Tag: revision

New Stage of Revision

Laura Highcove

My writing process involves a lot of: ‘oh I’ll add that foreshadowing later’ or ‘I guess I’ll need to stick in an extra scene sometime’ or even ‘well I’ll get around to explaining that.’ in it. Now, for the first time, I have reached a stage where I actually have everything I wanted to do in the story. It’s not all perfect and beautiful and flowing, to be sure. But it’s all there.

And since it’s out with beta readers, I sort of hit a spot where I have no desire to work on it. It feels like a little switch in my head got flicked to ‘done’, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not, in fact, done.

So I am using this blogging time to both blog, as well as plan what the next few steps will be, still holding to the DIYMFA revision pyramid, which for it’s simplicity, is so powerful. I have the bottom of the pyramid done. I know my pov. I have my character development done. My plot and story structure is all there.

That leaves making a list!

World building:

  • Make sure I have enough artifacts floating around that the world feels like it has artifacts.
  • Make sure all my magic is logical (As well as Tabitha’s progression through learning it.)
  • Hashing out the syntax of commands used for the Storybook.
  • Figuring out syntax for using remnants.

Description/Dialogue:

  • Mark all the places where description needs a boost. (Most of the fights fall in here.)
  • Make sure every person’s voice sounds right in their dialogue.

Theme:

  • Choice vs Fate
  • Everyone needs friends

Line Editing:

  • Print out the story on paper and see what typos pop out.

Now, the world building is still something I can do while the story is out with the beta readers, because if any of the feedback involves “well, I dunno about this world having magic” then I have other problems. The rest of it should wait until I know what scenes I may be adding or subtracting or moving around. Line editing won’t happen until I’m ready to submit to an agent. (I’ve only line edited one story before. It was annoying, and that story was only 12k words.)

I think the biggest thing I got from this week is remembering the benefits of sitting down and making a plan. Even though I never cleave 100% to the plan I make, it just helps to organize everything in my head and makes everything seem attainable as well. And it’s always important to give myself a little ego boost from time to time.

Embracing Your Zero Moment

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

I wrote this blog post in response to a prompt from DIYMFA.com. I’m a bit behind the curve in terms of timing, but I wanted to write this post anyway, so it gave me an excuse.

Embrace Your Zero Moment
The hardest step in your creative development is the “zero moment,” the point where you go from doing nothing to doing something. The distance between the zero moment and being a newbie is far greater than the distance between newbie and pro, yet rarely does anyone celebrate this pivotal, important step. Today, we want you to celebrate. Think back to your zero moment and do something to celebrate that incredible leap of faith.

The zero moment I remember the best is for my current story, probably because it’s most recent. I have always wanted to do a story based in or around fairy tales, due largely in part to The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey but for a long time I didn’t have a way to make it work or any real inspiration.

Then, in March of 2014 I was skimming through the “fairy books” by Andrew Lang which were published online. I was reading through different fairy tales until I stumbled on one called ‘The Little Wildrose’. As with all of my ‘research’, I don’t so much take what is, as use what I read to come up with a spark of my own. As soon as I got to the point about the Wildrose being raised by eagles, my mind immediately went to gryffins. (Because I love gryffins, but that will be a future post.)

And as basic and uncomplicated as this tale is, this was the spark that I needed to throw me into the whirlwind of creating a new story. I forget why I decided to make Wildrose a guy instead of a girl. I think it may have started as an idea to have all the roles in the fairy tales gender swapped, as an early version of this story had Wildrose attempting to stop a female Bluebeard from collecting and killing husbands. As I wrote my early drafts I kept coming on the issue of needing another character for Wildrose to play off of.

Eventually Tabitha popped out and took over as the main character of the story. I wrote a chapter or so and then the story sat there until October of that same year when I decided I was going to do this story for NaNoWriMo, only one month wasn’t enough, so I gave myself a goal of 40k words for October, and then did the 50k words in November as well, leaving me with over 90k words by the end of November.

During December I organized what I had written (I don’t always write in order, and I tend to go off on a lot of tangents while writing a rough draft) as well as had a mentor call with Gabriela that helped me to make a plan for tackling the revision. This story is actually what started me on my ‘post a week‘ habit as I wanted to keep track of what I did.

Now everything did not go nearly as beautifully as my plan would suggest, but I certainly did a lot of editing and character development and world building in the next five months. I ‘completed’ my revision only to realize the story was only 55k words.

After a break to let the story rest I came back and did more development work until I threw myself at NaNoWriMo again in order to hammer out the second half of the book. (Which I had really struggled with.) Then I stopped and reassessed.

I had my husband alpha read the story at the beginning of this year, and then I just started hammering out problems over and over, until we get to the present, where the story is out for its first beta read. It really is encouraging to be able to look back at the zero moment to see exactly how far I have come. Two years is a long time, but I’ve also gotten a lot of work done, as well as improved myself as a writer. Even with all the ridiculous doubts along the way, it really is all about not giving up.

Out to Beta Readers

Laura Highcove

So this week I finished up my rough draft of The Storyteller. I then went through and did a quick read of the entire book, fixed up a few things, held myself back from fixing other things, and then compiled and sent it out to my beta readers. There’s not much more to my week than that, except in that reading the story in its completion, I got the sense that maybe the bad parts aren’t quite as bad as I thought they were. It needs work, sure, but it might actually all be there. Now I just have to wait for my beta readers to get back to me. Hopefully they’ll have some helpful advice that will help me improve the story even more.

Resistance to Finishing

Laura Highcove

So I ran into some major resistance this week with my story. And I kind of knew I was having resistance, and I let myself resist. I’m still not entirely sure if the resistance comes from the fact that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make this fight scene satisfying, or because I know that once this scene is done, the story is ready for beta readers. It might be a little bit of both.

Truth be told, it might also come from the fact that I don’t know how to finish. This will be the first time that I am going to be able to say to myself that my rough draft is actually done enough that I am letting other people read it and asking them for real, actually feedback. There is no more “oh I’ll add that later”. It needs to all be in there.

Now that’s not to say things won’t change after this. But this will be a first. A first I’m resisting. It’s always funny when people talk about the ‘fear of success’, but it really is a thing.

My mind is even trying to push me on to other stories, having great ideas for things not related to this story, in a wild attempt to distract me from finishing. Even as I’m writing this blog post. This was the time I was supposed to sit down and use for writing but I’m writing this blog post instead. It’s good to get my concerns out, but at a certain point it’s just procrastination. Back to work.

Taking Stock

Laura Highcove

So this week I spent going through the story and taking stock of the progression of all of my main characters and their relationships toward each other while ignoring everything else. It actually gave me some good insights into Tabitha and Wildrose’s relationship toward the end of the book.

And it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. Is everything perfect? Nope, but it is good enough for now. Then I decided to go through and look at all the comments I have and pull out the things that really need to be fixed. And I found myself able to pass over some things that weren’t all that important, that last week I would’ve stressed out over. The list that I have isn’t even that bad. I am feeling confidant about my ability to get this story out to beta readers before too long.

Tomorrow I plan on giving it a quick read through to find any problems I might not have marked with comments. Shouldn’t take too long as I know which scenes are lovely and beautiful and which are not. And that one pesky scene I am convinced I need but have still not been able to write. I’m going to have to nail that down this week for sure.

Also, in case you didn’t notice, I have a sign up for my new Newsletter over on the right hand side. If you sign up then you can get the current version of Chapter One of The Storyteller. Please sign up and let me know what you think.

Mentoring Session

Laura Highcove

This past Wednesday, I was delighted to have another mentoring session with Gabriela Pereira, the instigator of DIYMFA.com. I came into this session, having hit what felt like a wall in my revision. I was trying to iron out a late scene and things were just not coming together.

So we took a step back and Gabriela asked where I was, what my goals were, and then turned my idea of how I was trying to revise my story on its head.

I had been going through the revision pyramid, but she straight up told me to not even bother with the top part of the pyramid before sending it to my first set of beta readers. In fact, she shoved me back down on the pyramid, reminding me of the basics that I had sort of glazed over. She also told me I did not need to polish nearly as much as I thought I should, before sending my story to beta readers.

Somewhere in my mind I assumed I wanted the book to be nearly publishable before I had any beta readers read it, but she made me realize that I needed to get outside input before I worked so hard on the stuff I had that might change. Again, I knew this… but I was thinking about wrong.

So suddenly I had a new direction, and I was feeling light again, and it took me a few days to realize why I was feeling so good.

Gabriela reminded me that the story did not have to be perfect.

So all at once, I stopped beating myself up about the fact that I couldn’t make everything work. I could just stop and focus on the things that I could do. I am going to continue learning my whole life. I am never going to be that idealized “perfect” that sits in that corner of my brain to taunt me. It is good, sometimes, to be reminded that I am perfect exactly where I am.

Colorizing my Scenes

Laura Highcove

In case you haven’t noticed yet, I like colors and I like organization. I had a color system for my notes and so it shouldn’t surprise you that I have a color system for my files within Scrivener.

Here’s a picture of it:

Dark Red = Concept. Those are scenes where there’s not even necessarily a scene there. There might be simply the idea for a scene or I might just know I need a scene. It might be a bunch of attempts at writing the same scene. Basically, if I handed it to another person, they would think it was a lot of gobblty-gook.

Red = Rough Draft. This is a scene where I’ve actually written the scene, hence there is actually prose, but the scene might not be complete, there might be notes for elements I still need to add. It’s the roughest form of a scene that is actually still a scene.

Orange = First Draft. This is when I have all of the elements or ideas put into the scene, and they are in order. Doesn’t mean it’s pretty, but it’s all there.

Yellow = Second Draft. This is the first stage that I would consider ‘readable’ by a third party without explanation from me. At this stage, the scene should have all it’s elements and should flow. This is where the story needs to be for beta readers.

Green = Revised. Yes, technically I have to revise to get between each color, but green is the color where not only are all the pieces there, and it flows, but I have sat down, played with my word choice, and beautified my prose. This is the stage at which a read would hopefully be able to tell that I’m a writer, and not just some smuck.

Blue = Finished. Blue is post line-edit. This is the “and now it gets sent out to an agent” step. Blue is the best I can do.

Purple = Notes. I have notes, lots of them. You can see the ‘Notes’ folder (technically the notes file should be purple, but default for new file is red and I haven’t changed it yet.) This is so I can leave a notes file within a chapter and not get myself confused.

Magenta = OOP or Out of Place. These are scene I write where I have an idea for later (or earlier) in the story and I write it whereever I am at the time. Later it will get moved to where it needs to go, but when I’m in “words on the page mode”, stopping to do that while writing is just a distraction.

Pink = BTS or Behind the Scenes. These are scenes I write that are not part of the story. They might be from a different character’s pov or just be something that gives me inspiration or detail that I want to keep but doesn’t really fit anywhere.

Gray = Obsolete. I rewrite scenes in new files in order to not loose old versions. (I don’t like the idea or execution of Scrivener’s snapshots, so this is how I do the same thing.) The different color keeps me from accidentally reading the wrong scene and wondering why my changes aren’t there.

And as for the file structure, which yes I did leave in on purpose, you can see most of Draft 7. I am currently on Draft 8, which you can see the last chapter is ‘the hero’s return’. I know, spoilers.

The colors are also updated on the folder. The color there is the color of the lowest ranked file within that chapter. As you can see, the beginning of the story is rather clean, with all of that yellow. Later in the story things dip into a lot of rough draft.

Since I am currently revising from the end of the book forward, I hope this means that it’ll be slow going at first, but pick up once I get closer to the beginning of the story. My goal for now is to get everything to the first draft stage. Then, hopefully, there will only be a few tweaks needed to get to second draft.

It took me a week to get through one chapter. If that holds, it will take me over two months to finish this revision. I’m hoping that some of the chapters will go more quickly than that, especially the ones that are already yellow. A scene can lose it’s color if I realize there are new elements I need to have, but yellow still means the scene is rather clean to start.

No Good Title

Laura Highcove

I completed the revision pass on time, though as you can see, I am posting this a bit late, because I didn’t write it till late, because I was pounding away at my revision through Saturday. Sunday was our Wrestlemania party, for which we cook.

So here I am to tell you that it is indeed done, and I am on to step one of writing my fight scenes better, which includes looking over the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons character sheets that my husband made for all of the main characters. I’ll probably write a more in depth analysis about why I decided to do this and how it’s helped, but for now I’m getting all my ducks in a row and hammering out exactly what remnants and artifacts everyone has so I know what they can do.

Total guess on the timeline: I want to have the character sheets finalized by Friday. Then it will be time to work with my husband on choreography. There are approximately 15 fights, a few of which are mere scuffles and three of which are just different phases of the same fight.

Talk of Superpowers

Laura Highcove

Talk of Superpowers:
There was talk recently in the DIY MFA sphere, about superpowers, that aspect of every writer’s personality that helps them to write their story.

I waffled on this a little bit because I was thinking of it from a place of “What am I good at?”. Instead I realized that what Gabriela actually meant is closer to what my yoga instructor refers to as a dharma. Now if you google dharma, you won’t get this definition, but I use it to mean a person’s true self. If you set aside your family and friends, your job, your hobbies, your passions, and pursuits, then who are you?

I am authentic:
There was one call for DIY MFA where I remember Gabriela asking, “How did you tell the people in your life that you are a writer?”

And I remember thinking on that while other people gave their answers, and then she asked me that question and I said: “I never had to tell people I was a writer, I just always have written, and the people around me know that I write.”

I later realized that that sums up who I am. I am authentic. Everything that I am is open and out there and everything that I’m not doesn’t exist.

How this shows up in my writing:
My characters end up authentic, truthful, reasonable, and willing to see another person’s point of view. It makes it difficult for me to write truly evil villains and only recently have I been able to write characters having verbal arguments without one or both of them apologizing and coming to see the other person’s point of view by the end.

This means I don’t have conflict created by misunderstandings. When my characters fight or disagree, it’s because they have (at least mostly) reasonable views on life, that just happen to conflict.

I want my readers to be able to understand where a character is coming from, even if they don’t agree with where they’re going. (Oh, that sounds tweet-able, too bad I don’t twitter.)

Now for other things:
I wanted to write this post because I wanted to put up something about myself that wasn’t just a laundry list of the things I’ve been doing in my writing. I’m not sure if people are enjoying that or not, since I don’t really get feedback, but I feel like it might get old after a while.

For those of you who might like my laundry list: I’m still working on the Arthur tale. It is rough and I don’t feel like I have a focus right now. The story is just kind of happening, which means I just need to keep powering through until something comes out that feels right. One more week and then I start on fights.

Continuing the Smoothing

Laura Highcove

Nothing much of interest going on this week. I’m still working through the story in the same method as I mentioned last week, though I am a good deal further than I expected to be. Bluebeard was quick and easy, which was not a surprise, but the Headquarters section also went very smoothly except for the scene here that has always given me trouble. When I talk about the writing of this book after it comes out, I will certainly talk about how important this scene is, and how dang-blasted hard it was to write.

I started the King Arthur tale midday on Saturday and I’m already aware of how not smoothly this tale is going to go. But it is the newest part of this story (writing wise) and thus the most raw. Even the climactic final battle and denouement were written prior to this section. However, I can start to see the story behind me actually smoothing out, which is a great feeling. Still needs work, but it is better.

I’m hoping two weeks will give me enough time to smooth out this tale. I’m still hoping to get started on my fights starting in April, and that will be a whole new adventure.