Category: Revision & Editing

The Home Stretch

The end is in sight for two of our current open projects, and it feels damn good. Tenpenny Zen has been resting quietly in a drawer, awaiting its publication date later this month. We’ll pick it up this weekend and give it one final read through to make sure our last round of edits didn’t introduce any embarrassing typos, but other than that the manuscript is ready. Kent spent most of this week’s work sessions hammering out the back cover copy. It’s a completely different style of writing, and we haven’t had a lot of practice with it yet. Kent persevered even when Jen wrinkled her nose at some of his early efforts, and we’re quite pleased with the result he arrived at.

With all those pieces falling into place, expect the cover reveal next week. It’s gorgeous!

While Kent was toiling away on one type of nonstandard prose, Jen was intent on another. Two nights ago she finished writing the stubs for the rest of Son of Science Novel. Up until now the ending was basically “stuff blows up.” We knew who survived and who didn’t, other big picture things like that, but now we know most of the details. Not all, obviously. That’s what the actual writing is for. But now we have the finale broken down into beats, and we know whose point of view we’ll experience those beats through. It’s a complex series of events, and having this roadmap will make the writing go a lot faster.

With any luck (and fewer distractions now that Tenpenny Zen is all but finalized) we’ll be in a good position to sail through the rest of Son of Science Novel’s first draft.

Either of us working on our own would not be able to accomplish nearly as much as we do working together. We find having a writing partner invaluable. How about you?

Are They Ever Really Done?

Something that we knew about in an abstract way, but appreciated more viscerally once we published the first book, is that at some point you need to stop looking for things to fiddle around with. It’s done, move on.

But are they ever really done? (Yes. Yes they are.)

It’s hard letting go. A creative enterprise on the scale of writing a novel requires huge investment, to the point where it becomes an emotional bond with the book itself. You feel responsible for its well-being. There’s also the more rational concern for providing readers with a flawless experience. The paradoxical thing about perfectionism is that it keeps your readers from ever experiencing anything at all. Maybe that’s a kind of flawlessness, but certainly not the kind you should aspire to.

There will be the temptation to go back and do more fine tuning even after you’ve officially published the book. It’s easier than ever to tweak your files and re-upload them. It’s understandable. We’re sympathetic. But here’s the thing: it’s never-ending. There’s literally always going to be one more thing you could tweak, one more edit you can second-guess. Let George Lucas be a cautionary tale.

The best you can do is to do your best. Edit yourself meticulously, and get outside help if editing isn’t your strong suit. As we discussed last time, it can be tough to achieve critical distance and see what’s actually on the page rather than what you know you meant. Even with two of us to watch for them, cringeworthy errors have a way of sneaking in. In one of our manuscripts, we recently discovered “load crack” — a decidedly unsavory sound effect, which we changed to “loud crack” — and this is in a project that’s been read by about ten people, on which we’ve already done multiple editing passes. It’d been there the whole time.

Feel free to use “load crack” in your own work, by the way. We don’t need it.

You let things rest, you do your best, and then you move forward.

A writing partner is invaluable as a second set of eyes on your work, and also as a source of perspective for when to sign off.

A Plethora of Piñatas

So you’ve just finished your first draft. What happens next?

Obviously you celebrate, but after you sober up or get back from Disney World or whatever, then what?

Then you put that manuscript aside for a while. You do other things and try to forget everything you wrote so that when you do look at it again you have critical distance.

Critical distance is among the most important skills for an author, and also among the most difficult to master. It’s what allows you to stand in the reader’s shoes, what enables your own work to surprise you sometimes. And that’s crucial when you’re ready to edit. You need to be able to see the plot holes, the out-of-character moments, and the places where motivation is thin. You need to be able to spot the story beats that are obviously contrived.

That last one can be tricky because all the story beats are contrived, obviously. You wrote them.

So, like we said, you need critical distance. How do you achieve it? Just reading something else is good, but what you want to do is fully engage your faculties. Reading is too passive for this. Nothing will restore your own work’s ability to surprise you faster than editing or writing a different piece. It’s not enough to just look away from a project for a while. You need to actively push other stuff through the system. You need to overwrite that part of the hard disk.

We’ve had a lot of success achieving critical distance by having three series, each set in its own story world. While Miss Brandymoon’s Device was resting between editing passes, we could write the Music Novel. While Tenpenny Zen was tucked away in a drawer we could plot out the entirety of the Science Novel. We’ve been rotating through those three series for a couple of years now, and it’s worked well. Now that we’re publishing the Divided Man series, though, we suddenly have fewer open projects.

It’s really exciting to have our work out there in front of people, and it feels really good to have the end in sight for that series, but it does mean that we need to figure out what our next new thing will be. We don’t want to turn around one day and find that we’ve run out of material, and we need to always have something on the back burner so that there’s always a productive way to get that necessary (dare we say critical?) critical distance.

The Backstory Conundrum

Too much backstory can be a major problem. No argument about that. What might be worth arguing over is the trend toward saying that any backstory is too much backstory.

Here’s the thing about backstories: everyone has one, and most of them aren’t very interesting. By definition, they’re made up of the stuff that went on before the story kicked off. Often the details are things that the author needs to know, but the reader does not. That’s a hard distinction sometimes.

First, go ahead and write out the backstory. As stated above, it’s stuff you need anyway. Get it down, so it’s not buzzing around inside your brain distracting you from the real story, and so you can refer to it.

Okay, now: does it belong in the finished manuscript? There’s a simple test for that.

The first question to answer is, is it relevant? If it is, then move on to the chart.

 this backstory is… Predictable Surprising
Tedious No. No.
Interesting No. Maybe.

 

Be brutally honest about these questions. The reader doesn’t need to know that your criminologist was in a spelling bee in third grade. (Unless she now uses a spelling-based meditation technique to clear her mind and see how the clues connect. In that case, this reader would be curious about where such a trait came from.)

More important, the reader also doesn’t need a detailed overview of your criminologist’s studies in law and forensics at a respected university. Just give us passing mention to confirm that, yes, she went to school. That’s expected. However, if she pulled twenty successful bank heists and was never arrested, which is how she knows so much about crime, well that’s different. Passing mention would feel like cheating. We want to go along on one of those heists.

Even when you can honestly tell yourself that it’s a maybe-means-yes situation, bear in mind that every paragraph of backstory is a paragraph that’s diverting from the main plot. If the writing sizzles your readers will happily follow along — to a point. (Just show the climax of the spelling bee, rather than the whole thing. Definitely skip the training montage.)

It’s great to have a partner to discuss backstory with. Helps keep it in perspective. How do you approach backstory in your writing? How do you feel about it in your reading?

Keeping Busy

r-avatarA quick progress update from the writing cave.

In addition to the ongoing prosification of Son of Science Novel, this week we began a read-through of our next release.

Tenpenny Zen is scheduled to come out in March. It’s book two of the Divided Man series, following Miss Brandymoon’s Device. (which was released last month — did you get yours yet?) The manuscript has been edited a few times already, but we feel it needs one more polishing pass before we put it out there. The first step is to reread it, so it’s fresh in our minds. Once we complete that, we’ll have to park Son of Science Novel to focus on revisions to Tenpenny Zen.

And we’ll take this opportunity to wish you Happy Solstice!

Location Location Location

r-avatarIf you reached today’s post through a bookmark, you’ll want to update it. We’ve relocated the Skelleyverse to the newly constructed Blog Wing of runeskelley.com. All of the content you know and love made the move, and everything is arranged exactly the same way. The only difference is the beginning of the URL.

Yeah, this means we’re still wallowing around in the “not-so-much-writing” part of writing. It’s leavened with a smidgen of actual writing and editing, so we shouldn’t get too rusty.

What does this mean to you, faithful reader? It means that we’re drawing ever closer to the big day when our first novel will be available for the world to see. We’ll keep you posted.

Spinning Plates

r-avatarRune Skelley likes to focus on just one novel at a time. Having to keep track of multiple story worlds simultaneously makes it harder to do any of them justice. Harder, but hopefully not impossible, because we’re bending our own rule right now.

Novel #1 (Miss Brandymoon’s Device) is getting a final round of line edits, while we’re also doing a read-through on the Science Novel in preparation for outlining the sequels. We’ve already rainbowed them, and now we need to really get that world under our nails to expand those rainbows into full-fledged outlines. The line editing is happening mostly by day, with evenings available for the read-through. It seems to be working pretty well, so far.

In addition to all of that, we’re getting feedback from our beta readers on Son of Music Novel. That means we have to keep all three of our story worlds in our heads, to some extent.

Oh, and we’re doing cover mockups for our first trilogy. Shifting from verbal creative mode to pictorial creative mode is refreshing now and then, although there’s a lot of creative verbiage flying around the writing cave while we converge on a common vision for these covers.

Sometimes, practical demands force you to spread yourself a little thin. Having a writing partner means you can keep more plates spinning.

Reading Aloud is Always Allowed

r-avatarWe just drank our champagne in celebration of completing the revisions on Music Novel, a process that culminated in a few nights of marathon read-aloud sessions so we could make sure our careful cuts hadn’t gone amiss anywhere.

Now, we’re doing our preliminaries for revision of Son of Music Novel, which consists of (say it with me) reading it aloud. We like to read things out loud, and we think you should do it, too.

There is a little more to it than just getting prepped for editing. We have beta readers awaiting this book with varying degrees of impatience, but it’s a first draft. We know it has some issues, and we don’t want to make it our beta readers’ job to report them to us, at least not the big ones.

We could just each read the manuscript and then compare notes. But hearing it (and in Kent’s case speaking it) is a great way to pick up on the rhythms and textures, and we find it’s a good info-dump detector, too. Working with a partner gives you a built-in listener, but even if you’re going solo it’s a valuable tool.

We also have at least one prospective beta “reader” who’s requested it as an audiobook, so perhaps one of these times we’ll make a recording.

Careful With That Axe Eugene

r-avatarEdits on the Music Novel were completed last night, to great fanfare and celebration. The kind of fanfare that sounds a lot like a satisfied sigh, and the kind of celebration that greatly resembles going to sleep. We finished up late, is what we’re saying.

Throughout the editing process, Jen went first, with Kent following along behind to neaten things up. If it were yard work, Jen would be on the riding mower and Kent would have the tiny little nail scissors to trim the stragglers. Except when we got to Chapter 17. When we got to Chapter 17, Kent was feeling feisty. He set his nail scissors carefully aside and got out the weedwacker and the flame thrower. Instead of one word here, one word there, he started yanking out clauses, sentences, and in a couple of cases, entire paragraphs. Several darlings gave their lives to the cause.

The carnage was a shock to Jen’s delicate system. She thought she understood how things worked (i.e., she was the vicious one), and to have the tables turned was painful. We took our time and worked through Kent’s reasoning (and he asked several times if a break would be a good idea), and made the necessary edits. And Jen can (almost) admit that he was right and the work is (probably) stronger now.

It’s important to have strong communication skills when you’re writing with a partner so that when you come across your own Chapter 17 you’re able to work through it as a team. And so that you want to keep working together. Respect and compromise are invaluable.

In the end we surpassed our arbitrary goal, removing 12.5% of the words we had so carefully written. Our next step will be to read through the finished manuscript and make sure we weren’t overzealous. That’s the other danger of swinging the sharp editing tools around — you might remove something that was better left in place.

52 Card Pickup

r-avatarEdits on the Music Novel continue apace. Jen is still bushwhacking, and she’s a handful of chapters ahead of Kent who is smack dab in the middle of the novel, doing more precision pruning. We’ve already passed the arbitrary word removal goal we set for ourselves, and it looks like we’ll have no problem shrinking the book by 10% by the time we’re done.

There are several approaches you can take when you’re editing, but you’ll get the most bang for your buck by finding big things to remove, like redundant scenes, superfluous characters, or even distracting subplots. Kill your darlings, as they say.*

The Music Novel has no superfluous characters or distracting subplots (because we’re awesome!), so we were left with routing out redundant scenes. And even those were hard to come by. There was only one scene that we removed entirely.

Since we like to present ourselves with challenges to keep our environment interesting, we took a good hard look at a series of scenes that occurred back-to-back and involved the same three characters. “These scenes are each individually spectacular!” we cried. “Nary a one is expendable! But surely there is a way to streamline the sequence!”

And lo, we were correct. By chopping those chapters into little pieces and throwing them all up in the air we were able to reassemble the components into a more pleasing shape. The pacing is better, tension escalates in a really effective way, and we saved ourselves 1200 words. Huzzah!

*no actual darlings were harmed during the production of this novel