Archive for the ‘ Editing ’ Category

Todays Lesson in Writing: The Writer’s Button Box

In Twilight’s Child (Rewrite) I ran into a problem/opportunity, they can be indistinguishable. I had removed an entire subplot. In brief, the Protagonist, Alec Thisbe, has a sister who was a “seventh son,” the seventh son of the seventh son down seven generations.
Yes, she is female and I have changed the rules to reflect that mortals, as opposed to the Fae, got it wrong. Every firstborn of her family line back seven generations was female, so she has the innate ability to use Fae Glamour (Magic).
I wrote her subplot because my protagonist for this first novel is a Changeling, an immortal Fae left in the crib in the place of a mortal child taken as a hostage in the Tithe to Hell.
I deleted the subplot because I had toyed with writing for a younger audience. I have changed my mind, so his older sister is in, and her dalliance with Puck is back in.

Now, I had thought I deleted those scenes, and it would have been a real pain in the tuchus to rewrite. I just pulled them out of an early copy of the novel.

Every thing I’ve written has had scenes or paragraphs deleted. I have a file where I keep those old versions. I consider it like keeping button box. Because I am old as dirt, I will explain for those who do not understand the reference in this throw away age.

My mother and grandmother kept buttons off old clothes or spares when they had to buy buttons in a box. When one of us kids would lose a button, an event so regular as to be the norm, they would have a source of buttons to make repairs.

My writer’s button box came to my rescue.

On the Vanishing Habits Habitat

I am not a member of alliteration anonymous. Just thought I would write that.

I have discovered that the phrase, Old Habits Die Hard, is, at best, inaccurate. For some weeks, I kept my daily blog for weeks—weeks I tell you — and then ran into articles that told me I did it wrong. I’ve discovered Blogging daily had become a part of my discipline, and without it, I faltered.

I did not stop writing, but I have found it more difficult without this daily habit. Today, this afternoon actually, I chose to dump the way I am supposed to do this and move back to a daily post.

Twilight’s Child Progress

I have slammed up against one of my lousy habits with Twilight’s Child (the name may change). I now finish novels; now I need to learn to edit them. I am having trouble. Other than a few ongoing projects, I intend to bull my way through. If I can’t read through it who will, after all?

Writer’s Boot Camp

The Boot Camp goes well. Having done it before, these early phases are a bit of a chore, but it changes a bit from run to run and we will soon be over this phase.

A Cat by Any Other Name

I began a short story, A Cat by Any Other Name, and wrote 504 words. I expect it to hit 2000. Oddly, it started as a Fan Fiction for Forgotten Realms. One thing led to another. I am gong to start writing Fan Fiction and posting things on Fan Fiction sites to get people to know my name.

Pro Tip by Emma T. Gitani

Creator Emma T. Gitani Editor and Author.

Emma T. Gitani is a writer and editor of my acquaintance. As a warrior in the eternal conflict between telling and showing, she provides professional tips for the Author-Warrior.

Remember: SHOW don’t TELL!

Emma T. Gitani, Editing Services

Emma T. Gitani Author Page

A Pantser’s Lament

For a pantser, the potential of the blank screen is cocaine shot straight to the third eye creating a pineal high, an occult fusion of creativity and melatonin. Nothing is holding the story to the earth, and you can fly to Andromeda or places much father and stranger.
The Downside is the inevitable crash when your story wonders into a dismal swamp in the bowels of a pointless pit. Your characters followed a freeway sign reading, “So what happens next, asshole,” and stand sphincter deep in “quickmud, abandoned by conflict, comfort, and subplots.

The Inevitable result of this unmapped waypoint in a writer’s peerless prose is the decision to abandon all hope yee who write yourself here, or regroup and rethink where your story took its left turn in Albuquerque. (Remember this decision. I’ll get back to it later.)

For me, that point is fifteen thousand words into my work in progress, the first of a Space Opera Trilogy. I began knowing how the first book started and ended. As for the rest, I have visions of mutated sugarplums dancing in my head., my series antagonist, and a frontal lobe full of MacGuffins. Sometimes, it is just a fusion of an aha moment and despair fixed by jumping back a scene or two, adding a new character to subplot to the mix, or just muscling past the swamp freezing your short and curlies. More often, a pantser throws up metaphorical arms and returns to the potential of the blank screen and moves on while pretending to be older and wiser. (The former is always true, but the later almost never.

Step 1: Cry it Out Dude

No, I am not suggesting you go biblical by rending your clothes or moving right into sackcloth and ashes. The pointless pit where a Pantser finds the story leads depresses and disheartens the creator and creativity. Our darling is drowning in foul odorous quickmud, and that requires a moment of grief. I am not suggesting a side trip through the five stages of grief recovery; you’ve lost your narrative direction not your dog or cat. I recommend a cup of coffee, no more than a glass (oh hell make it a bottle) of wine, or a joint. Take the last two under advisement. Alcohol loosens inhibitions but depresses the mind. Pot leads to a relaxed sense of well being but can cause cases of the munchies and lead to, “fuck it, dude, and light up another.”

Step 2: “Whatta Ya Lookin At, Back to Work!” Hector Barbossa1

Feel better? Good. Remember that choice in Paragraph 1? I told you we would get back to it.
Okay, you are fifteen, twenty, fifty thousand words of peerless prose with nowhere to go. Probably, you got her through a combination improvisation and declaring, “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead. You’ve sunk your plot in quickmud by crossing that swamp without a support structure. No, no, no, I’m not suggesting you change your authorial religion from Pantser to Planner. The whole point of this exercise is to do the minimum amount of work so you can find a rope and pull your characters out of the mud. Unless you want to dump the last hour, day, week, or month of writing, do not enter the Abandoned Hope Hotel. Every pantser must make this decision for themselves but for efficiency’s sake, regroup, especially if the word count is a substantial portion of a novella or novel. I have found two approaches that help me get back on track. (No, you don’t have to use them both, just find one that works for you. )

Structure, Structure, Structure

One of my professors of creative writing said, “classic western story contains thee acts, a beginning, middle, and an end.” You are not going to turn into a “Planner” if you take a moment to write on note cards (old school) or make a comment in our manuscript a basic outline of your acts.
Act 1: 25% of your book containing your hook, your instigating incident, and your point of no return where POV character commits to the story.
Act 2: 50% of your book, with rising action where the character tries to solve the problem where the stakes of each action get higher and lead to the final failure and the black moment where everything seems lost.
Act 3: 25% of your book containing the climax and denouement (resolution). With that minimum blueprint, most of the time you can see where your book went wrong and put it back on track.

Arc Your Characters

In my experience, a lot of Pantsers write character-driven stories, by asking themselves what would the character do next. Fix a character disaster by creating a character arc for your POV character. An arc resembles an arch. In the beginning, your instigating incident creates tension that the character tries to relieve through some form of conflict (mano a mano, emotional, legal). Reduce character tension by defeating whatever causes the character’s problem. A few cards or comments in your document can reveal the points of conflict and stress and get you back on the road.

“Let Me Sum up” Inigo Montoya2

This is neither a comprehensive list nor an attempt to turn readers into Planners. These approaches worked for me. The intend and purpose is to find the quickest way back to writing the novel. I do not find troubleshooting narrative problems fund or pleasant. There are other approaches I did not touch. For instance, narrative cohesion can fall apart when a character makes an abrupt change without having gone through the process that causes change. (example: POV character is a dynamic leader in the first scene but turns to a follower by the middle of the book.) A simple character dossier can fix this, and changing the dynamic question to “What will my character do next and does it fit the characters personality. Finally, I started writing this for myself, and now I have solved my problem with the work in process, and its times for me to get to work.

1: “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl “

2: “The Princess Bride.””

Writer’s Log 01.20.2019-0752

Sundays are tough, it’s family you know. I want to stay on task, to make my goal, and today I did. But Sundays are difficult. We went to a movie today. We cooked. We hung out together. Tonight the boys went to see Glass.

Adventures in publishing: A reader found an error in Shift. Got it fixed, but I have learned a serious lesson. Editors make mistakes and writer’s pay for them. I need to work much harder with editing from the beginning.

I reached 1099 words today, and wrote a thousand words.

Writers and Holidays

Working writers have few days off. The stories are always there, constant companions demanding freedom. Characters, both the living and dead, drop in for a cup of coffee, and afternoon drink, a glass of wine, to discuss their worlds, which are more real than the default writers space.

The Fourth of July, a day like any other, a work day, with the manuscript calling demanding closure for plot holes and poor grammar and character flat character arcs.

Which leads me to my upcoming novel, Twilight’s Child.

“Twilight’s Child” is a Young Adult Fantasy Novel (12-18 years old) of 94,000 words (74 Scenes divided into 36 chapters) going through a final edit, and due for completion on July 31. I am seeking Beta Readers, an editor, and cover artists.

Twilights Child Elevator Pitch:

An eleven-year-old boy discovers he is a changeling, a faerie exchanged for a human child as part of the Tithe to hell and returns to the Twilight World of the Fae to rescue the child whose life he took.

Read “Shift.” Now Available at Amazon in eBook and Paper Back Formats.

Editing To be and it’s Conjugal Relations

A posting on the Wordward Press Blog I found an excellent resource on editing.

THE CASE OF THE COPULA OVERDOSE

I read a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much fiction writing, even in published books. Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis, 2012) criticizes many aspects of fiction, but saves its most withering scorn for the rampant and indiscriminate use of copulas.

I hear you asking, “What’s a copula?” I admit I had to look it up. Webster’s definition says: “the connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition.” In most cases, this refers to a form of the word “be.” But what does that mean to us everyday writers? It means banal, didactic, often passive sentences, almost completely lacking in action or depth.

As Glover says: “A copula spider occurs when a student uses the verb ‘to be’ so many times on a page that I can circle all the instances, connect them with lines, and draw a spider diagram. Now there is nothing grammatically wrong with the verb ‘to be,’ but if you use it over and over again your prose is likely to be flaccid and uninteresting.”

An excellent resource for editing.

Over-Prepping – Light Bulb

Writer, Lara Lalalynn, (Facebook Friend) posted today about the perils of Over-Prepping, by which she meant TOO MANY PREPOSITIONS.

To-whit

Over-prepping is using superfluous prepositional phrases–often redundant, but also just unnecessary for meaning/clarity. And as with all evil things, it adds to verbosity and will kill pace.”

By Lara Lalalynn

I have this problem. In my latest work, it isn’t so bad, which shoes I’ve learned something, but in this process of going back and editing earlier works, I’ve found myself addicted to prepositional phrases. Good writing means we use the right word and no extra words. Those markers of good writing are in conflict.

Going back to edit, I can look for prepositions, and make sure that each one is necessary.