally would with a beta. My notes are a little lengthier than they would normally be for a single page, but the idea was to let you see my beta style.

So without further ado!

If Hana Larkhill had her way, her father’s body would be in a sailboat, rope and a flute in his hands, and she would watch him embark one last time toward the unknown at the eternal curve of the earth

[Initial reaction to death is usually at a gut level. First we feel and then we think and rationalize. This passage sounds very intellectualized as if Hana is distant from the emotions she is feeling].

Instead, James Larkhill lay in a sterile metal box at Faraday’s Funeral Home. Someone who did it for a living

[I think you can strike this. Reader would assume.]

had caked his face with makeup. His delicate freckles were powdered out of existence [nice detail]. An old blue suit bound

[would love to see “anchored” instead of “bound” to carry through the seafaring metaphor]

his body; even the strawberry gold of his curls had faded.

Hana’s mother, Noa Larkhill, hasn’t

[change in tense]

fought these depressing conventions.

[makes me wonder who the narrator is. Can’t quite get a sense of it yet.]

But she had insisted on an open casket. James’ face and shoulders were in tact

[one word]

and the suit covered his abdomen. But Hana felt the looming specter of his ruined lower body, smashed into irreparable pieces by an anonymous fender

[specter sounds a little purple especially juxtaposed with fender].

Faraday’s was cold, clean and modern—everything was black or stainless steel. Everything had razor-sharp edges. It was the kind of place that gave Hana the feeling she was being blown through by unseen drafts

[watch state of being verbs like was and were. Try using more active verbs that add color to the narrative].

She longed for home. For his family James had provided a house with a door that shrunk up in the winter and bloated until it wedged in the door frame in the summer, a house with stairs that had predictable creaks and groans, a house that moved around them like a familiar friend.

James’ death three days earlier had crushed Hana underneath deep, prolonged silence

[like the silence compared to the noise in the house before. Maybe into instead of underneath?].

Her mother, whose loudest expression to this point had always been in the strength of her brush strokes on canvas, rocked and wailed. Hana felt like a ghost, alone and unseen, holding her mother’s tiny shaking limbs in a room full of people that, at least today, felt like strangers.

Thanks for sharing this piece, Sarah! I included notes in the text, but here are some gut reactions overall.

Narrator: Right now I’m struggling to get a sense of the narrator. The narrator sounds very distant from the action/emotion right now, which give me little insight into Hana. I think this would be more revealing across more pages, but it’s hard to attach to Hana in this short section.

Language: When in the midst of deep grief, we tend toward more one syllable words. As we intellectualize and gain distance from the emotion, we use more of those multi-syllabic words. Right now, the language is distancing me from the emotions of the characters. That may be okay depending on your longer goal, but I thought I would bring it up.

Marine Metaphor: You brought up a lovely metaphor in that first sentence with the marine imagery. I’d love to see this continued a bit more throughout. Sailing into the horizon is often equated with death in literature, but death also leaves the loved ones still alive feeling unanchored. Could be something to explore.

State of Being Verbs: I bring this up in EVERY beta because I do it. I do a mad search and destroy for them in my manuscripts.

Suggestion: One great advantage of third person POV is the distance. You can start far away and pan in closer to your character. In this scene, you could show us everyone in the room before you closed in on Hana. That gives us a nice basis for discovering who she is. You might check out the opening pages of Anna Karenina to see how Tolstoy does this really effectively.

Check out what the other beta readers had to say!

Kate Hart
Kathleen Peacock
Meredith Primeau
Alicia Gregoire
Windy Aphayrath

Editing, Wordles, and the Color Gray

I am editing.

Pause.

I. AM. EDITING.

If you haven’t written a novel, you have no idea how tedious this process is. On the plus side, my agent’s changes have been minimal. On the also-plus side, I have taken this opportunity to hoover my manuscript. I am tightening up every line, removing unnecessary words and phrases. The times I was lazy and told the reader what my character felt instead of showing it – deleted. This terrible habit I have of overloading my descriptions with a train of adjectives – picked one and made it stick. That little sub-plot that didn’t move the story but amused me – had to go.

Here’s where I congratulate myself.

As my manuscript progressed, I noticed I had to kill less. My writing was cleaner, more concise as the story deepened.

Here’s where I berate myself.

I created a supernatural world with two sets of opposing beings, and I did not adhere to the rules I created. Oh, I built Microsoft Word tables to show how A interacts with B, which changes A to X and B to W. Believe me, I had tables that broke this down by chapter. BUT I didn’t stick to them. I let myself fall into gray areas because that’s where my story wanted to go. All I did, though, is create confusion and a headache for myself as I correct this laziness. My editing tip for the decade: Avoid gray areas – they make for bad plot continuity.

Here’s where I took a break from editing to make art out of my manuscript.

Kate introduced me to Wordle, and I decided to try it out to see which words I had abused. I LOVE my Wordle. At least 90% of the words on it should be on it. Character names – check. Relationship names – check. Verbs and nouns inherent in my MC’s world – check. This is a book of self-discovery and creating relationships and making connections. If I take out the innocuous verbs and prepositions (which I ruthlessly will do), I’m left with words that I would use to describe my novel’s theme. That’s a win-win to me.

My Quote for the Week:

The work was like peeling an onion. The outer skin came off with difficulty… but in no time you’d be down to its innards, tears streaming from your eyes as more and more beautiful reductions became possible.

By Edward Blishen

Editing Your Manuscript; Or Amputating Limbs

Today I did something I haven’t done in a while. I sat down and read my book from first page to last. I clipped my inner-editor’s wings and let myself get lost in the story. Guess what happened? I LOVED IT. Now, that my sound egomaniacal to you, but let me put this into context. For the last four months, I have been stuck in the seventh ring of hell that I like to call editing.

Painful, gut-wrenching, and confidence breaking. That’s editing. And every time I make an edit, it feels like cutting a little piece of myself off. Fingers for sentences, and arms and legs for whole paragraphs and pages. Yet, I do it because it’s necessary. Then, I send my baby off to beta readers, hoping they will tend to it as carefully as I have.

The hardest discovery through this process is the one we all knew the moment we picked up our first Dr. Seuss book. It’s a subjective experience. No two people feel exactly the same way about their Green Eggs and Ham. Beta reading can be likened to this experience. One may tell you that your opening chapter is on fire. The next tells you to cut, cut, cut. You fix one thing only to create another problem, another limb that needs cut off. And you find yourself wondering, where does it end? What will be left of me when I’ve sliced and diced and carved away?

Gold. Pure gold.

That’s the dream, anyway.

Editing Tip #2: Beginnings (Abusing the Pronoun – Verb Combo)

While laboring away on my manuscript, I obsessed over the passive verb problem. I switched out the “I was” and “She became,” obliterating most of the sleepy “to be” verbs from my novel. Proud of my work, I sent it off into the world to be read by my trusted few. The new comment that came back? Something along the lines of this: “You should really try to vary your sentence structure. Many of your sentences seem to begin with a pronoun-verb combination.” Damn.

So I sat down at my laptop once more and did a close read of a random chapter. Then, I shrugged sheepishly because my reader proved right. See an example of two lines from my current work.

Original Version:

He stared for a moment in disbelief and spoke with a bite of amusement. “When did you run into this…door?”

I sighed. “Four days ago. Are you always this nosy?”

Now that you’ve read this example, you may note one of my biggest criticisms – I have a bad habit of not letting the dialogue speak for itself. Setting that aside for another post, see how simple this problem is to fix.

Revised Version:

“When did you run into this…door?” he asked.

I sighed. “Four days ago. Are you always this nosy?”

I challenge you to scan a few pages of your manuscript. Are you varying the sentence structure enough? Do many of your sentences begin with a noun (your character’s name) or a pronoun in tandem with a verb? Spice things up and move them around. Like most revisions, you’ll find it only gives you some gray hair and will make your work better.

Editing Tip #1: Passive Verbs

Every six weeks I submit a packet of writing to my Spalding MFA professor. She then sends the packet back to me with margin notations and summary notes. Many of my mistakes are common to writers, so I thought I’d call your attention to them in a week of editing tips. Though I try not to censor myself when I’m writing, I find these errors happening a lot less frequently not that I am aware of them. I think that’s half the battle.

Today, let’s talk about was, were, and other variations of the “state of being” verb. “Was” and “were” are my downfalls, my fallback verbs. My professor’s comment was that she felt sleepy reading a series of these on the page. I can’t blame her. If you are using passive verbs, I guarantee you there is a way to have a stronger, more powerful sentence using active verbs. Here are some simple examples.

Passive: I was running from the madman with the knife.

Active: I ran from the madman with knife.

I’d much rather be active than passive when running from a madman.

Passive: The wrought iron fence was decorated with flowers and vines.

Active: Iron flowers and vines suffocated the metal fence.

Take out the passive verb, add in a verb that fits the tone of your story, and suddenly that boring fence comes alive.

Passive: The car is driving down the road.

Active: The tires chew up the road.

That same car that dawdled on the road is now speeding down the road.

Passive: I became overwhelmed by a sea of grief.

Active: A sea of grief overwhelmed me.

A little reordering and an active verb can go a long way.

“To be” verbs:

am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been, become, became

Most people won’t notice how much they are abusing the “to be” verb. Try using the Find/Highlight option in Word to check how often you are using them. You may be surprised to see how much better your work is once you rid it of these tired words.