%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
| Today was Figure Out School For The Kids In The New Place, which means I didn't do much, writing-wise, except let the subconscious churn and do some reviews/responses. (Okay, and I did my Artist's Way morning pages, and I dinked around with the like three partial chapters that I've got going. But I didn't finish anything.) Revise This WIP will wait until next week, when I hear back on the outline. Which means the rest of this week can be dedicated to This Summer's WIP, i.e. Impulsive Disaster Mage & Boyfriend Annoy Local CIA Agent, Save World. I'm going to try very hard to actually FINISH any of the three partial chapters I have on the go for this one. We shall see. |
It's finally Day 8 of Revise This WIP (see, I don't count days off) and the task today is simple: send "The Long Rain - New Outline"  to my agent. This is the Outline With More Than Traveling In The Middle which she requested I come up with. The original version of this, if you recall, was something over 4k long. (I get very wordy in composition.) This multi-revised version is about 2600 words--still plenty wordy for an outline, but it's a DETAILED outline. Once that's done, I'm going to try to write an outline for This Summer's WIP, not because I think I will actually follow it, but because I need to get my brain to start chewing on the ending. I think I know what the VERY end will look like, but how will my hapless heroes get there? At least if I write an outline, I give my brain something to argue with. What are your writing goals today? |
| I frankenstein-ed boring Chapter 15 where People Talk and Nothing Happens - some into 14, some into 16. Now to sew it back together! |
Reply
| citruspocket - Inevitably when I write a first draft I have a bunch of scenes where characters sit on their beds and think (and talk) about life, sometimes metaphorically but often literally. Much sympathy in the sewing! |
Reply| Today was not, though you may think it, day 8 of Revise This WIP. That is because today was Monday, which is always Laundry, Groceries, and Clean this Filthy Weekend House. I made a grocery order, did the barbell workout I've been promising myself, put music in my ears, and cleaned the house. I determinedly did NOT open any of the writing files. And... my brain obliged me by plopping, into my lap, several story things I've been trying to figure out for days about This Summer's WIP. Sometimes you have to stop trying to kick the door open and actually try the knob, apparently. I'm still fiddling a bit with exactly what happens next--which probably means my aim is slightly off, and I need to try flipping things around. My natural tendency is to keep methodically kicking the door with greater and greater force, but I'm trying to learn to back off, do something else, and let my subconscious finally burble up whatever its problem is. Tomorrow my goal will be to reread the outline I made, compose an email to my agent, and get the dang thing off MY desk and onto HER desk, where it can be HER problem until after the holiday weekend. (I hope. She may Uno-reverse me and turn it around quickly, in which case it becomes my problem again.) |
| Sometimes you get so fed up with life that you glare at your garage gym and say "FINE! IM RESTARTING 'STARTING STRENGTH' TOMORROW!" (I miss lifting) |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  - I immediately thought of the advice... "walk don't run." As I've aged I repeat the adage, "use it or lose it." I'm glad I can still walk. |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - I dropped lifting when we found out we were moving back in January and of course I've lost some strength, which annoys me. I love the way lifting flushes stress chemicals out of my body and while I get a bit tired of how much food I have to eat to build muscle, I do enjoy *having* muscles, especially arms. So, tomorrow I will pretend to be a noob and retest all my maximums, and begin again. (I do believe there's mods you can do if you have to be careful about knees, etc. My coach used to be super clever about having people i.e. squat to sit on a box or bench.) |
Kåre เลียม Enga  - this is why I keep squatting even when I can't actually do it with a barbell--I want to keep my hip mobility as long as I can. |
| It's Day 8 of Revise This WIP, and it's also Saturday--day to do family stuff, which is lucky because the plan for today is quit fiddling with This $#!@! Outline and let it rest a while so I can read it and actually see what's written instead of what's in my head. I have a tendency, when I'm composing anything, to reread the latest thing I've written over and over again as I keep pushing on the next thing. I used to feel bad about this, like it was vain or obsessive or something, but I've come to realize this is just how my brain likes to stay in the story. It's a problem during edits, though, because it directly inhibits my ability to actually see the pieces I'm editing. So my goal today, since I need to let the outline rest before polishing any further, is to work on Other Projects. Which gives me an excuse to reread the last bit of This Summer's WIP and work on the next chapter, which a number of lovely people have been reviewing for me and which I have been slooooooooow about posting new bits of. I've also finished uploading all the chapters of Partial Novel, which I'm trying to work on in between things, because I've got no sense of self-preservation. What are you all doing this weekend? (NB: it occurred to me that somebody might be curious, so here's a key: Revise This WIP - "The Long Rain" This $#@! Outline - "The Long Rain - New Outline" This Summer's WIP - "The Long Dawn" Partial Novel - "Hollowknell" I feel like anybody actually interested in reading these things is probably already doing it, but if you've been wondering and are just shy, drop me a line and I'll get you a passkey.) |
| I continue to be amazed you can do so many things at once. Today I made a few notes on my single WIP, then spent the rest of the day working on next week's newsletter--which always seems to come at the least opportune time. I think I'm going to decline to do another year of newsletters, partly because it takes so much time but mostly because I'm running out of ideas. |
| For those of you playing along at home, it's Day 7 of Revise This WIP, and my task for today was finish the revised outline and make it read narratively. Somehow I managed not to distract myself with anything long enough to actually do it! Behold: "The Long Rain - New Outline" Or actually, you can't behold it without a passkey, because I want to sell this thing and publishers get weird about stuff like this, but if you're dying of curiosity I'm more than happy to show you what an "outline that reads narratively" looks like. (Basically, it looks like a long synopsis.) Drop me a line and I'll get you the key. Eventually I'll have to take this document and cut, and cut, and cut until I get it to a one-page synopsis, but for THIS iteration it's important that I be able to show my agent that the action plot doesn't get bogged down anywhere, so I have to show all the main events, instead of doing the thing you have to do in a one-page synopsis where you handle like five chapters of action by saying "as they struggle to reach ___, the characters ____". Goal for the weekend: work on the aesthetics of my fantasy city-- Ratha, seat of the government and City of a Thousand Gods. I *think*, having thought some more about the way this religion works, that "gods" in this world are almost like pharmaceuticals are in our world, which means that Ratha might actually be "city of a thousand billboards/pharma ads"... |
| It is Day 6 of Edit This WIP and today I was supposed to make my outline read more narratively, and also trim down its word count. Did I do that? Of course not! Instead I made a giant list of bullet points of what happens in this book. (Like one bullet point might be "Dana drugs Andrew, takes him, and flees the island.") Then I thought about the plot archetypes in this book. The main one is a love story, of course--we have two protagonists, incomplete by themselves, whose relationship must defeat an obstacle so they can complete each other. When I went through the beats for a love story (one example here: https://plottr.com/romancing-the-beat-template/), I discovered that HUZZAH I already have plot points for all these. The love story is pretty good as it stands, just needs polish and emphasis. Yay me! But when I went through other plot archetypes that exist in this story, I really started seeing how I could rearrange and fix a lot of things at once. For example, this book has an "information" subplot--a mystery to solve about why the magic is behaving in ways that should be impossible--but I didn't have enough clues. There is also a "special powers" subplot, where the character has to understand their powers and gain mastery while facing down a nemesis and struggling with a cost. Lastly, there's a "monster in the house" subplot--where a relentless villain, like Michael Meyers or the Predator, is trying to destroy the characters while in a closed location (a house, a town, a jungle outpost...) because someone has committed a "sin" that gave the monster power. For each of these, I was missing some elements to tie up the end. Once I saw I had all these elements, I realized I can braid all the subplots together in my new "not just traveling" middle section, where the characters will go to what is essentially the fantasy equivalent of a weapons research facility to try to get out of their magically-binding partnership. (They don't know they're in a love story and only in act 2.) The information plot gets clues and exposition from the experts there, the romance continues apace, and when the monster--my horrible-person villain Nynneth Tane--attacks, the "powers" plot gets advanced when one of the heroes uses his to resist her. And yes. Many writers do all this work BEFORE they write the book, but I cannot. As my old teacher used to say, pay me now or pay me later. |
| These beat sheets are certainly helpful. I'd tried to use them before in *planning* a novel, but they never worked. I guess I'm a panster at heart. But now I see they are useful in *revising* a novel. It's true that my current WIP has many of the beats for both quest and romance already present. I'm not sure my plan for the plan includes the HEA ending, though. |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - Oh, I can never ever use a beat sheet when I START writing. For whatever reason my brain just gets irritated and straight-up won't do it. It's afterward, when I've already decided what's going to happen in the book that I can pick out the spots where I need to rearrange, introduce, or cut elements--usually in some place where I bog entirely down and just have characters sitting around having tense conversations in not-very-described locales. (Sometimes the fix is very simple. In Gray's second book I remember I had a scene where essentially they just walked across town, but I needed to describe the town and I needed to do exposition for later. What to do? I decided, while doing this kind of edit, that I could just...make there be a riot for them to walk through. Bam, now the walk isn't boring!) |
Raven - As it happens, I'm revising Chapter 18 at the moment, adding some beats to make it a bit more interesting and to advance Sebastian's character arc, as well as the romance element. It's hard to insert romance when there are ten-foot-tall demons trying to kill them...but after, when they tend their injuries, is another matter.  |
| Update for Day 5 Of Edit This WIP: I have completed the $%#@! new outline! Or rather, I have made the first draft of the new outline, the one with More Than Just Traveling in the middle. It is fully 4k words of yelling in various font colors. I usually don't make a formal outline before I write a first draft, although I have done it before (and that's the novel I wrote and edited and turned in, complete, in 8 months, so....maybe I should?) but I find using an outline structure is helpful for looking at first draft and figuring out what to trim/rewrite/add/highlight/cut. The structure I used today was https://savethecat.com/get-started#1565365814194-e72fe034-d83c. I've used other structures with other books. Save The Cat is easy, though, and reliable. It instantly lets you see what you might need to emphasize, and when you might need to move a scene to sooner or later in the story. I don't follow it slavishly, but if I can't put my finger on exactly why a section feels like it's a bit draggy, STC will often diagnose the problem for me with a quickness. Tomorrow's goal: survive the DMV to get new license plates for my car. BUT AFTER THAT, the writing goal: take my 4k outline, make it read narratively, and make sure that everything where I wrote "you should probably foreshadow this" actually has a bullet point of foreshadowing earlier. I'm pushing kind of hard, targeting handing this new outline to my agent by no later than the middle of July, because I want to make a final revision plan before my kids restart school in September. (COULD I turn the outline around faster than that? Maybe. But she probably won't get back to me before mid-July in any case. Publishing time is geologic time except when it's "run with hair on fire" time. It's a weird industry.) |
| So...this made me think about my WIP, "The Cave of Worlds" . I know the theme, and I know the quest that Sebastian is on. WHat *looks* like the main plot--Marcus's quest--is the *secondary* plot, even though it looks like it's got all the attention so far. Still, I think I'm kind of following the beats in the save-the-cat thing. I haven't precisely stated what's missing for Sebastian--what he needs to fix--but I bet you can guess... |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - I had to laugh when I started thinking about the secondary plot in Rain. The Save The Cat website helpfully tells you "the B plot is often a romance or a friendship". And I realized, no, in this novel, "figure out how to stop the war/save the world" is the B plot. The romance is the A plot! Like, sure they'll save the world. But who CARES, unless they also save each other? (As for Sebastian, pretty sure the Beatles sang about "all you need is..." although I think he probably also needs to start believing he's lovable.) |
| Yesterday was Day 4 Of Edit This WIP and Day 1 of Raven Forgets To Post Something. But I completed my edits for voice/POV on chapter 4, and went through chapter 5 for voice and word count. I never worry about word count when drafting, except to split chapters before they get to be 8k-long beasts. But when I'm trying to make the book more book-shaped, I start paying attention. I've never had to add words. Alas, I'm a naturally talky person and always need to cut words, either to get the manuscript to a more standard length or to eliminate repetitions in the prose. Especially in early chapters I tend to talk in circles because I'm figuring out the world, the setting, and especially the emotional landscape of the characters. What I end up doing in edits is taking out the characterization repetitions/boring parts--my first drafts tend to have a lot of scenes where people basically sit on their beds and think about their lives--and using the space that frees up to add in some description of setting. My natural tendency is to care very little about setting, but setting is one of the things people read fantasy for, so it's worth it to get the details right. How much fluff am I cutting? The novel was 130k when I began. I need to cut to reach 115k. I'm to chapter 5 of 30, without having cut any entire scenes yet, and I've managed to cut 3k JUST by pulling out repetition and bulky prose. I'm pretty sure I'm going to remove/rewrite a whole chapter (or two) later, but if these trends continue I may end up cutting *more* than 15k, and the prose and the story will both be better for it. Seriously, give it a go. If you're polishing a project, give yourself the challenge of cutting 10% of the word count without altering the meaning of the sentences. (You can always save another version, so you won't worry about losing something great in the original.) It can be done, and it will almost always take your work from good to excellent. So today is Day 5: goal is reread chapter 5, and outline/decide how to combine chapters 7 and 9. Also, actually make the outline like I'm supposed to. |
| Hard agree about cutting down word counts always being positive! My problem is I handwrite a lot so I can't always get the satisfaction of knowing how many words I've cut!! |
| citruspocket - I can't remember where I read this, so maybe I hallucinated it, but I go by the rule of thumb of one handwritten notebook page (you know, a school notebook size) is about 350 printed words. Maybe not much help if you're transposing from the notebook to the word processor and cutting as you go, but at least a ballpark idea...? |
| It's Monday! It's Day 4 of Editing This WIP! I know the pacing in the first three chapters (say, about the first 50 pages) is fine, so today I'm finishing tightening the prose in chapter 3. Even when I've been over a manuscript a few times, it's always startling to go through with an eye for concision and discover all the ways I repeat myself or use three words where one sharp one will do. I need to cut a bit more than ten percent from the overall word count of this manuscript, which isn't as difficult as you might think, but I also want to have some word count to play with since I know I need to add a couple of events in the middle of the plot. ("Have something happen besides traveling in the middle" said my agent, helpfully, and she is correct, so I'm going to invent and then burn down a secret weapons lab. Never say I can't take direction.) But we're not inventing the weapons lab yet! We are editing this chapter for length and emotional heft, looking for clunky phrasing, excess dialog tags, and repetition. (How many times do I need to say someone was standing up? A whole bunch, evidently.) It's a 5k-word chapter, so the goal is to cut by 500 words. |
| For those of you following along, it's Day 3 of Edits On This Novel. Today's project was GOING to be writing the current outline and the new outline. But I also had a note from my agent that I needed to make sure that even though the story is 3rd person, the narrative voices in the alternating POV chapters were a little more distinct. One POV character is a shy, anxious, religious healer, and the other POV character is a tough, foul-mouthed military type who was the bodyguard to a prince. They should, perforce, view the world differently in the narration. Since the default narrative voice in this novel is pretty obviously the healer's, that means I need to tweak the prose in the soldier's POV chapters. I also knew that, while there are some pacing issues in the middle of this book, the first 50 pages are good. So today's project actually turned out to be "rewrite chapter 2 narration to better match the soldier's voice". Alas, I love this character with my whole heart, which made this incredibly fun, so it's all I did today, apart from spiffing up/tightening the prose some in chapter one. So tonight I'm going to make a few notes on my edit to-do list, and then knock off to do some reviews here on WDC. (A review a day keeps the hubris away!) |
| For those of you following along: Today's WIP edit task: characters, internal/external plot. A lot of people make character sheets before they begin writing, but I never can. I always experience making a new character as if I'm meeting an actual person, and I "get to know them" throughout the course of writing the first draft. But *afterward* filling in a sheet like that can be useful because the most important thing about the character isn't making sure you stay consistent on eye color (although your copy editor will thank you if you try). It's that at the end of the first draft I've usually figured out what the characters' Entire Deal is. You'll see this called various names--Untrue Beliefs, Mortal Wounds, etc. It's the lie that heroes have to stop believing, and that villains/tragic protagonists can't stop believing. It's important to figure this out because the plot, ideally, should have two drivers. One is the external events: in my case, a plot where two factions that have been at war for generations are each trying to acquire a weapon to turn the tide. But there also needs to be internal events driving the plot, otherwise who cares who gets the weapon? It's very easy to see this in movies. Even Die Hard has to pause and give you some emotional stakes for John McClane, surely the most externally plotted man in history. We have to believe, before he starts throwing Alan Rickman off of things, that John is 1) a good guy and 2) has higher stakes than just whether or not he survives the siege of Nakatomi Plaza. So the movie opens not with the bad guys plotting, but with John bringing a teddy bear to LA, kind of knowing he's been in the wrong, and anxious about whether he's going to be able to reconcile with his wife. And as the external plot advances, John's internal plot *also* advances in tandem, so that by the time he's picking glass out of his feet, he's also baring his soul to Al and admitting that he was wrong to not support Holly's new job. (That he's barefoot in the glass because he argued with Holly at the beginning of the movie is an extra *chef's kiss* of resonance.) So today: 1. I'm making character sheets and clarifying everybody's Entire Deal. 2. I'm glancing through the scene list from yesterday to see if the crisis points of the internal and external plots line up. |
| Wanna come along with me as I do an edit of WIP I Finished Last Year, with suggestions from my agent? Maybe it will keep me motivated, and maybe it will help you to see someone else's edit process. Here are the things I've already done so far: 1. Finished the first draft. This is a big messy process for me, but the way it worked with this WIP was that I pretty much pantsed a first draft (and iterated it while I went, because that's how I compose). I posted chapters of this draft for reading/workshopping/review in "Crosstimbers Novel Workshop" --HIGHLY recommended--which means it was a pretty polished, good first draft. 2. Let the draft sit for a month. I am bad at this, so I distracted myself by starting This Year's WIP. It only kinda worked, but I also moved 1800 miles in here so that helped with not rereading the draft. 3. Print off a paper version of the draft to reread/scribble on. (You can have Staples do this for you and they will spiral-bind it, pro tip.) I left myself a lot of notes and caught missed words/etc. 4. Make basic edits to the draft, call this draft 1.5. This is where I tried to take out clunky prose/repetitions, made sure there weren't glaring plot holes, tried to ensure that each character had an actual motivation for everything they do, make sure the geography is correct etc. etc. 5. Send *that* draft to my agent so she can tell me whether to keep working, or whether I should put the novel in a drawer for a while because it's not sellable right now. Keep working on This Year's WIP, also move into my new house. 6. Have a call with my agent where she says the story has legs. Huzzah! She has some suggestions! I take notes on the suggestions. ---WE ARE HERE-- So, today I set out to enact her suggestions. Here is my first step: 1. Break the novel down by chapter and scene and give each scene its own section in Scrivener. (Don't have Scrivener? Index cards or a list of scenes in a notebook work too. I know from talking to my agent that I need to trim about 15k words from this novel. I *could* do that just by tightening up the prose, but as I suspected just by looking at my list of scenes I can see some that should be combined or deleted. So I will also mark the scenes to delete/combine. That's it for today--we're not going to get too excited; by the yard it's hard, by the inch it's a cinch. Next steps tomorrow; now I have to go clean the bathrooms. |
| I have been wrestling with a chapter for like a week. This is not the same thing as being blocked, because the words show up just fine. It's this iterative thing that I sometimes get stuck in where I keep writing versions of the same scenes until I find the one that is correct for the characters. Why do I have this maximally inefficeint process? Heck if I know! Do I much prefer my other extreme, where I can outline something and then get 10k words in a day? Yes! (Except the 10k days bork my wrists and turn my brain to goo. Don't type 10k words un-ergonomically, kids.) Anyway. I think I finished the chapter. Now, hopefully, I can get to the other one I've been trying to compose, which should have come before Problem Chapter in the plot order. (Yes. I know. It is to laugh.) |
Hi, Raven . You aren't alone. I get this all the time. My style is to write one scene a day. I get everything as good as I can get it, and set it aside. Then the next day that I come back to write (not necessarily the next actual day) I read that last scene to get back into the flow, and every time I go through, that could be phrased better, that contradicts what I wrote last chapter, etc. In fact, I'm doing that right now. Let's wish each other luck, shall we? ...  |
| In my experience, it's better to re-write until you're happy with it. I will sometimes get off track in a chapter and take the characters somwehere I didn't plan for. On rare occassions, that's a good thing. More often, it's a mistake. In any case, I'm looking forward to reading this chapter! |
In honor of 19 (golly!) years on WDC, I'm posting a link to
When they discover a threat to the magic barrier that protects them, a village nestled in the haunted forest of Hollowknell sends its best fighters and wizards off to save the kingdom. But the villagers find themselves stalked by unspeakable horrors lurking in the woods and realize, too late, that the real danger is at home. The only ones left to stop the monsters are disgraced local mage Tylan Howling and a reluctant group of townie misfits. Now Ty must unravel his own past and uncover what the monsters are really after—and what they really are—before the village is consumed by the hungry ghosts of Hollowknell. This is an in-progress novel, playing with an idea I had about the village that the Chosen One leaves when he goes on his grand adventure to defeat the dark lord. What happens to the people left behind? It's under a passkey because I intend to shop it around in the future. If the pitch sounds interesting, however, drop me a note and I'll get you the passkey. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
