The LadyKillers

12 Tips for Self-Editing

By Margaret Lucke

"There is no such thing as good writing -- there is only good rewriting."
-- Anonymous

You've come up with a great plot. You've created characters that your readers will love and root for (or root against, in the case of a villain). Now that you've finished that first draft, or the second one, what else can you do to make your book a standout?

Part of my "day job" involves critiquing and editing manuscripts for other writers. Based on what I've learned from reading and analyzing many manuscripts, and from reader what writers wiser than I am say about our craft, I see the revision process as having two main goals. Here they are, along with some tips to help you achieve them both when you're going over your work with a red pencil in hand:

Goal 1:  Give the reader a rich experience

Nonfiction provides information. Fiction is about plunging your readers into your story world and giving them a rewarding experience there. If you engage their emotions and make them feel like participants in what's going on, they'll come away satisfied.

1.  Show, don't tell. Yes, this has become something of a cliché, but there's a reason--because telling the story mainly through action and dialogue makes it more lively and engaging for the reader.

 2.  Tell the story in scenes. Make each scene a mini-story, in which a specific action occurring at a specific moment and in a specific place.

 3.  Keep the point of view consistent. Put your readers in one character's mind and keep them there for the entire scene--or the entire book.

 4.  Stay in the present moment. Keep time in your story moving forward. Let your readers feel like the story is happening right now in front of their eyes.

 5.  Use vivid details. Details are the bricks you use to build a bridge between your imagination and the reader's. Make them specific, sensory, and in keeping with what your POV character would notice.

 6.  Make your dialogue sound like real people talking. Give your characters individual, colloquial voices and keep their conversations interactive.

Goal 2:  Achieve the maximum impact in the minimum number of words

This doesn't mean you can't write a long story or use lush, detailed prose to tell it. Just be sure that every word makes a real contribution to the effect you're trying to create.

7.  Make every word earn its keep. Ask yourself:  How can I say this more sharply, effectively, succinctly?

 8.  Watch for the 3 R's. Try to avoid too many repetitions, rhetorical questions, and ruminations (those long passages where a character does nothing but think).

9.  Don't overexplain. Draw readers into your story world, show them what is happening there, and let them reach their own understanding.

10.  Remember that shorter = faster. To pick up the pace, use shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, and shorter scenes.

11.  Don't hide your strong points. If a dramatic moment occurs, don't bury in the middle of a paragraph. And construct sentences and paragraphs so that the strongest word or idea comes at the end.

12.  Choose words for their effect as well as their meaning. Consider their energy level, emotional impact, sound and rhythm, and the mental picture they create.

What are your favorite self-editing tips?

Strangers in My Brain

by Margaret Lucke

A late afternoon in early spring. I've just left my office in the attic of a Victorian mansion, where I worked for San Francisco's historic preservation organization. I'm walking down the block toward Van Ness Avenue, where I’ll catch a bus to the printshop that my husband and I own, where I plan to put in a few hours of bookkeeping.

The daylight is fading and the air is cool. My steps beat a rhythm on the sidewalk, and I begin to hear a conversation in my mind. A woman is awakened late at night by a jangling phone. The caller announces that he is her father, but it's not the voice of the man who raised her. "I'm your real father," he insists. She slams down the receiver.

Where did that come from? And how intriguing. During the bus ride I replay the exchange between the two of them, father and daughter, or are they?

Arriving at the printshop, I settle in at my desk. Before I pull out the stack of bills to pay, I write down the dialogue that's bouncing around in my head.

I don't know it at the time, but I've just begun to write my first novel, A Relative Stranger.

It's not as though I'd never started one before. I had files filled with scraps of paper like this one, on which I’d scribbled snippets of stories and random ideas. In a few cases I'd written a chapter or two, but then the book would stall. Although I'd written short stories, I'd never figured out how to write a long one. Starting was easy, but how did you keep the momentum rolling?

This time the characters wouldn't let me quit. They captivated me--who were they? What was their real relationship to each other? Why did she hang up on him so abruptly?

Soon I discovered that the woman was Jess Randolph, an artist who worked as an investigator for a private detective firm to support her art habit. The man, Allen Fraser, was indeed her biological father, but he had walked out on Jess and her mom when she was a small child. Now he was reaching out because he needed her professional help--he was the prime suspect in a high-profile murder.

Cramming a novel into my busy life was hard. I went weeks, sometimes months, without adding to my word count. But sooner or later the characters would drift back into my brain, usually as I was falling asleep, and whisper one more small piece of the story. In the morning I'd jot down this new revelation and once more my work would be in progress.

As I kept writing what interested me most was not what Jess did to solve the murder, but how she handled the jolt of having her father drop back into her life. It was fascinating to watch as a relationship warily developed between them.

I encountered two main challenges in writing the story. One was to maintain a balance between Jess’s sleuthing and her personal dilemma. The other, of course, was my old bugaboo, keeping up the momentum. When the novel was half written I stumbled on a book about screenwriting and read the section on the three-act structure with wide-open eyes. Here was the secret I'd been looking for. Once I divided plot into three acts and identified the dramatic moments that twisted it from one act into the next, the whole story fell together. I finished the book with renewed confidence and enthusiasm. I'm not saying every writer will find this approach helpful, but it made all the difference to me.

Taking my first book on the long journey from idea to finished manuscript taught me how to write. The journey from there to publication was educational too, but that's another story.

The Last Last Draft Draft

This is not the first draft of the last draft, it's the last 'last draft' draft, and I have to finish this before my first husband becomes my first ex-husband.

Here goes:

Let the defendant state clearly for the record, I do not ever get to the last draft. Ever.

Are you the last draft? Are you? Are you?

Like Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, I keep taking shots at it:

• First draft, that's super painful, like pulling teeth, and only a quarter of the book ends up on the page, plus another quarter of foul dreck that'll have to be excised. And quickly, before it stinks up the good stuff. If there was any good stuff.
• Second draft, I'm still not fooling myself. Usually I have to pull out at least one major character, try to imagine scenes more exciting than going somewhere to talk, and face the fact that yet again, I am not Dennis Lehane or Cornell Woolrich nor will I ever be.
• Third draft, I start to remember that my goal is to be the best me I can, and the sting of not being Dennis Lehane begins to fade. With terrifying and entirely misplaced self-confidence, I think up too many new plot twists, forget to track eye color and last names in my spreadsheet, and generaly make a huge old mess. Messy McMesserton. I do also usually write two or three scenes that aren't entirely horrible.
• Fourth draft, I can't remember why I ever thought writing was a good idea. There's a lot of swearing over this draft, as I find structural...anomalies akin to the architectural issues of the Winchester Mystery House. And have no idea how to fix them.
• Fifth draft leaves me feeling like a fake. Who writes five drafts? But there's so much time invested, and there are about five scenes that aren't perfectly terrible. And so I go on and on and on. (Hah, this is just the kind of cliche I would have cut out, if this weren't the last draft!)

At this point, my friends forbid me to mention "that stupid book." My husband tries to decide if he could start over with someone who has hobbies instead of obsessions. Who could blame them?

Once I'm convinced I can't make any more major changes without doing more harm than good, then the checklist work starts. Sure, Amy Tan can keep all those people and all that history in her head, but it turns out I'm not Amy Tan either. She was probably a better technical writer than I am, too.

Here's just a few items from the checklists:

• Are there cliche scenes, character traits, phrases?
• How many senses have I exercised in each scene? Enough of them?
• Dialog differentiation. If I cover up the context, can I tell who's talking just from the dialog?
• Emotional tone map--does every scene start in one emotional place and end in another?
• Does each scene ask a question, provide some kind of answer, and sew the seed for the next question? (Hey, how did I miss another cliche?)
• Gestures: does everybody sigh quietly? Roll their eyes? Or is there variety of physical movement? One day I'm going to have a character who makes noise with their armpit, just to round out the gestures.
• Are the stakes higher in each sequence, if not scenes?

And those are just the easy ones.

My point is, I'm never done. I don't ever pat the computer and think, "Ah, that's perfect." Only "Oh, I guess this won't embarass me, and there's no time to do better before it's due." Even the short story that's going to be published next year, on real paper, if they're still doing that next year. It wasn't done, it was just out of time.

My fellow LadyKillers clearly have mastered the art of the draft. Maybe one day I'll learn it. Until then, like poor Rita H., I'll have to just keep shooting.

Trying to Get to the Last Draft

By Margaret Lucke

She's gone. Vanished. Disappeared without a trace.

Sitting alone in my office, I drum my fingers on the desktop. I sort papers from one stack into another and back again. I stare at the blank page on my computer screen.

Where could she be?

Finally I type two words: Chapter Twenty. At least the page isn't blank anymore.

What if she never comes back? What will I do then?

Just as I'm about to file a missing person report, my Muse comes strolling in, wearing a flower lei and drinking something pink and frothy out of a glass topped with a paper umbrella.

"What?" she says when she notices that I'm glaring at her.

I say, "Where the heck have you been?" or words to that effect.

"Such language," she says, turning away. "Just for that, I'm not going to give you a sip." She starts to walk out of the room again.

"Wait!" I jump up and run to the door, blocking her exit. "Don't leave. I need you."

"You don't have to get all excited. I just went out for a little walk."

"Looks more like you took a swim. All the way to Hawaii."

She swirls her hips in a hula move. "I need to recharge my batteries sometimes, just like you do."

 "You were gone for days. Weeks. No goodbye. No postcard."

"What's the big deal, anyway?" To my relief my Muse walks to my desk and sets down her glass. I'm so glad she's back that I want to hug her, but that might just drive her away again. She's nothing if not temperamental and capricious.

I sit back down in the desk chair. "I'm trying to get to the last draft of my novel. You know that."

The last draft is my favorite. Writing the first draft is hard work. It means figuring out who these people are whom the Muse has set running, or sometimes slinking, around inside my head, and then cajoling her into explaining what they're up to. For the next draft--and the next, and sometimes another--I have to take the huge mess that we created in the first go-round and turn it into something logical and coherent. Not to mention suspenseful and compelling. But the last draft is easy; it's polishing the diamond you squeezed out of that big lump of coal.

"You're already up to the last draft? Good for you." The Muse claps her hands. "See, you don't really need me." She leans over my shoulder and stares at the computer screen as she reads the words aloud. " 'Chapter Twenty.' Really? That's it? All you've written is those two words?"

"Well, I'm still working out the details of the scene in my head … "

"Last draft!" She snorts. "When I left you had just finished chapter nineteen. You haven't done a thing."

"I've been busy," I say in my defense. "And you were AWOL."

"If there's one rule about writing I've tried to drum into your thick skull it's this one: There's no way to write the last draft until you've written the first one."

"I didn't say I was there yet," I mutter. "I said I'm trying to get there."

My Muse heaves a sigh of exasperation. "Get out of the way," she orders as she pushes me out of the chair. She sits down and begins to type: The detective's heart pounded as she crept into the creepy old house. Could the killer be hiding inside?

"That's terrible," I point out helpfully.

"Of course it is," my Muse says. "It's first draft stuff. We'll fix it later." She takes off the flower lei and puts it around my neck. "Here. This is getting in my way. You might as well finish my drink, too."

"Thanks," I say. "I mean, for coming back." The sweet scent of jasmine and plumeria fills the air. In my next novel, maybe I should send my detective off to a tropical island.

"I never really left. I was hanging out in your imagination the whole time, just like I always do. That place could use a good dusting, by the way."

My Muse scoots over in the chair, making room for me. She pats the seat. "Sit down," she says. "Now let's get to work."

"Final?"

-from Susan the procrastinator

The Final Draft

I stand in awe of Penny Warner, Camille Minichino, and my fellow LadyKillers who march through their manuscripts in what seems to me double time, meet tough deadlines, get their plots and characters right, and build loyal audiences who can count on them to produce another terrific book in nine months, like a brand new bouncing baby.

How do they do it? I’m the wrong person to ask. If I had an ounce less discipline than the six ounces I have, I’d never be ready to pronounce a manuscript finished. I have a tendency to circle back to the beginning to nip and tuck a plot issue, sharpen or better conceal an early clue, or make some other vitally important (to me at least) change again and again. It drives me crazy. My agent is a patient woman, but I fear I test her elegant manners and strong support.

I want to be done, but I don’t want to send something that isn’t my best. And that’s a moving target, one that can never be met, really. It is also a way to avoid tackling that one troublesome scene somewhere after the middle of the manuscript, the part that really isn’t anywhere near my best, the one that at this minute I’m fighting with. So I go back to chapter one and tinker with it, or to chapter four…and so avoid chapter fifteen, which is, simply put, a mess.

That’s where I’m headed today, honestly. No more fooling around with the beginning or the name of a minor character or the uneven lengths of chapters. I tell myself, no one cares about those. They will care about the characters bumping into walls in chapter fifteen, and so I’m summoning my small reserves of self-discipline and wading in to fight the good fight.

Getting to the final draft? I am the wrong person to ask. Stay tuned this week for the real experts!

 

Getting to that Last Draft By Michael A. Black

Ironically, as I’m writing this blog, I’m trying to get to the last draft of a major novel project, so the timing of this particular subject was right on the money. I wish I was proceeding as well on finishing the novel. Usually I can hammer a book out with no problem, but this one has proved more problematic than most. But, as they say, getting to that last draft is only as hard as you make it.

My old physics teacher, Mr. Rush, used to say “Starting is half the battle. So you start twice and the battle’s over.” Physics, you see, has a lot to do with measurement. I learned a lot from him. A lot of it had to do with physics, but like all good teachers, he included lessons about life too.

So getting back to getting to that last draft . . . What’s the key? That’s simple--- Hard work.

It’s no secret that I’m a great proponent of outlining. If you know where you’re going, the book seems to proceed with more precision than if you don’t. I guess that’s kind of a no brainer, isn’t it? Let’s use the analogy of a road trip. If you have a road map of some sort you can gauge where you are, and know about how far you have to go, Thus, you should be able to estimate how much longer you’ll be driving. The same thing applies to writing. Not knowing where you are in the story can lead to many problems. You can write yourself into a corner for the fun of it, but you’d better at least have an idea of how many pages you have to write yourself out of it.

You also need have an idea as to where you’re going. For those of you into vintage TV, I’ll use the example of the old show, Route 66. It had an engaging premise: two young men out to find themselves, drove along the historic Route 66 in a sports car discovering America. They would become embroiled in various conflicts along the way, but were always able to tie things up and resume their journey. The show’s writer, Stirling Silliphant, used to travel the route himself, looking for ideas and producing a teleplay for an upcoming episode each week. Obviously, Mr. Silliphant could deliver a finished script in a timely fashion and had no problem getting to his last draft. But if you use this type of approach for your own writing, one of the problems you may run into is losing your focus. Maintaining the focus of the plot is essential as you work through the various acts to get to the end. Losing your focus, like you were meandering along Route 66 in a Corvette convertible, can not only slow you down, it can lead you off on a series of unending tangents.

I read William Faulkner when I was in college, both as an undergrad and a graduate student. When I was an undergrad I blindly accepted the professor’s word that this was great prose and I should strive to understand and appreciate it. After all, Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize. By the time I got around to grad school a few decades had passed and I’d not only developed a stronger sense of self, but also the ability to form my own opinions. I had to read Faulkner’s Light in August for one class and found it slow going. My only guess is he was so drunk he forgot where he was in the story each time he sat down to write it, or it was true that his secretary wrote all the books and that she loved to be tangential.

I’m not here to bash poor, old William, although I reckon somebody probably does need to point out that he was a marginally talented writer at best and had a tendency to make up words, and tell those professors to quit shoving him down the throats of their students lest we lose even more future readers. (How was that for a Faulknerian-type sentence?)

What I am saying is maintaining a sense of awareness as to where you are in the story is desirable. It should be desirable for the reader too.

So let’s review before this piece morphs into something as unreadable as one of those rambling novels. Make yourself an outline so you can plan where you’re going and know along the way how far you’ve gotten. Maintain your focus while doing this, and if you do get stuck, start over.

Remember, starting is half the battle.

NEWS and that Last Draft

NEWS FLASHES!!

• Rita Lakin's Gladdy Gold book, GETTING OLD IS CRIMINAL, has been optioned for a TV Movie by a renowned German production company. Rita notes, "That means translated into German, shot with German actors in Germany."
• Mary Anna Evans will be teaching a writing workshop in the South of France next summer, June 9-16.  Details are here: http://www.kaydiestoursofprovence.com/creative_pursuits.php The guests will spend the morning touring Provence with a French- and English-speaking American tour guide, then they'll spend the afternoons with Mary Anna, exploring ways to use their travel experience to infuse their fiction with a sense of place.  Everyone will unwind in the evenings with great food, fine wine, and sparkling conversation.
• The Square Root of Murder by Ada Madison (aka Camille Minichino) has just gone into a third printing.
• Camille will will be at the Showcase of Miniatures show in San Jose, California, all day Saturday, October 15.
• Penny Warner is doing a Code Buster event at Greenbrook School, San Ramon, California, on Monday, October 10, and blogging on Vampchix on Monday, October 10, blogging on Dollycas on Wednesday, October 12, and doing  a Code Buster event at San Leandro Library, San Leandro, California, at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday.
• Hannah Schwartz's Underworld Detection Agency novels get the nod from her publisher! Hannah now has a contract in hand for books 4-5 & 6, plus two novellas spinning off a new series.