Category: Revision & Editing

Beta Testing

It really didn’t take us long at all to put the finishing touches on the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We were done by last Saturday. Perhaps we should call it a first-ish draft. It hasn’t had a full edit, or even major rewrites, but it did get a little bit of extra attention in a couple of places. We knew a few items were lacking, so we dealt with those, and now the manuscript is in the hands of some trusted beta readers.

In a move that was somewhat controversial in the Writing Cave, we opted to not reread the book before handing it off. It’s technically resting before we edit it, and Kent was concerned that if we read the whole thing, instead of just poking at it here and there, that we’d refamiliarize ourselves with it too much. The whole point of letting the work rest is to forget how it’s supposed to go, forget what you were trying to accomplish with each scene and sentence. It’s the closest an author can come to experiencing their own work the way a reader will, and is a great way to spot parts that aren’t working. Jen saw the wisdom of Kent’s argument: she just really wanted to read the book because it’s good.

Every place we poked our noses in to make the small adjustments and additions drew us in and made us want to keep reading. That’s a good sign. It’s a good book, and it will still be good a couple of months from now when we come back to it with fresh eyes.

Keeping Busy, Keeping Sane

A little too busy, sometimes. Not too sane, though. What would be the fun in that?

Now that we’re done with edits on Son of Music Novel, we’re taking a quick swing through Sibling of Music Novel to take care of a few odds and ends. And in fact, there’s only one odd (or end?) remaining, which is to punch up the sensorium of the piece by adding smells. And that’s nearly done!

Still using our nightly dog walks to develop the ideas for the Ghost story. World-building conversations in the dark in our quiet neighborhood, as Kent tries to keep his voice from carrying overmuch when he uses phrases containing words like “aphrodisiac.” So, yeah. That’s coming along nicely!

Because it’s been forever since our writing group met, we’ve recently begun trying to round everybody up for a Zoom call. The cats are proving as difficult to herd as ever… Maybe the gang’s all burned out from too many online meetings already.

We hope you’re keeping safe. (And not too busy, nor too sane.)

The Patient is Resting Comfortably

Over the holiday weekend we finished up this round of edits on Son of Music Novel. Son is now over 18,000 words shorter. For those of you who prefer page counts, that’s approximately 50. We removed about 4 chapters worth of words. (!)

As threatened, Jen swung back around to give the beginning a second look. But even with all the cutting blades nicely sharpened, and her critical eye honed, she found fewer than 20 words to cut from each of the first two chapters. That’s about a tenfold drop from what was getting cut during the first pass. So, we’re calling it done (for now). That pace would lead to a not insignificant total over the course of the book. And we will take another trip through, just not right now.

We will leave this project in the recovery room for a while and turn our attention to its littermate, Sibling of Music Novel. That one’s earlier along in its lifecycle. Even though it’s the second in the series, we wrote it last, and there are half-a-dozen brief items we know we want to punch up before we consider it truly complete. Back in January we said 2020 was going to be the year where not much writing got done in the Writing Cave. We’re about to tackle the one little bit on the schedule. It will feel good to stretch different muscles.

Ouroboros

As the weather gets muggy and our neighbors ignore social-distancing recommendations to throw innumerable pool parties, we’ve been hiding in the writing cave, editing away. The cave is air conditioned, and we’re the only ones in it, so it’s quite pleasant.

We’re closing in on the end of Son of Music Novel. Jen only has two chapters left to edit, and Kent is (by design) about five chapters behind her. The plan is for Jen to loop back around to the beginning of the novel and take another crack at the first couple of chapters. It took a little while for us to get our various editing blades properly sharpened at the start of this project, so now that we have everything dialed in and calibrated it makes sense to take another pass. Or maybe we’ll discover that the opening of the novel is just more cleanly written than everything that follows. It could happen. If that’s the case, then Jen’s revisit should be quite perfunctory.

Whichever way it goes, Jen will be done by Independence Day (the deadline she set herself). Kent might not quite make that since he has a day job, but he shouldn’t need much extra time.

We don’t plan to run through the whole novel again right away, like a snake eating its own tail. It needs to rest, and so do we.

Wear your masks and stay healthy.

Pour One Out for Josh

As we stand athwart the midpoint of Son of Music Novel edits, we bow our heads in a moment of silence for Josh.

Josh was a minor character (so minor he never even had a last name) who has fallen prey to our ruthless editing knives. Don’t feel too bad for him, though. While he no longer has any lines, he still gets namedropped. And even though the only time he’s mentioned is on the worst day of his professional career, he gets off really light in the grand scheme of things.

Also removed from the novel? Over 9,000 words. The bit with old Josh up there accounts for a couple hundred of them, and is the biggest single cut so far. We already looked the whole novel over on a scene-by-scene level, and we’re pretty confident that what’s in there now is all stuff we need. But as we work our way through using the finer tools and the higher magnification, we’ll find a few things like Josh. He came to the Writing Cave with stars in his eyes, but unfortunately for him, his big break came at the end of a chapter, and he didn’t really contribute much. His dreams of stardom ended up on the cutting room floor in service to tighter prose and a better chapter hook.

So really, dear reader, it’s your fault. We did it all for you.

A writing partner is someone who helps you make the tough calls, even when they shatter an innocent character’s dreams.

Weasel Hunting

One particularly efficacious way to tighten prose is via the systematic removal of the so-called weasel words that tend to infest one’s writing. Digressions that add little to no new meaning should be avoided. Be clear and concise, rather than cluttering your page with rambling verbiage, and cut out extraneous and superfluous modifiers.

Every author has their own bad habits of wordiness. Could be stating and then restating ideas. Could be tacking on cliché figures of speech to puff things up with faux-authoritative air. Could be excess jargon. Could be lists that go on too long.

For us it’s qualifiers. It’s been a sickness, honestly. We made a list of specific crutch words, and we use the software’s search function to comb through looking at them. It used to be, in our first drafts, nothing ever quite actually was anything. It was “almost” or “seemingly” something. All. The. Damn. Time. Our other bad habit was redundant modifiers. “Crept slowly” was a favorite, as if there is any other way to creep.

We do a much better job these days of keeping that stuff out of the prose from the start. Not that we’re completely cured, just that we see it when it’s happening now and rein it in. But that doesn’t mean our first drafts are perfect. We still need to revise them and tighten things up, it’s just that there’s less low-hanging fruit to be harvested. It used to be we could count on about a 5% reduction in word count from weasels alone. But not these days.

It’s a good problem to have. We’re feeding a higher grade of ore into the smelter, so the purity of the metal coming out is that much greater. (On our planet, low-grade ore is that which contains too many weasels.) A writing partner is someone who’ll take a turn pumping the bellows on your weasel smelter.

Macro Level Editing

We like to edit from big to small. It would be silly to spend a lot of time polishing up a scene, only to decide later to remove that scene entirely. So, as we mentioned recently, the first editing pass is to determine if any scenes get cut from the first draft.

You might not be surprised to learn that we have a methodology for this process, or that it involves a spreadsheet. Making the decisions would be all but impossible if we tried to just wing it, especially with two of us who have to agree. It’s not a judgement of whether the scene is “good,” because if it’s “bad” it can always be fixed. The question is, does the scene earn its keep?

We name our scenes as we’re writing, which is handy for building the spreadsheet at this stage. Going down the line, we discuss each one and make notes. What you want to do is document what each scene does to move the story. What information is conveyed? What events take place? How is character developed? Are there other scenes that do exactly the same job? Ideally, most of your scenes will be contributing more than just one significant element. But it’s not a points system. Scenes that only do one job aren’t necessarily weak. And if you eliminate the moment where a vital clue is revealed, that’s not helping.

Look over your list. Be critical. You probably don’t want to be the writer who says, “I can’t cut that scene, it’s the one where the main character has breakfast!” Notwithstanding that it might be the most important meal of the day, most readers will find other events more captivating. Unless this breakfast is thematically charged, becomes a crucial moment of clarity for the protagonist, is attended by a vital ally, etc. In which case, those should be the things on the list.

You know what your story wants to be. The stuff that doesn’t help with that is what you should take out. Even if it’s good stuff, it might not be in the right story. (When you cut something, you don’t have to burn it. And you won’t hear us saying “kill your darlings.” Just, you know, lock them up in a folder or something until you find the right project for them.)

A writing partner is someone who helps you look at the big picture before you dive into the details.

Smallerizing

Last time we talked, we were in the midst of embiggening Son of Music Novel. As of last night we’re switching to the shrink ray. We already looked at the work on a macro level and decided that there were no entire scenes that were superfluous, so Jen started on page one, working line-by-line to tighten things up. Kent has a few pieces of side-work to finish up, then he’ll make his own pass through in Jen’s wake and see what further fat there is to trim.

With two of us working, this part of the process can be a bit tedious. Every change gets marked for approval, no matter how minor. That’s not how every writing team operates, but it’s how we like to work. We enjoy the discussions it sparks. At least usually.

We’ve set ourselves a target — we’d like to get this beast down to 150,000 words. Is that feasible? It’s hard to say at this stage. What we do know is that this editing pass won’t be the last one. After surgery the patient will rest while we turn our attention to a different project, then later we’ll come back for another attack, this time with finer tools.

A good writing partner is someone you like spending quarantine time with.

Embiggening

Son of Music Novel (Book 3 of our Music Series), is a chonk. A whopper. A massive tome. And we’re currently making it bigger. The enhugening is happening on the micro scale, the macro scale, and everywhere in between. On the smaller end of the spectrum are the missing words we’ve since found and inserted in their proper places (thanks beta readers!). Next along, size-wise, are the places where our readers asked for clarification or additional detail. A sentence or two, maybe a paragraph. Nothing scary on its own, but it starts to add up. Largest of all will be the new scenes. Yes, even as big as this puppy is, our beta readers felt there were a few story beats that needed a little more attention. Kent already tackled one of them, adding two pages to an existing scene, and blending the edges expertly. The other two will be entirely new scenes, and as such they’ll need stubs before they’re written. Which means that Jen will need to write the stubs, which she’ll get to as soon as she tackles a few more of the medium-size changes.

What goes up must come down. Even word counts. Our next step will be to roll up our sleeves and start the sometimes messy process of editing. We’re just fattening the manuscript up so we can make a good meal of it.

 

Writing Cave Progress Report

Update on the Music Series: After completing the read-through for the whole trilogy, we made a few tiny little adjustments to Book One. We then collated all the input from our critique group and beta readers for Book Three, and all the stuff we wanted to take action on has been transferred into the live Scrivener project. It was a few dozen items, mostly pretty small. We say it was a few dozen because Jen has been knocking things off the list at a truly impressive pace. Meanwhile, Kent dug in on a couple of the not-so-small issues and has made great progress on them. Fewer items getting checked off the list, but a comparable degree of progress.

We did discuss working on Book Two after we got Book One tidied up. Because, you know, they go in order that way. Here’s the thing. Book Two is the one we wrote third. Thus, it hasn’t had as much time to rest, and we haven’t had a chance to circulate it for feedback. Therefore, we’re still doing this series inside-out.