Karen Sandler

Tag: editing

  • A Literary Schlep–4…er…5 Tips on Finishing Your Novel

    Awakening Final cover-sI flew from DC to Northern California today. I bring this up because I was contemplating how odd it is that at 6am this morning (3am PST), I was heading off in my rental car to Dulles Airport, and at 2:10pm PST, I was pulling into my own driveway. Door-to-door, about 11 hours.

    Which might seem like an excruciatingly long time. But truly, if you think about it, my plane ride was barely a blink of the eye compared to crossing the country in a wagon train. A quick Google search tells me that a wagon train trip (which generally left from Missouri, not DC), took 4-6 months. Tack on the extra 40% farther DC would be and you’re talking 6-8 months.

    What does this have to do with writing a novel? That plane ride I took is a lot like, say, writing a short story. The cross-country wagon train trip is like penning a novel. It’s a long-term commitment with pitfalls and setbacks around every corner, and if you’re not fully prepared, you just might not make it.

    So how can you improve your odds? Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way:

    1. Write at least a rough synopsis. Yeah, I know, some of you are thinking, But that’s just not how I work. I just have to let it flow. My answer to that is, if it really, truly works for you, if you find yourself able to finish that book, then another, then another, and they’re all reasonably coherent stories even before you start your re-writes, then okay, I’ll give you a pass. But if on the other hand, you start one book after another, get a few chapters in, or even half-way through, but can’t seem to close the deal–write a synopsis. Even if it’s so ugly you won’t dare show it to anyone else, get your story structure mapped out.
    2. Flesh out your characters. I have a variety of character sketch formats that I’ve used over the years. Twenty-plus books later, they’ve gotten a little abbreviated, but I still like to know a) physical characteristics (don’t want to change eye color in mid-stream) and b) conflicts and goals. This helps me get to know the character well enough that when I plunk them down into a scene, I know how they’re going to behave. I know what they’ll say, how they’ll say it, and what they’ll reveal and won’t reveal about themselves. They’re not just blobs moving through my invented universe, they’re real, three-dimensional people.
    3. Turn off that infernal internal editor. Shoosh her away. Put duct tape on his mouth. Lock that hyper-critical, opinionated loud-mouth in a dark closet in the corner of your mind. Because she will freeze your hands on the keyboard. He will convince you to turn your back on that story that you could see like a movie in your head. That cantankerous soul will make you doubt every word you put on the page. Your internal editor has his place in the process, but it isn’t now. Give her a margarita and tell her to wait her turn.
    4. Just keep going until you get to the end. Well, that’s pretty stupid advice, isn’t it? If you could get to the end, you wouldn’t need this blog post. But this goes along with tip #3. Just keep going. Without worrying too much about how it’s all going to hang together. Without stopping every paragraph to polish the prose. Without going back to chapter 4 and adding that crucial information you didn’t figure out you needed until chapter 18. Just make a note to yourself about what needs adding and keep going. The time for worrying about those changes, for letting the editor out of the closet and taking away her margarita is at the end. Because after you’ve written right to the end, you have a book you can re-write and fix and polish. As author Nora Roberts said (my all-time fave writing quote), “I can fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank page.”

    So, there you go. With these four fabulous tips, finishing your novel will be easy-peasy. A do-it-with-your-eyes-closed cake-walk. Heh. Yeah, right.

    It isn’t easy. It’s cholera-just-broke-out, the-wagon-wheel-broke, early-winter-has-us-snowbound hard. So here’s one more tip to keep you going.

    5. Don’t beat yourself up over the bad days. If all hell breaks loose at home, or you’re exhausted after work, or you have a stack of student essays to correct and you can’t get even one word written, let alone one page, cut yourself some slack. You’ll get back to it tomorrow. And you’ll be one more paragraph, or page, or chapter closer to The End.

    Anything to add? Tips you’ve discovered that keep you going? Please share.

     

  • Kill Your Darlings

    When William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings,” the darlings he referred to were those elegantly composed sections of prose you adore beyond reason. They do nothing for the story, they stick out like garish jewels on an otherwise humble hand, and they must be killed (i.e., deleted). It’s difficult to say goodbye to those intricate metaphors and precious phrasing, but they have no business being in your manuscript. Sorry, gotta go.

    There are other kinds of problem children that we sometimes insert into our prose, that also have a bad influence on our work.  For instance, words we have a compulsion to use often and liberally (redundantly even) in our books. Punctuation we have a special affection for. Turns of phrase we throw in at every opportunity.

    Since confession is good for the soul, I’ll reveal mine here. I love em dashes. You know what they are–those long dashes that break up two clauses. When I do a final edit of my book, I search for all the em dashes and in most cases, I can either replace them with a comma, or separate the two clauses into two sentences. I also have a particular fondness for ellipses (also ruthlessly squelched), and am a recovering semi-colon-aholic. In the word choice department, adverbs are my bad actors. Really.

    In other authors’ work, I’ve seen overuse of the word mumble (a very useful word that loses its power when utilized too often), nervous characters chewing their lips so often it’s surprising their mouth is not in shreds, and the italic overload (IMO, italics are hard on the eyes and should be used sparingly). The exclamation point is also a travesty, although its overuse seems to be limited to newbies.

    The nice thing about all these pecadillos that creep into our writing is that once we recognize the problem, we can fix it on that final edit. I’ve acknowledged to myself that em dashes and ellipses are part of my process, how I get the words down on the page. I know I can take them out later, but in the draft process it works best to just let myself put them in. Same for my adverbosity. I’ll trim those back in a later draft.

    So what are your problem children? Metaphors you overuse, that character action you repeat ten times too many in your manuscript? Feel free to share.

  • Tankborn Outtakes

    Back around October 2009, I finished work on a manuscript titled GENeration, a young adult science fiction book. I knew it wasn’t finished finished. I didn’t yet have an agent or editor for the book, but I knew that when I did, they would have their say in further re-writes. But I thought the book was ready enough to start querying agents. It turned out I was deluding myself, but I nevertheless e-mailed out my first query on October 13, 2009.

    I’d been sending out queries for about a month and a half when it occurred to me that having a beta reader look it over would be a really great idea (gee, ya think?). Luckily, I could keep the read in the family via my younger son. He wasn’t exactly swimming in spare time (he was in the third year of his PhD in economics), but he’s a fast reader and brutally honest. He got back to me at the end of November 2009 with suggestions for some pretty extensive changes.

    Of course, I’d already sent the complete manuscript out to a few agents, including the agent who eventually took me on. Hindsight being what it is, this was when I realized I really hadn’t been ready to start querying. Yes, I wish I’d thought to send the book to my son before that first query. But water under the bridge and all that.

    In any case, those agents who had the manuscript were happy to replace it with the new and improved version. I eventually got offers from two agents. The agent I signed with asked for another major re-write before he sent it out. Then the book sold to Lee and Low/Tu Books, and required even more changes including a title morph from GENeration to Tankborn. Tankborn was released in Sept. 2011.

    Along the way, what with all this re-writing and editing, by necessity a lot of material got deleted from the manuscript. As part of the various and sundry editing, there were four quite sizeable chunks that ended up on the cutting room floor. Each of them was at least a few pages long and the content in them was fairly significant. They offered some pretty cool perspectives of life on the planet Loka, where Tankborn is set. Unfortunately, these scenes didn’t do anything to move the story forward. They didn’t “earn their keep” and had to go.

    But I thought it would be fun to put them up on my website, part of some exclusive material that will only be available there. So if you’d like to read what might have been in Tankborn, take a look here. If you haven’t yet read the book, there is some spoilerage, but it is clearly marked. So it’s safe for all to take a peek.