Category Archives: First Drafts

Conquering First Draft Fear: How to Proceed with the First Round of Revisions

Choice Editing First Drafts Kristin Luna Rewriting Self-Awareness Self-Motivation The Writing Life The Writing Process No Comments

You’ve done it! You’ve written the first draft of your book! A very merry congratulations to you, and you deserve a beer. Maybe even a vacation. At the very least, a trip to the gas station to buy three packets of candy. If you feel proud of yourself, you absolutely should. If you don’t feel very proud of yourself, then congratulations again, that just means you’re a writer.

Any good writing website or book worth its salt will tell you your next step is to revise the sucker. Yes, you must do this step. Yes, everyone else hates it, too. Some books or fellow writer humans will advise you to put the book down for a set period of time to let it “rest,” like a good yeast bread needs a good rise. Unfortunately for your book, it doesn’t keep getting better in that resting period like bread does. No, no. It’s still the piece of crap you left a few weeks ago. So instead of the story rising like bread, think of it this way: YOU’RE doing the rising. You walked away for a few weeks and grew wise enough to rise above the piece of crap you made in order to come to a place where you can look past your subjective love of the story and objectively say, “Ah yes, indeed, this is a piece of crap.”

That might sound a bit dreary, but I know you. *winks* I know you because you’re a writer like me, and although you see what you’ve written as a piece of crap in front of you, you still love it and will do the work necessary to make sure it’s a remarkably great piece of crap instead of just a regular, old piece of crap.

First, may I just confirm what you’ve already been feeling? Yes, it’s hard. It’s going to be difficult at times. But let me reassure you as well: if you’ve already written the first draft, you can certainly complete these revisions. Not only that, you can do it in less then ten years. Maybe even less than five. If you’re lucky and ignore all of your adult responsibilities, a month.

Let me tell you the secret of doing revisions. You’re going to be surprised, because you’ve already learned this lesson when you were writing the first draft.

Ready?

Here it is.

You make yourself do them.

Just like you made yourself sit down and write when you didn’t feel like it, when you didn’t feel inspired to do so. You get yourself in the zone however you did when you were writing. You sit down with your cup of tea. You put on the music that gets you going, and you do it.

Everything else is just details. Should a comma go there? Is her hair dark brown or more of a medium brown? Do I italicize internal dialogue? Is the book long enough? Will people like it? Will I ever make it through all these stupid edits?

All of those fears and questions? Just the details.

Keep yourself focused on the big task in front of you: Just. Do. The. Revisions.

After the First Draft, What’s Next?

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills First Drafts No Comments

You’ve finished the first draft, what do you do now? Revise? Publish?

Of all the skills I had to learn about writing, this was the hardest. Revision takes patience, persistence and it requires objectivity. It also requires dealing with well-meaning friends and relatives and their enthusiasm for you. “You’ve written a book! That’s great! When will it be published? When can I buy it?”

Try explaining that the first draft is really just an in-depth outline which needs work and refinement. They don’t get it. Unfortunately, many writers don’t either. That’s a concern with self-published books. Most authors take the time to revise and perfect their manuscripts, but those who don’t have hurt the industry’s reputation.

The trouble is that revision is a hard thing to explain because many writers don’t understand the process or exactly what needs to happen. It’s more than just line by line revision, as we’ll come to learn in this month’s blogs. It’s about story structure and making certain scenes are doing their work. It’s about getting feedback from beta readers and perhaps even editors. We’ll hear from an acquisitions editor for a magazine and a freelance editor about what revision means to them.

We’ll even hear from a pantser about how she approaches revising her novels. This month’s blogs will also tell us HOW to revise. That’s what I had the most trouble with when I first started out, was knowing how to approach revision and what I needed to do.

The issue is this: we have lived, dreamed and scribed the story. We know the characters, the setting and the plot well. We know it so well, that we’re not aware of gaps, pitfalls, inconsistencies, clunky writing, too much telling, and not enough showing. But this creation is our baby and giving it time away from us so that others may applaud and criticize our efforts is a nerve wracking process.  Yet, it is so very necessary for if we don’t address the problems one of two things will happen: readers will either ignore us and never become fans, or the reviews will be so bad that no matter what we write again, it will not be read. And should that reader be an acquisitions editor – well, we don’t want our names to end up in the amateur, do not read pile. On all counts, that is a disaster because we writers desire to entertain through our marvelous creations of character, world, and plot.

My dear fellow writers, I have learned that the first draft is but a mere outline of the story. It begs to be revised time and time again until it becomes its best and perfect self. For it is in the perfection of creation that readers marvel. However, revision can be a joyful and creative process. But first, we must all learn the process, and that’s our goal for April!

When Your System Isn’t Enough

Craft & Skills First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Kim May Outlines Plot Structure Storyline The Writing Process No Comments

A few months ago I wrote about how I outline my novels. If you missed it you can find it here. I’ve used this process for multiple novels and it has yet to let me down. Well, as I worked on the second book on my series I realized that there is one thing that this format doesn’t allow for: seeing the big picture.

Normally I’m only working on one novel and only one novel so it’s pretty easy to keep the big picture in my mind as I work. But I realized that with this series I’m not writing just one book. (I know. I’m a genius.) I was having problems figuring out how to pace the character arcs throughout the series. How far was too far? I can’t let them progress too quickly. That doesn’t make for a satisfying ending. But if I go to slowly I have to rush it and that’s not satisfying to the reader either.

The obvious solution is to outline the rest of the series. While that would work it wasn’t something I can do. I know my subconscious. If I outlined every book my pesky subconscious would come up with something awesome that would change the course of the rest of the series. I’m not going to go to all of that effort if I’m going to have to redo it later. I was really at a loss for how to proceed. So I sat down with one of my awesome mentors and talked it over with them (Thanks, Diana!). At her suggestion I wrote out what I knew had to happen for each of the remaining books — and I do mean everything. Plot, twists, and character development. Okay, I know some of you are thinking, why did I plot out the books when I didn’t want to do that. Well, I didn’t. I plotted out the pieces that I knew had to happen to bring about my desired ending. For some of them I only have five notes but it was something and in the end it helped.

(Yes, Sergeant Schlock is shooting Sailor Moon.)

In order to better visualize what I had I used 3X5 cards in different colors. Each POV character got their own color card. What you see above is the outline cards for book two. I wrote on each card what that character accomplished in that particular chapter — whether it was plot related or a personal development or both. Once I had everything that I knew in front of me it was pretty easy to put events in order and figure out what books those events needed to happen in. When my subconscious surprises me, and I have no doubt that it will, I’ll just add new cards to reflect those changes in the later books and put them in their place.

I’m very much a creature of habit. Especially where my writing is concerned but sometimes new challenges can get me out of that rut, and bring new, helpful techniques into my life. I never thought of myself as a visual person but at least in this I seem to be. If you find yourself in a similar situation and the difficulties seem too much, try a different approach. Maybe the new angle or process will make the solution clear.

When You Realize That Your Sequence of Novels Doesn’t Make Sense

Character Conflict Craft & Skills First Drafts Guest Posts Ideas & Plotting Plot Structure Publishing Storyline The Writing Process 1 Comment

Writing a Series: When You Realize That Your Sequence of Novels Doesn’t Make Sense.

A guest post by Nathan Dodge

Those that know me from the Superstars seminars know that I signed a contract for Shadow Warriors, the first novel of a YA SF series at this year’s SSWS. In brief, the series is a sequence of five novels about teenagers that are kidnapped and forced to train as the crew of a starfighter to fight in a galactic war.

I wrote all five novels in an 18-month period. That might not sound very smart, having sold none of them, but I went into a writing frenzy and they all rolled out—about 450,000 words in all. And now, finally, one is sold, with the prospect of perhaps selling more.

Like everyone else writing a novel series, I ran into “series problems,” the blips that come up for any writer of a series as the writing progresses. Example: continuity. It’s darned hard to remember all the stuff you’ve put down over time, especially about the time you get into the middle of novel 4. How many times have you started to edit something in the new book of your series and thought: Wait a minute—I said something about this situation (or character, or background element) in Book 2. Is it consistent? And sometimes it isn’t, and you have to sharpen the old red pencil, metaphorically speaking, and reconcile the two passages. And yes, I kept a “facts” diary, but you still forget.

However, that isn’t the problem that had me buffaloed as I finished Book 2 of the Shadow Warriors series. It had very nice starring roles for several of my main characters, a couple of independent parallel plots, and the usual 1/3-point and 2/3-point crises. However, as I began to reread and seriously edit, a problem slapped me in the face: The book didn’t read like Book 2. It read more like Book 3!

What was wrong? Mainly, I decided after some analysis, the characters had matured too quickly. They were already advancing in command positions, and they were becoming too important in the overall command scheme of their navy.

I had let a little of that happen at the end of Book 1. The top male character had become a unit commander after only one major battle (sort of a “battlefield promotion”), essentially in charge of not only his crew but nine more fighter crews. In addition, the two main female characters had demonstrated excellent planning and strategic abilities, so that they were assigned part-time to their Carrier commander to assist in battle planning.

Which was okay—my crew was still a group of base-level fighters, with some modest responsibilities above and beyond that of a fighting crew. That led to my realizing the problem: they had to prove they had earned the new positions by performing in them before they were again promoted in Book 3. That is, they had to gain more experience (and also more success), demonstrating that they had earned the right to advance further in their military careers.

But that hadn’t happened. What was needed was a Book 2, in which my daring young warriors proceed to act in their new roles and prove to their commanders and the Alliance at large that they deserved more command responsibility.

So editing Book 3 (formerly Book 2) was put on hold while I returned to the end of my first epic and designed another plot to allow my young charges to earn their stripes. Or, since they were all young officers (as in the US Air Force), to earn their officer ratings. Of course, that meant a new plot that would mesh with the already-established Book 3 events, but that would also stand on its own as an interesting story line.

In addition to a main, galactic-war-related plot, all the Shadow Warrior books have a secondary, more personal plot. That presented a challenge in Book 2 until I considered: in Book 1, a relatively small Shadow Warrior force had defeated an enemy of fifty times as many warships. What if the upper hierarchy of naval command, far from the battle on their home planet, didn’t understand the unique strategy that had allowed victory, even at the cost of half its ships? What if they recalled the carrier commander in charge—the one whose faith in my crew had led to the victory—and court marshalled this commander before a military tribunal for her “excessive losses?” Not only would the crew be facing a new enemy threat, but they would also have to testify in an alien court to save their commander.

All this required not only lots of new plotting, but a great deal of rereading of the former Book 2 (now Book 3) and its “facts” log to be sure that details in my new story didn’t contradict the events of the following story. At the start, I mentally groaned and moaned a lot, trying to find excuses to ditch the new volume. But I stuck to it—and about three months later, I had finished the new Book 2. Further, my revisions to Book 3 were minimized, with careful, regular back-and-forth comparisons and reading, so that in fact I did not have to rewrite the third book to any great extent. In only about a month or so more than it took to complete Book 3, the new Book 2 was done and Book 3 altered as required. Problem solved.

In retrospect, I can identify three “take aways” from my experience. First, in a series about the same character or group of characters, they need to constantly mature and evolve—but that maturation/evolution must seem reasonable and natural. Second, careful plotting and story line management can assure that if you do have to change or rearrange your sequence of novels, the transition can be as painless as possible while bringing the maturation of your characters back into balance.

Finally, this exercise brought home to me rather graphically that when you deal with a set of characters over an extended series of volumes, since these characters constantly evolve, you must deal in each new volume with what is essentially a new set of characters.

Because the “old characters” are growing, maturing, and acquiring new abilities and capacities, you must constantly expand the texture and nature of their personalities and individualities. In my case, for example, the battle-hardened seventeen-year-old veterans of Book 3 were absolutely nothing like the timid, just-kidnapped sixteen-year olds of Book 1.

If your characters aren’t constantly becoming new versions of themselves, your reader will more than likely lose interest, as the characters can quickly become flat, featureless, and boring. It can be a hassle to pay attention to the maturity level and complexity of your characters, to help them grow, and to make them continually more well-rounded and interesting, but in my opinion, the result is worth the trouble!

 

 

With BSEE (SMU) and MSEE and PHDEE degrees (The University of Texas at Austin), Nathan Dodge was an engineer and engineering manager before joining the University of Texas at Dallas. After 16 years, he retired in 2014, although he still teaches half-time. He won several teaching awards at UTD.

Nathan began writing seriously in 2012 and has attended seven Superstars Writing Seminars. He has a story in the Purple Unicorn Anthology with daughter Sharon, a short story sale to Mike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge, and recently sold the first book of a young adult science fiction series to WordFire Press. He and Sharon will soon release an anthology of SF stories, To the Stars.

In his spare time, of which there is surprisingly little, he loves weight lifting, hiking in Colorado, and solving crossword puzzles with wife Faye Lynn.