Revise, Rewrite, and Reconsider?

copied from Pinterest

 

Revise, rewrite and reconsider…what, throwing everything back in the drawer?

 

How many edits does one book require?

 

It’s very frustrating to think that the edits are endless, ongoing and forever. Just joking. Sort of. Maybe. Not really.

 

My frustration is due to a recent editing binge. My friend, and personal editor, sent back my book with her usual expert edits, and after a day and a half, I finally have the book more reader ready.

 

My friend is very good at picking out my most common mistakes. All I need to see is her note ‘shift in POV’ and I grimace. Again? I’m getting better. I should be, after all she’s pointed it out to me often enough.

 

And then there’s tense. All that past, present, future crap. I play, I played, I will play. Or I write, I wrote, I will write. I screw it up by going I’m writing, I was writing, and maybe on some future day I will write…good, better, best.

 

‘I writ it down’, how’s that for good grammar?

 

Because I’m still in a learning phase, I read books and articles on writing.

 

Writer’s Digest has a newsletter with interesting articles written by their online editor, Brian Klems. A recent article was titled “3 Easy-To-Use Revision Techniques”.

 

Yeah right, Brian. One thing I do agree with is his comment that the “revision process can be brutal”.

 

So here are his revision techniques.

 

Number One: Start on page one.

Follow your story the same way your reader would.

 

Number Two: Circle passive voice words and eliminate.

Passive voice slows down your work and makes it less exciting for the reader.

Words such as was, were, are, is and have been.

 

Number Three: Delete all clichés.

 

So, I took my recently edited book, Number TWO in my roster of books and tried his easy to use number two technique.

 

This is easily done on the computer with that neat little feature called FIND.

You can do FIND, FIND AND REPLACE, or FIND AND GO TO.

 

I used FIND, what?: have been, and checked Highlight all items found in: Main Document. Finally I clicked on Find All and lo and behold, there were 29 places where I used the words ‘have been’.

 

All these have beens are making me feel like a has-been writer.

 

I went back to the book, started at the beginning, and eliminated 22 out of 29 of these phrases. Next time I write, I’m going to do this little exercise chapter by chapter. Maybe I’ll get the hang of it by the end.

 

If you were going to try this with your own writing, have been isn’t a bad start. Don’t go to is, it was a truly horrifying experience. Apparently I used is one thousand, eight hundred and forty times. How can this possibly be?

 

I had to look and see for myself, and was mildly comforted to see that the computer picked up all incidents of i’s and s’s, such as whisper, isolated and television. Phew.

 

I played one more time and did the Find thing with the word was. Now I’m absolutely disheartened. One thousand, two hundred and seventy four times I used the word was, and I didn’t find any words like washed or wasted to make me feel better.

 

Oh well, It’s a learning curve right?

 

 

To Make You Smile

Borrowed from Pinterest

I once wanted to be known as that crazy old lady with the cats. When I had two, and lost them both within a few years, I had to find something else to be remembered for. Loving and losing them was too painful.










If you love cats as I do, you'll enjoy these pictures, kittens posed with books, another of my favourite things.

I want to celebrate a few sales of my book, Lost in Sorrow. It made me happy so I want to share a couple of photos that may make you happy too.

How can you look at these faces and not smile.

Have a good day.

The Dreaded "No Signal"

Photo from Pinterest expresses exactly how I feel without my internet.

There has been occasion; with the amount of time I spend on the internet, that I worry I’m addicted. Well, now it’s confirmed, I am truly and without a doubt, hooked on the internet. My modem quit on Saturday night and I have been cut off from the all things internet for almost four days.

 

That’s no internet and no E-mail, and no posting to my blog. To make matters worse, my phone line is connected to my modem, so no telephone. At least my cable worked so I still had television.

 

I felt lost. Since my move I haven’t gotten back into other hobbies, so no painting, knitting or such, and have depended entirely on my laptop for my amusement. And there I was; no Blogger Dashboard, no Pinterest, and no PGA Shot Tracker (that’s a story for another day).

 

Saturday night I did the movie marathon thing, and watched movies on my laptop. Using the laptop prevented me from opening my book for another round of editing. Even dedicated writers need a break.

 

Sunday, while the PGA Championship played in the background (part of that other story), I went back to editing, wanting to correct something I’d dismissed earlier from my friend’s list of comments. Sometimes I’m just too lazy to make that kind of complicated change, or, as I prefer to think of it, I need to let it stew until the solution comes to me.

 

Where I would normally have taken a break, checked my E-mail, scanned Pinterest, I played Solitaire. Finding Spider was not enough of a challenge; I switched to Free Cell and whiled away a number of hours playing games.

 

I had to go out on Sunday, since I had no phone to confirm plans with a friend for Monday. I used her phone to call my service provider and got an electronic message. They gave me something to try, which of course I couldn’t try until later, and when it didn’t work, I was still without a phone to call back.

 

Today I borrowed a neighbour’s phone, called the cable company, and got to speak to a real live person. When she couldn’t reboot, or whatever, from her location, I got the promise of a service call, for that very afternoon. Wow, was I impressed.

 

I was not going to have to drive the streets, searching for a signal or a site with free WIFI in order to complete my post.

 

I feel free, I feel connected, I feel wireless.

 

All is good and right with my world.

Writing and the Subconscious Mind

I think it’s funny how bits and pieces of my life, my memories, find their way into my writing.

 

In Book ONE, the main character, a young woman alone and feeling lost, finds her grandmother’s cookbook. It was more of a journal, recipes and anecdotes of family events. Memories.

A few years ago I started making scrapbook pages of my favourite recipes. I have the originals, but each of my grandchildren has a copy. There are photos of the kids baking with me, and notes about where a recipe came from, or when it was first served.

Kayla, Tia and Rianna, my baking buddies.

 

All the recipes are in a binder, in protective sleeves, the binder covers done with each child’s name and photo in true scrapbooking style.

 

 

The recipes were about thirty in number when my daughter and daughter-in-law presented me with a make work project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two more grandchildren, born a month apart, had me scrambling back to Staples for more binders and a slew of photocopying.

 

I hope, when those kids are grown, they will enjoy the recipes, and remember their grandmother with love. Exactly the feelings my character had reading her grandmother’s journal. 

My father died suddenly in 1988. I think of him often, and have to laugh as memories of him find their way into my books.

Dad’s routine on a Sunday morning was simple, coffee, a cigarette, and the crossword puzzle. He had this small pencil, which he picked up at the golf course for marking his score card, and used it for the crossword.

I wasn’t so fussy, if I saw the unfinished crossword on the table, I’d grab a pen and fill in what I could, often having to scratch over a mistake. Those were tough puzzles.

My dad had a subtle way of telling you what he thought, without making it a big issue. Like when I was a teenager and I experimented with peroxide, leaving my normally dark hair streaked with orange. I didn’t get the expected parental lecture, what I got was a simple question. “How long will it take to grow out?”

So his annoyance, at my taking a pen to his crossword puzzle, was handled the same way. “Some might say it’s a sign of conceit to do a crossword in ink.” I used the pencil after that, but I used one with an eraser on the tip.

Is it any wonder when I had an elderly man and a young woman strike up a friendship, it was forged over filling in a crossword puzzle. I liked this concept so much; I made the crossword an ongoing part of Book FOUR.

My dad was fond of peanut butter, loved it on his toast in the mornings. My mother found a wooden plaque, cut in the shape of a slice of bread, with the following motto. “Man cannot live by bread alone, he must have peanut butter.” I remember it sat on the top of the stove in their place in Florida.

In Book SIX, I wanted two strangers to meet, and strived to make that meeting memorable. The woman is in the grocery store picking up supplies for the cottage, and stops in the aisle with all the peanut butter and jams.

She had recently lost her husband, her grief compounded when she learns he’d been having an affair. She looks at the peanut butter and has a flashback to better times, remembering when her husband gave her that same wooden plaque, a joking reference to her pregnancy craving for peanut butter.

The other character comes upon this teary woman and…well, you’d have to read the book.

What gets me is all these real memories end up in my writing without any plan. I wasn’t writing only to stop and think, what could I use from my life to make this work? After writing those segments, I’d sit back in surprise, shocked that those memories came so fluidly from my subconscious, and worked so well.

Thanks Dad, love you and miss you every day.

 

 

Book Number FOUR, A Human Interest Story

For book number FOUR, I wanted to write something outside the comfort of ‘write what you know. Not that I really know anything about murder, or being jilted, I wanted to write a story with more depth, more emotion…just more.

Something, I thought, about interpersonal relationships, and how the convoluted thinking of one person, can have ramifications for others, for years to come. A human interest story with strong characters the reader could connect with, enough to want to stay with them on their journey of discovery.

By the time I’d completed the first draft, it was more than 400 pages long, double spaced mind you, and over 100,000 words.

The research was intense; the topics personal, thought provoking and, at times, emotionally draining.

One of the problems with research is the potential to get side tracked. Time spent reading articles that may veer off topic, is not really time squandered, for you never know when that information might prove valuable.

It’s like You Tube. Somebody sends you a link to You Tube, and for the next hour you’re watching all these other videos selected from the ever changing side bar. Or Pinterest, that’s just as addictive. But I digress.

For this book my research centred on adoption, and World War II. Two subjects completely outside my personal knowledge or experience.

My focus was on adult adoptees, searching for their birth parents. I found sites that detailed the red tape involved in searching sealed files for adoption information, and support organizations offering aid and advice.

But the stories from adoptees, and birth families, gave a picture of how difficult, and often futile, their searches were, in a way the government rules, regulations and forms could not.

I talked to people with first hand experience in searching for a child given up for adoption. They all felt the same frustration, had all suffered through the ongoing bureaucracy and the endless waiting.

I wanted a character to have a war time experience that fit with my plot, and was at the same time credible and based in truth. I immersed myself in the war, reading books and articles, even watching old war movies.

I had dates of battles fought, the number of troops mobilized and of course, the casualties. All the statistics of war. What brought it all into focus for me was a site I came upon, copies of original letters, written by soldiers while serving overseas. Letters mailed home, reflecting the harsh situations endured, the fear of the unknown, the need to stay connected with loved ones.

Then I found a search site, written by family members who wanted to understand what their father, or grandfather, had endured in the war, what was so horrible they would never, ever, speak of it.

The list was long, details of military history were given, requesting any information about the service of their relative. Most requests were initiated after the Veteran’s death, out of respect for their feelings, I would imagine.

I was moved beyond words, and in those readings I found my fictitious old Vet, my Sam.

I used only a small amount of that research in my book, but all of it gave me a better understanding of my characters, so none of it was a wasted effort. I’ll keep all my notes, all the printouts, along with a list of reference books and sites, for you never know, I might need them again, for some other story.

I gave this manuscript to a friend from my writing group, told her it was too long, and she gave it back to me with pencil notations and a large number of yellow sticky notes for where I could ‘slice and dice’.

I appreciate the effort she went to, believe me, as I have spent the last five days going line by line, looking at her suggestions, making some changes, resisting others, and initiating revisions of my own.

So far, I’ve decreased the word count by almost 5000 words. I bolded sections she suggested could be deleted, sections I was too attached to for now, and will look at the next go round.

I once read a book in which the main character was a published writer. In the book he talked about the status of his novels, at any given time. There was the one he was currently writing, a second he had just finished that was in the edit phase and a third that he had recently published and was doing promotional work for.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? If that is a realistic representation of the publishing business, then I don’t feel quite so bad. I’ve been so inundated with editing and preparing to E publish, I haven’t written anything but a few short stories for the year…thus far.

There’s still November, National Novel Writing Month. More familiarly called NaNoWriMo, it’s a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

I have lots of time to come up with an idea.