Pre-Summer Progress

June 1, 2017 By 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!

The Dreaded Synopsis

August 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

While my WIP is with an editor and readers, I am filling time by working on my query and synopsis for that WIP, so I will have the marketing materials ready ahead of time. That way, once I get my WIP feedback, I can set to work revising and be ready for querying immediately.

I have a query I quite like. A few other people are going to give me feedback, but I feel the underpinnings are solid.

My big problem is the synopsis. I can easily tell the story of what happens, at whatever length is required. What always seems to elude me is the voice of the book and the emotional heart of the story. By the time I have editing the plot down to something synopsis length, all of the voice and life have vanished and it reads like an outline in prose. Boring!

I have a first draft, which I will return to and try to liven up. But even if I get the voice in there, I feel I have missed the heart. A lot of the plot points I include are only important because of the emotional arc attached, but that somehow does not come through in this draft.

This part of the process always frustrates me, because I feel that I should be able to do this much better than I do. After all, this is my book—who else knows it as well as I? My passion and excitement do not come through on the synopsis page, and they need to. It reads like one of the many college papers I wrote. I got A’s on them, but the synopsis is judged by a different metric.

Perhaps I will approach the synopsis more like a short story. Perhaps viewing it through that lens will open up that emotional heart I’m lacking.

I believe that if I can write a great synopsis once, I will have the “lightbulb” moment that will show me how to do it consistently. Here’s hoping the lights come on soon!

How do you approach synopsis writing? Any advice to share?

The Art of the Collaborative Writing Process

July 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I talked last week about collaboration agreements and creative control, but people often ask me about the process of working with a collaborator. How does it actually work? After all, writing is usually a solitary pursuit.

Truthfully, every collaboration partnership will find the process that works best for them. In non-fiction, the most common partnership is where one person provides the knowledge or expertise while the other does the actual writing. It can work this way in fiction, too, where one partner who loves research provides the details the other writer needs to make the book’s world pop.

In fiction, probably the most important consideration is voice—the novel must have a consistent voice and feel to the writing all the way through. The exception, of course, is when the writers purposely want two distinct voices or points of view in the structure of the story, such as alternating chapters from different characters’ POV. In the vast majority of cases, however, the book should feel “whole,” with no indication that multiple writers had their fingers on the keyboard.

The best way to achieve this is to have one writer be the primary writer. The primary should be the writer whose natural voice best fits the purpose and tone of the story. This will mean less revision later for reasons of voice, which is one of the harder things to edit and revise for if it is not strong from the start.

The primary writes the first draft; then the secondary takes it and makes edits, additions, suggestions, etc.; then it returns to the primary to be “polished” into the proper voice. Some may choose to have the secondary write the first draft and then the primary work it into the right voice in a rewrite, but I believe that is an inefficient process. The primary would almost certainly have to do a complete rewrite of every chapter to get the voice the collaborators want.

In my collaborative fiction project, I am working with two other writers. We each bring different strengths to the table. I am the primary writer, because my voice is the one we liked best for the project. I tend to focus on character and emotion. One of my collaborators, Jim Kempner, is excellent with plot and research. My other collaborator, Jeff Pero, is a line editor with a great nose for writing action. So our process goes something like this:

We all hash out the outline of the book. This was an enormously fun part of the project, full of synergy and enthusiasm. I then wrote the first draft. Then Jim took it and added detail and description and poked holes in the plot and logic, which he then mended. Jeff took it from there, checking for grammar but also policing the pacing and action. We all, of course, also kept an eye on character and dialogue and all the other things we writers need to juggle!

After Jeff, it came back to me, and I polished it, massaging all of Jim and Jeff’s inserts into the voice of the book. Then we all sat down together, read it out loud, and made line-by-line edits.

And that is how the three of us wrote our book, The Egyptian Enigma.

Have you ever worked with a collaborator? What was your process like?

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