Karen Sandler

Tag: re-write

  • I Love You, You’re Perfect…Now I’m Gonna Revise You

    rewriting_265x265This week, with November and NaNoWriMo in the rear view mirror, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, How do you approach editing/revising?

    So, here’s the first most important thing about revising. You should write your draft knowing that you not only don’t have to get it perfect the first time through, you’re not expected to get it perfect. That’s one thing about NaNoWriMo that’s pretty great. The demand is so enormous (having to average close to 1700 words a day, every single day of November), you can’t possibly revise as you go. You just have to barrel ahead, getting the words down. But you have that freedom every time you write. You can always fix it later.

    Here’s the second most important thing–nothing that you’ve written is sacred. Nothing. Nothing. Every chapter, scene, paragraph, word, even character must be subservient to the story. If something doesn’t work, even if it worked at first, but in the course of revising is no longer relevant, that beautiful chapter, scene, paragraph, word, or character must go. And you must be ruthless in cutting out that dead weight.

    Here’s the third most important thing about revising. You must approach your revisions as if you were the editor rather than the writer of the book. You must go in there looking for trouble, not expecting a masterpiece. And you should never take it personally. Even the best manuscripts go wrong sometimes.

    Now that we’ve got those three basic musts down, here are a few other things I’ve learned over the course of writing and revising 20+ books.

    1. Give it a rest. After you’ve finished your manuscript, give yourself some time so you can return to it with a fresher eye. How much time? I personally don’t like to go longer than a week, and it’s usually just a few days. But you might need a couple weeks or even a month.
    2. Give it a read and think story as you go. Are the story questions answered? Are all the setups paid off? Is there extraneous material that doesn’t move the story forward? Are there characters who don’t pull their weight? This is where your major revising will be happening, where your bigger problems are solved.
    3. Give it another read and look at characters and details. Are your characters’ actions & dialogue consistent for them? Have you introduced word or phrasing repetitions in the course of your first big revision? Ditto for typos?
    4. Give it a final read. Are there any parts that just don’t flow? Awkward phrasing, expository dialogue, settings that are either overly detailed or not detailed enough? Anything confusing that you think a reader might stumble over or have a problem following?
    5. Let someone else give it a read. If you have a critique group or a beta reader, preferably someone who has never heard about the story, ask them to read it. It has to be someone whose opinion you completely respect and trust. And you have to be open-minded about their feedback.
    6. As needed, give the manuscript one last revision based on reader feedback.

    So is it a hard and fast rule that you must give your book three (and only three, no more, no less) readthroughs? No. But is it necessary to pay attention to all of the above elements while revising? I’d say yeah. If you can do that with one pass through the book, that’s great. As long as you’re reading with an editors eye, and are brutally honest with yourself about what’s working and what’s not.

    Happy revising!

  • My Father’s Daughter

    Years ago, my mom told me a story about my dad that was both funny and telling. Early in their marriage, my dad decided to paint the picket fence surrounding the house they lived in. The thing is, he didn’t just get out a can of paint and start painting. He had to figure out a better way. As my mother told it, he spent more time rigging up a contraption to hang the paint can around his neck for handy access than he did actually painting the fence.

    I am so my father’s daughter, luckily with some modifications. While I have that same compulsion to find that “better way” to do a task, I resist that urge when the straightforward way will do. But I can come up with thingamajigs with the best of them.

    For instance, I’ve been spending more hours than usual at my computer working on the developmental edit for Awakening, the sequel to Tankborn. I was ending up in a fair amount of pain by the end of the day. Not only was there some carpel tunnel type inflammation, the pressure on my wrist bone from my mouse pad and laptop led to quite a bit of soreness.

    So I put on my thinking cap (the one I inherited from my dad) and considered options for protecting my hands. I went digging through my fabric supply in the garage and came up with some black fake fur I’d used to create some stuffed animal or another. I started out by just cutting a couple rectangles, then folding them in half for extra padding. Resting my hands on those made a world of difference to my comfort.

    But I still had a few issues. How did I keep the rectangles from unfolding? How did I keep the pads on my wrists? Once they were on my wrists, how did I keep them from slipping too far down my arm?

    What you see here is what I came up with. I stitched the rectangles into squares. I added a piece of black elastic to hold the guards to my wrists. Then, to keep them from slipping down, I tied on a couple of hair bands. Hmm, I suppose I should have looked for hair bands in black to keep the same color scheme.

    This is how they look in action. They are dorky looking in the extreme, but since I had all the material on hand, they were free to make (and not too time consuming). Plus, they work just fine, at least to pad my wrist bone. As a protector against carpal tunnel syndrome, they suck, but that wasn’t their purpose.

    For that, I had to rearrange my work space. I use a laptop, and I could never get a very good wrist angle while typing on the keyboard. Not to mention with the screen being down at desk height, my neck was having issues with my head constantly tipping down to see the screen. So I did two things. One, I got an external keyboard with its keys laid out in a slightly more ergonomic way. It allowed me to a) have my forearms level with my wrist (essentially parallel to the floor) and b) have a comfortable angle between elbow to fingers as I type rather than straight on.

    The second thing I did is elevate my laptop. This allows me to look at the screen straight on rather than tipping my head down. I feel rather smug that I didn’t have to buy the rack it’s sitting on. It was tucked away in the garage (because we never throw anything away), just waiting for a brilliant idea to put it into use.

    What you can’t see in the pictures is that I have a drawer open on the mouse side, and a board on top of it to give my arm support when I’m mousing. All of these changes have made a big difference in my comfort as I make my way through my manuscript.

    Unfortunately, my cats tend to thwart my ergonomics when they lie in my lap and drape themselves across my arm. Casper here isn’t as much a problem as Tenka, who suspends half her 14-pound body across my left arm. Ouch.

     

    But I think my solutions are pretty cool. And I think my dad would be proud.

  • 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.