Revision Archives - Page 4 of 10

A Muddy Revision Slog

January 17, 2019 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

I am finally getting back to writing. Not drafting right now, but revising something I have been putting off. Sometimes revision is clear and straightforward. In fact, I usually prefer revising to drafting. But this time the revisions are difficult—muddy.

In theory, I know what to do. Among other things, I am shoring up the “goals” in my protagonist’s scenes. Making clear what she wants. Because the feedback I got was that her goal got muddy after the first few chapters and therefore the reader lost interest in all the confusion.

So I have sharpened in my mind the overall story goal—the one that drove her from the beginning. But I am having trouble bringing that goal to the surface in all the scenes, because sometimes the scene goal necessarily overshadows the book goal. When you’ve been imprisoned and tortured, the immediate goals of survival and escape take precedence over all else. So maybe I have the wrong story goal altogether and that’s why I’m having so much trouble with it. And sometimes what the character thinks they want and what they actually need are not the same. And sometimes what they want changes over time. So I’m slogging along but not sure I’m making the story any better—I may be muddying it further.

The second part of the revision is my struggle with the Points of View (POV). I have 3 POV characters—but have been told that I should lose two of them. One is the villain (an adult), and the advice I got is that adult POVs have no place in YA. Unfortunately for me, I love this villain and find her very interesting, so it’s killing me to lose her POV. I also need to find a way to get some info that only that character knows into the story so the reader can know it, too.

I disagree with losing the second POV, as it is the twin brother of the main character. The genre is also space opera, which by its nature has a large canvas and usually needs more than one POV to tell the complete story. So I am trying to tie his POV closer to the main character’s to make his POV more relevant, as well as trying to find other ways to tell his part of the story that may involve the main character.

Again, not sure if I am helping or muddying at this point.

I’ll just push through the mud and then take a look at the finished whole and see what I think. I’m not totally happy with the way the revisions are going, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not actually going well. It’s just that right now there’s so much mud I can’t find the solid ground underneath.

So, fellow scribes, how do you know if your revision is making your story better or worse?

New Year, New Goals

January 10, 2019 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Everyone posts New Year’s resolutions. I don’t so much do resolutions as goals. And I would like to try and make them realistic goals, so I don’t frustrate myself. The uber-healthy diet and sculpted beach-body? Not gonna happen. I’m going to try something more amenable to my couch-potato self.

I have talked about being in the midst of a great burnout. No creativity at all. 2018 was horrific, writing-wise. I totaled 89,672 words—and 73,218 of them were blog or other non-fiction writing words. Compare that to 2017, when my total words were 405,116, with 326,542 of those being fiction, and you can see how badly I fell off the workhorse.

So what am I aiming for this year? I have no specific word count in mind, but I do have two goals I want to reach:

Finish revising Veritas.
Re-release The Witch of Zal with new cover and illustrations.

Both are doable. I intend to do them.

Over this holiday, I have been trying to sleep more, to get out of the spiral of exhaustion and anxiety that I’ve been in for months. I think it is helping. I have an interest in getting back to revising Veritas, which I have been avoiding for quite some time. There’s a new angle I want to lay into the existing framework that intrigues me–and scares me, as I am not certain I can pull it off. But I want to try, which is huge step forward.

So that’s my master plan for 2019. Not Earth-shattering, for sure. But within my reach. The burnout took a long time to set in fully, it make take some time to climb my way out of it. But I pledge to be kind to myself, to try and focus on taking better care of myself, and hopefully get back on that writing workhorse again.

What goals have you set for yourself this year?

The Best of The Goose’s Quill 2018

January 3, 2019 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I always enjoy looking back over the past year and seeing what posts readers enjoyed most. I see an unexpected pattern with the top 4. Enjoy!

10. Genetic Genealogy: Proving the Paper Trail

9. Anxiety Spiral: Idling in “A” Gear

8. Control Your Inner Critic: The Power of a Name

7. Power Outage 2018

6. The Split Brain Phenomenon: On the Outside Looking In

5. On Being a Low-Energy Person in a High-Energy World

4. Spring Book Fair 2018: Snowmaggedon!

3. The Enchanted Book Fair: Fall 2018

2. 48 Years

1. Book Fair Magic: Casting a Reading Spell

Thank you to everyone who has read The Goose’s Quill this year! I hope you all have a safe healthy, happy 2019!

Revision: The fun and the fear

September 13, 2018 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Revision can seem never-ending. But when someone gives you feedback you know will make your story better, you have to act on it. I have embarked on yet another major rewrite and restructuring of my YA scifi. After some great feedback from an agent, I am now revisiting the story viewing it through a new lens.

I’m experiencing mixed emotions about this revision. On the one hand, I can see how her feedback will majorly strengthen my main POV story. So my body tingles with excitement when I think about tackling that part.

But the restructuring will also require cuts to my other two points of view characters. I will lose much if not all of my villain’s POV, which pains me because I love my villain. I fear she will become a two-dimensional cardboard character and that I will have trouble finding new homes for essential information that currently comes from her.

My other POV character is a secondary protagonist. I know I will need to keep SOME of his POV or the story will not make any sense. But I will probably have to lose much of his romance subplot. This is problematic for me because I envision this as a series, and the second book would focus more on him, growing out of the plot points in this book. The rest of his POV that remains I will need to tie even more closely to the main character’s plot.

So I am facing this revision with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Excitement for the way this will strengthen the story; trepidation because I am not certain my skills are up to the challenges ahead.

Now that my daughter is back in school, I can dig into the revision full bore. I’ll let you know how it progresses!

Do you experience the same emotional dichotomy when facing major edits?

Revision: 3 problems, 3 fixes

November 30, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I’m deep in the revision of my YA SciFi manuscript VERITAS. Much of it involved minor mechanical fixes and flew along. Then I got to the ending.

My denouement section was too long. My developmental editor suggested trying to get it to around 25 pages. After reviewing everything, I decided 30 pages was more realistic. I set my goal: trim from 64 pages to 30.

Once I dove into the revision, I found 3 recurring problems that inflated my ending.

Segmentation

I had several storyline arcs which I spread over multiple chapters. The love story had 3 chapters. The “consequences” storyline had 4. In addition, these events stretched over several days. Did I need to spend all that time and all those words?

Repetition

This revision problem piggy-backed on the segmentation issue. Having so many similar scenes meant I covered the same ground over and over. Even outside those chapters, I tended to repeat myself, so repetition was an issue throughout the book, as well as the ending.

Addition

The denouement of a story should wrap up all the major loose ends. Taking place after the climactic scene, the denouement serves to allow the protagonist to process what has happened, and to settle into the new world she has helped create. Any major subplots also need to be resolved. What should NOT happen in a denouement is the introduction of new story questions. Leaving some minor things open is fine, but bringing up new “in your face” storylines is frowned upon.

So how do you fix those three problems with the ending?

Combining

Segmentation can be solved by combining scenes. Creatively find ways where one scene fulfills the goals of what is now two related scenes. Sometimes it is as simple as shuffling two scenes together like a deck of cards, weaving bits of each to make a new whole. Other times it means throwing out the old scenes and writing a new scene from scratch.

Excising

Repetition is often most easily solved by cutting. Pick the moment that most poignantly embodies the idea or information you want to convey, and cut the rest. Alternately, you may be able to combine several of your favorite repetitive moments into a single scene that gets the point across.

Seeding

I added new storylines in the denouement of my story because I wanted to set things up for future books. The problem was not in wanting to leave clues for future books, the problem was visiting these potential storylines in deep detail. Instead, seed your denouement with hints that readers will remember when reading the next book. For example, I took a chapter and a half that examined new storylines and turned them into 4 lines of dialogue.

When your revision starts, look for these issues in your manuscript. Use these tips to fix them and make your manuscript tight and compelling.

Did I reach my goal? Not quite. I cut it from 64 pages to 34 pages. And unless my critique group sees a way to tighten it further, it will likely stay that way. I’m happy with it. The length feels right, and everything I needed in there is there.

What recurrent issues do you find in your manuscripts when you edit?

Slimming Down the Ending

November 16, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I have been revising my YA Sci-Fi Veritas, guided by developmental edits from fabulous editor Kathryn Craft. I chopped the first 4 chapters down to 2, then cruised through the next 70 or so chapters.

Then I got to the end, which is too long. I knew it was too long when I sent it in, but I didn’t want to believe it. After all, tightening my work is hard and everything I wrote is so perfect and necessary, right? I blame editing fatigue.

So now I’m at the end, and I need to cut about 40 pages from the 64 that currently exist. Kathryn suggested many cuts, but I cannot cut everything she suggested, because I need some of it to set up future books. So how am I going to do this?

1) I’m going to highlight all the information I need to retain and number each.

2) I’ll put each number and a short reminder of what it is into an Excel sheet so I can see all of the pieces at once.

3) I will then see what information can be woven into existing scenes that I will be keeping and what information might be combined into new scenes.

4) As I put that information into the story, I will mark it in the spreadsheet so I don’t accidentally leave anything out.

5) When I have done all that, I will whisper an invocation to the goddess of writing and chocolate and hope the page count is okay.

6) If it’s not, then I will go back and try again until I get it right.

That’s my plan for yanking 40 pages out of my denouement. I will report back once I have completed the process.

Do you have a specific process when you need drastic cuts to your manuscript?

November 1st: The Most Wonderful Date of the Year

November 2, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

And no, it has nothing to do with NaNoWri Mo. I have never done National Novel Writing Month in November, although I would like to at least once in my life. This year will not be the year, however.

No, I love November 1st because that means October is over! The last 10 days of October are a whirlwind for me: parents’ anniversary, my anniversary, my daughter’s birthday, then Halloween and all the concurrent festivals and festivities. For an introvert like myself, that’s a lot of socializing in a short amount of time. It’s also quite a bit of planning and errand running to pull off the birthday and Halloween so close together.

So when November 1st dawns, I take a deep breath and revel in the sudden silence of my social calendar. Not that November won’t be busy—I am the mom of an elementary school child, a working author, and there’s that whole Thanksgiving thing—but the month goes back to the normal level of crazy.

Although I am not doing NaNoWriMo, I plan on doing NaNoEdMo—National Novel Editing Month. I got my latest manuscript back from my editor in August, and didn’t get to look at it until October. So now I intend to buckle down and finish the revisions this month. By the end of November, I want to have a shiny manuscript ready to be sent out to agents.

Then I can spend December compiling my list of agents, readying the materials needed to send to them (query, synopsis of varying lengths), and be ready for a query storm in the New Year.

So now that I can breathe, that is my plan for the month. We shall see how well my plans pan out, since we all know how often life derails our plans!

What are you doing for November?

Raising the Dead: Giving an old manuscript new life

July 27, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Every author who has written for any length of time has novels in the drawer that didn’t quite make the grade. They are “almost” there, but sometimes we can’t quite figure out what’s missing the mark. For the moment, they are dead novels.

I have one such novel, The Oracle of Delphi, Kansas. It’s a YA contemporary fantasy that made the query rounds a few years ago. I had a few requests, but ultimately no one took it. The feedback I got pointed to a confusion on the reader’s part on the character’s goal, the driving force behind the action.

I didn’t know how to fix it, so I put it aside and moved on. Now, though, I am ready to raise it from the dead. I have learned a lot on the past few years, and have new ideas on what might help move the book from “almost” to “ready”.

One tool I am using with this review is Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Her book is meant to be used before you start writing, but can be used to revise. Her exercises focus on the “why” that drives all the character’s actions–and thus the plot. Since the feedback I got from the agents who looked at the manuscript was that they didn’t understand the main character’s driving motivation, Cron’s exercises seem tailor-made for bringing this to the front.

Hopefully my revamping under Cron’s guidance will move the manuscript from “almost” to “there”. I am having fun viewing this story through a different lens. Even at this early stage of revision, I see my protagonist more clearly, and I can hear her voice in my head more precisely than ever before.

Do you leave your dead manuscripts buried? If you do raise them from the dead, what methods do you use?

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Pre-Summer Progress

June 1, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Nothing like a looming deadline to spur on the writing. In my case, the end of school creeps ever closer, and the knowledge that I will no longer have 6 free hours a weekday pushes me onward. And so I have buckled down to try and get my current Work In Progress in shape before my days are filled with Mommy-duty events and my creative life takes a vacation.

Of course, I will have SOME time to write over the summer, but it will not be in the same volume as now. It will also likely not be in the large chunks of time I prefer, but in snatched moments here and there, at swim practice or waiting to pick my daughter up from day camp. Perfectly fine for blog posts and even line-editing, but not conducive (for me) to deep writing or big-picture revision.

Knowing that, I’ve been focused on making progress on Veritas, my YA sci-fi. I am coming into the home stretch with these edits, and I want to finish before summer stifles me. I also have a July deadline to give it to my editor, in case I need further urging.

This round of edits focuses on two things: sensory details and voice. Sensory details because I am terrible at putting them in. As a reader, I’m okay with minimalist description, and I take that to the extreme in my writing. So I have to go in and add appropriate sensory details.

Those details go hand-in-hand with voice in that point of view determines exactly which details a character will notice. But I also need to make certain my 3 POV characters don’t all sound alike. My antagonist (a 300-year-old spirit of a queen) can not sound like my main protagonist (a 16-year-old girl who only wants a quiet life and her father’s love, and seems destined to have neither) nor her twin brother, who wants desperately to be a warrior but fears he doesn’t have what it takes.

Voice is more than just tweaking, but I have already gone in and physically re-written each scene from scratch. Now I’m polishing the voice—especially the boy’s, as his voice took the longest to become clear in my head. In this go-round, I added many details to his scenes, some to the antagonist’s scenes, but very few to my protagonist’s scenes. I hate when that happens. I’m never sure if I am not making tweaks because what I have is really good, or because I’m just sick of the project. My editor will tell me.

I finished that round of edits earlier this week. Fantastic progress, to check off that last chapter! But I have one more round to go—trimming word count. The last round of revision pushed my count to about 101,000 words. Not out of the ballpark for a YA science fiction, but more than I am comfortable with. So I am hoping to trim 5,000 to 10,000 words at least. It’s no secret that I can be wordy, and I am sure I will find plenty to tighten. I hope I can finish that before D-Day on June 21st.

Once I finish that edit, that’s all the progress I can make on my own. I will have revised the manuscript about 5 times, and I will be so sick of it that I will have lost all objectivity. At that point it will go off to the editor, who will no doubt make it bleed.

Here’s hoping for pre-summer progress for all you writers who are parents!

Taking a Break before Revision

April 6, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

We’ve all heard this advice: put your manuscript in a drawer for at least a month before you revise/edit it. Generally, I do this as a matter of course (and because life often gets in the way). But lately I have been lamenting an unscheduled break in my revision plans.

My sci-fi YA Vertias is inching toward being finished. I wanted one more major sweep for voice and plot tightening, and then I think it will be ready for professional editing eyes to look at it. So, I printed it out—all 100,000 words of it—punched some holes and stuck it in a three-ring binder (2 three-ring binders, actually). Ready to go!

Not so fast! I did a few chapters of it, and then for some reason (or many reasons), it languished. From September 30, 2016 to March 8, 2017, it sat on my table waiting for me to return. That’s 160 days. 5.3 months.

Way too long.

My frustration built and built as the binders gathered dust on my end table, and they accused me of slacking every time I glanced in their direction. Finally, I got back to it.

Since March 8, I have made good progress. I finished polishing the shortest of the 3 POV lines in my novel and started the second.

For all that the length of the break frustrated me, there have been some good things out of it. Not only do I see mistakes more readily and clearly (the rationale for taking a break in the first place), but I can see what I did WELL with greater clarity. In a pleasant surprise, my writing is better than I remembered it.

Also, I hear the three POV characters voices more clearly in my head. I see where a sentence doesn’t fit the voice and needs to be tweaked. I have a better handle on their worldviews and can use the voice to crystallize that. In another surprise, the three voices are more differentiated than expected, allaying my fears of them all sounding like me.

So while I hadn’t planned on such a long break, it had some up sides to it. How long do you usually wait before coming back to revise a manuscript?