LUCIANA
God for Thy mercy, they are loose again!
ADRIANA
And come with naked swords. Let’s call more help
To have them bound again.
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act 4, Scene 4
That’s how I feel about my characters right now. Robert runs amok, changing the future I wrote for him 100 pages from now. Martin’s plans are unsettled.
To have them bound again. I hear you Adriana.
#amrevising
Step 1: Write a book
Step 2: Rewrite the book
Feedback from the real-life agent helped. With his input I have reached to a new level of objectivity about the work. Time away from the manuscript helped too. And so, a re-write is underway. The novel is going to be better.
This time I am going to do it smarter:
Step 1: Map the original story by chapter.
Step 2: Make notes of all the things I want to change. (That was hard. Some of the things I want to change are pretty dear to me, but I can see how the story will be stronger without them).
Step 3: Map the new book.
All that’s done. Thankfully, the new book retains a lot of the character of the old book.
Step 4: Get busy. Today I revised Chapter 1. It is better. I don’t think it deserves to be called done, but it is better.
#amrevising
Orsino
“Come, but one verse.”
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 4
Taken out of context, for sure (Orsino wants someone to sing to the music that has just started), but a nice line to cast some light on a problem I have, in variations, during the creative moment.
I don’t get stuck on dialogue. I sometimes gets stuck on what’s next. Solving the puzzle of the plot, that’s what gets me.
It has been happening to me for years. My novel is a high-tech heist novel. HOW eluded me for years.
Then it came. In the middle of the night, I woke up and I knew how they did it. I started writing earnestly the next day.
What unstuck me? I don’t know. Where did it come from? I don’t know.
But it did.
#amrevising
I wonder if Stephen King has this problem.
Neck deep in what feels like the hundredth revision of the novel, it has become acutely obvious that an up-to-date outline would make things simpler.
I started with an outline, first on a white board and then on paper. Soon the writing took on a life of its own and I was too caught up in getting the story down to document the story I was getting down.
I should have realized sooner. Someone gave me feedback that inspired me to change something (early readers suggested I went too heavy on the inner workings of the insurance business. “Not that interesting,” they said*), so I changed some things. When I did, I had to figure out the downstream impacts of the changes. Most were easy to find because I was living in the book. I knew it backward and forward. The words were rushing out of my head faster than I could type and I got ahead of myself.
I never updated the outline.
Dumb move.
This is a significant revision, though the guts of the book are the same. But as I tamp down the backstory, inevitably some plot points are changing. There are downstream implications to be addressed. I have no map to find the nooks and crannies I’ll need to sweep.
Step 1: a good outline. Correction. A good CURRENT outline.
This time, I’m mapping the chapters using Trello. It’s a nice way to see what work needs to be done.
#amrevising
*I find the insurance business fascinating. But I understand that not everyone does.
Her’s worked: Buzzfeed
#amrevising
For the longest time – since high school really – I have wanted to write a novel. I never counted the false starts, the ideas that went nowhere, and the maybe-next-years that have passed, but there have been many of each.
Then I did it. It was a prefect time for me professionally; I was self-employed and my time was sufficient to make a go at it. And I finally had the idea. The characters had been kicking around in my head for a while, but the heist – that is, how they might pull it off – well, I had never figured that out. And then one day I figured it out.
I wrote a book. My first readers had a lot of feedback for me, but mostly the work was well received. To be sure, it is entirely possible that my self-awareness was broken and they were all just being nice. At the least, no one said “forget about it.”
With their help, the book got better. I revised and revised some more. Polishing, they say. My father read it and gave me line by line feedback. He made me realize that I overuse the word *that*. How about that?
Either Leonardo Da Vinci or E.M. Forster said (it has been attributed to both) “art is never finished, only abandoned.” I worked my manuscript until I was ready to leave it in the woods. It was time to query. For those who aren’t familiar, that’s the process of writing to agents to entice them to represent your masterpiece. The internet is awash in advice about querying and it all says be patient and grow some thick skin. I wrote a query letter (I thought it was great) and I paid my money for a writers’ conference where I could have my query letter critiqued. Good thing I did; the agent thought it was horrible. I revised and revised some more.
Patience does not come naturally to me, but I got ready to be patient and thick skinned.
After many revisions to my query letter, I wrote to some agents. The third agent I queried asked to read the first 100 pages. In the trade, this is called requesting pages. It’s a reasonably big deal, especially if your pages are good. And this guy is a Real Agent who represents books you know. I celebrated with Prosecco.
Maybe, I thought, I have something here. Maybe, I thought, I wrote a real book that I will one day be able to visit in bookstores and libraries. I sent the pages and waited.
Cue the crickets.
I continued to query other agents as the months passed with no feedback from my Real Agent, even after a nudge or two from me. My brother-in-law, a published author of a really beautiful book called MRS. HUNTER’S HAPPY DEATH, suggested that I nudge Mr. Real Agent again.
I nudged again. Mr. Real Agent replied. He was deeply apologetic about his slow response. Then he shared a laundry list of things I got wrong. My book is not for him. It would take too much editing to be viable and he just doesn’t have time for that.
I won’t bore you with the all of his feedback, but it is enough to say that I have some backstory issues to resolve (way too much backstory, as it turns out) and my writing suffers from many other illnesses that afflict first time novelists. Ouch.
Still, there is good news in this rejection and, I think, it is spectacularly good news. You see, Mr. Real Agent is the first person to read any part of my book who isn’t a friend, relative, or simply impressed that I wrote a book. Mr. Real Agent’s feedback is unvarnished. It’s real. And it is, as we say in the business world, actionable.
And so I am revising. I see how the story can change for the better. The feedback stung, for sure, but he’s mostly right and the novel will be better for it.
Bonus: Mr. Real Agent had nothing to say about too many *thats*.
#amrevising
manuscriptmanship 