How I Write: Revisions--How To Begin

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is Revisions--How to Begin.

I think it should be obvious, but just in case, let me spell it out: This is how I do it. Every writer has to discover his or her own process. You have to try different approaches to plotting, writing, editing, all the stages of producing fiction--and then settle on the ones that work for you. I think you're well advised to keep trying new things--you should never stop learning--but ultimately you have to use the techniques that work best for you.

I don't do a lot of revision. I make notes as I write, keeping a list of every character's name, and a short (one line) description of who/what they are, their purpose in the story. I do the same for places--named businesses, ships (star- or otherwise), cities, nations, worlds (I most recently wrote a spacefaring science fiction novel, so that was an issue). Why?

So I have crib notes when I revise the novel. I'm a seat-of-my-pants writer, not a plotter. Most of my plotting goes on in my subconscious or as I'm writing. If I introduce a new character as I'm writing, I generally don't spend a lot of time thinking about just the right name. I pick one and run with it. (And put it in the notes.)

When the time comes to revise the novel, I first look to see if I've given the same name (or names that look or sound too similar) to more than one character. Sometimes I have. Then I have to change them. Or if the names are too joke-y, the sort of think I do to amuse myself while composing. (I had an "Al Mondroca" in the first draft of my most recent novel. Al Mondroca. Almond Roca. Get it? My spouse objected, and rightly so. So he became Al Martinez in the final manuscript.)

Once the novel is complete, I put it aside for about two weeks and work on other things. Then I pull it out and read it through from beginning to end. I fix any missing words, homynyms (too/two/to, etc), and other obvious faults. I may add little text here and there to smooth out rough transitions, but not a lot. Then I give it a computer-aided spelling check (and add new genre-oriented words to the computer's dictionary...).

Then I give it to my spouse, who reads it and makes notes. My spouse is not a writer. My spouse does not want to be a writer. My spouse is, however, a voracious reader. Which makes Spouse a great beta reader because I'm not looking for a writerly critique. I want to know if Spouse, coming at the novel with no preconceptions, simply as a member of the target audience, likes the novel. Is it engaging? Does it hold his attention? What, if anything, throws him out of the story? What did he especially like?

Once I have that information, I can go in and make whatever changes he's suggested--if I agree with them. This is where craft comes into it. No reader is going to "get" or like everything you do. (Some won't like anything you do.) So you have to find a beta reader whose tastes are close enough to yours that you can trust that they're looking for the same things in your work that you want your readers to take from it. My spouse's tastes in novels don't parallel mine in some things, but we both know that, so the things Spouse bothers to mention are things I generally can agree are problems. Even so, you must take criticism with a pinch of salt. Is this a valid point--or is it a matter of taste?

I make whatever revisions are needed. Then I print the whole thing out and read it slowly, line by line. This can take several days. At this point, I'm looking for typos, dropped words, extra words, awkward constructions--all the things the spellcheck or grammar check didn't catch. I mark up the manuscript with a red pen. Once I'm done, I go into the electronic file and fix them all, along with any final changes (more smoothing of transitions, adding details that need emphasis, etc.)

At that point, it's ready to send out. Notice that I don't submit the novel to a critique group. I'm a member of one, though we meet seldom and irregularly. But that group serves a different function for me. Once my Spouse has given input, and I've made the changes I think are valid, I'm done. At that point, the only critiques I'm interested in are those that come from editors, in either the form of a rejection letter or a contract offer. (Heinlein's Rule # 4: You must send your story to someone who will buy it.)

Which is not to say that I won't show the manuscript to other writers and get their input--but that comes after I've begun sending it out to editors. I'll go into this in more detail next week, perhaps, but I believe in looking forward rather than backward. If my rejection letters show me a weakness in my work, I'll work on improving that aspect of my craft. But I'll apply that learning to the next novel. I won't be revising the finished ones. What's done is done, and the best I could do at the time. I believe I'll learn more by applying my lessons to new novels rather than trying to revise and improve old one. (Heinlein's Rule # 3: You must not rewrite except to editorial order. If an editor offers to buy my novel if I make some changes, that's when I'm prepared to revise a finished work.)

How I Write: Motivation/ Getting Through the Dreaded Middle Pages

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is Motivation, or Getting Through the Dreaded Middle Pages.

I've mentioned Robert Heinlein's Rules For Writers before. Heinlein, for those of you may not who he is (I find it incredible that anyone doesn't know, but the world is a big place...), he was one of the Grandmasters of science fiction. He began his writing career in the fifties, and his rules are as valid today as they were then:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must not rewrite except to editorial order.
4. You must mail your story to someone who will buy it.
5. You must keep your story in the mail until someone buys it.

This week's topic clearly falls under rule number two. You must finish what you write.

I'm afraid there's no magic bullet for this. As with so many things worth doing, there's no quick and easy route to success. It require commitment and discipline. If you can't finish what you start, you're never going to be successful as a writer. But how?

I can only tell you how I do it. I've finished two novels now, and the experience has been consistent so I expect it will continue to be so. For me, it goes like this:

I begin a new project with excitement. Or maybe with fear and trepidation. Or both. After all, it's not easy to write somewhere in the range of 90,000 words of story. It's a monumental task. But so is building a monument, or a skyscraper. Or eating an elephant. And in all those cases, you do it one small task at a time.

So the first step is to recognize that this will not be quick or easy. It's going to take time. Anywhere from days* to weeks to months to years, depending on how much time you can afford to devote to the project, and how fast you write. But if you can consistently apply yourself, whatever your time constraints and writing speed, eventually you'll get to the end. If you need something to reassure you on that point, reread my post from last week, Running The Numbers.

But having started, how do you get through the dreaded middle pages? Give yourself permission to be bad.

One of the most paralyzing things a writer can do is allow his (or her) internal editor to get involved in the writing process. Writing is creative; editing is not. Editing can improve the final product--but there must be raw material to work with before editing becomes useful. So give yourself permission to write something awful. It doesn't matter how awful; it only matters that you write the story. When it's done, you can go back and decide what works and what didn't, what to keep, what to throw out, what to modify. More on this in a moment.

As I mentioned, I've completed two novels now, and in both cases I seesawed between the conviction that they were pretty damn good--and the suspicion that they were awful. But part of the permission to be bad trick is that you must commit to continuing the project no matter how bad you think it is. Whether you think you're the next Shakespeare or you fear that your manuscript's best use is as fuel for a fire, you must keep writing. It can be tough to do, I know.

But here's another secret: You are the worst judge of your own work.

Really. You're simply too close to it. This is especially true when you're in the dreaded middle of it, after the excitement of starting something new has faded, and before you feel the thrill of reaching the end. Then it's just the slog of getting from one to the other. You can't trust your own judgment. This is a common reaction of many (if not all) writers. In fact, two writers I know, a married couple who have each sold scores of novels, tell me it's so common that they've made a joke of it. When one or the other comes storming out of his (or her) office to confess that the new novel isn't working and may have to be scrapped, the other asks, "How far along are you?" At which point, the complaining partner remembers what I'm telling you (and they told me), curses, turns around, and goes back into the office to keep writing.

The great thing about this? About ignoring your own feelings of inadequacy this way? When the novel is finished, if you go back to look for the places where you were sure it was crap, you won't be able to tell by reading which parts you thought rocked, and which you thought sucked. The quality of the writing has little or nothing to do with how you felt about the writing. It's all about your craft, your skill. THAT doesn't vary with your moods, or it won't if you're a professional about it. Just like any other professional--doctors, lawyers, cops, teachers--you put your feelings aside and do the job.

Which is basically how I get through the dreaded middle.
On the days when everything's going well and I'm pleased with my work, I write.
On the days when I think the novel is unsalvageable and I hate it, I write.
There's no other way.

*Joyce Carrol Oates wrote about 9,000 words a day! That's a novel every ten days! But even a few hundred words a day adds up.

How I Write: Getting the First Draft Completed/ Setting A Writing Schedule

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is Getting the First Draft Completed, or Setting A Writing Schedule.

I've already mentioned this in previous posts, but my technique is pretty simple. I keep a kitchen timer on my desk. On writing days, I set it for sixty minutes. Once I've opened up a new file, or reopened a work in progress, I start the timer--and I start writing.

For the next sixty minutes I write. I am not allowed to delete anything I write, or edit it (other than to back up and fix a immediate typo or missing word). I am not allowed to stop and think. I must simply write for an hour. When the timer rings, I take a brief break, then do it again. And again. As many times as I can in a day. The object is, as much as possible, to get out of my own way and let my creativity flow.

The less I allow my conscious mind (filled with rules gleaned from grade school, high school and college literature courses, books on writing, and so forth) to interfere, the better.My subconscious knows everything my conscious mind knows--and plenty more besides. It's also less constrained by rules and regulations. Once the first draft is done, I can go back and consciously apply the rules of fiction to improve the work.

But what I really want to talk about is numbers. I plan to write four novels in 2010. I've written two, and I have two more to go. (In fact, I just sent the second novel out to five publishers yesterday.) That's an ambitious goal, but not nearly as ambitious as it may sound. Your average novel tends to run between 70,000 and 120,000 words. There are exceptions. Some category romance novels clock in at 60,000 words, maybe less for some epublishers. But to the best of my knowledge, something much less than 70,000 words or longer 120,000 words is going to have trouble finding a home in New York, while 90,000 words is right in the sweet spot.

So. A manuscript page is roughly 250-300 words (double-spaced with one inch margins). Let's go with 250 words as the baseline. If you can write--not type, mind you, but write--reasonably fast, you can produce a manuscript page (250 words) every fifteen minutes. If you're slow, it might take you an hour.

If you write 250 words a day, every day, for a year, that's [250 x 365] = 91,250 words--or an average novel. That's a novel a year for between fifteen minutes and an hour a day. (That doesn't include any revisions you'll do, but bear with me.*) Think you can squeeze out fifteen minutes of writing time every day? You could write a novel in a year.

Say you can produce 1,000 words a day (in an hour if you're fast, four hours if you're not). That's 365,000 words in a year--or four 90,000 words novels. But that's too much work, you say. You want to take weekends off. And have a two week vacation after laboring over a hot word processor for between one and four hours a day. There are 52 weeks in a year. Strike two for vacations. That leaves fifty weeks. Five days a week x 50 weeks is 250 working days per year. At 1,000 words a day, that's still 250,000 words. That's 2.7 novels. Bump your writing up to 1200 words a day and you're producing three 90,000 word novels a year.

Let's say you can afford to spend the time to write an average of 3,000 words a day, (either because you're being supported by a spouse** or you're spending your evenings writing after a day at the office). If you write five days a week, that's [250 days x 3,000 words] = 780,000 words in a year***, or eight and a half 90,000 words novels. And you're still getting weekends off. (Now do you see how Nora Roberts, for instance, can publish so many books so fast? If she considers writing her day job--and she does--and spends hours writing every day, the words pile up very quickly.)

I'm only trying to write four novels this year. I'm an absolute slacker compared to Nora Roberts. She's not just a better, far more experienced writer, she's also a demon when it comes to productivity. Practice makes perfect, and boy does she get a lot of practice. We could all learn from her example.

As you can see, setting a writing schedule is mostly a matter of discipline. The numbers don't lie. If you can apply yourself, there's no reason why you can't produce a novel in a reasonable length of time--by which I mean, a year at most. The faster you can write and the more time you can devote to your writing, the shorter the time needed to finish a novel. So I'll be writing two more novels this year and getting them all out to publishers. And then four more next year, and the year after that. Maybe they'll sell, maybe they won't. But all that practice will be teaching me to write more effectively, and eventually they will start to sell.

Next week: Motivation--how to keep slogging away when your enthusiasm/confidence/muse deserts you.



*If you're spending only fifteen minutes to an hour a day on producing new words, I think you can find time to edit during the day as well.

**Who no doubt expects (or at least hopes) to be kept in the manner to which he intends to become accustomed once you become a rich and famous novelist, as in my case.


***If, as John D. MacDonald famously said, you have to write a million words of crap to get to the good stuff, that puts you three-quarters of the way there in ONE YEAR. Two if you dawdle.

How I Write: Starting A New Work - How Do You Begin and Tools You Use

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is wide open: Starting A New Work--How Do You Begin, What Tools Do You Use?

This is a difficult topic for me. I have two novels and a number of short stories under my belt (published already or written with intent to be published), in addition to hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of words of fiction (including fanfic) written for my own amusement before I Got Serious about writing professionally. And most of it was written off-the-cuff.

I'm a seat-of-my-pants writer, or "pantser" as some folks put it. I don't work out plots and then write to an outline. I don't even create an outline and then find the story diverging from the outline when actually sit down to write. I've tried that and it has never worked for me. I start with the seed of a story and find out the shape of the story as I write it down. That sometimes involves cutting and pasting, and tossing away parts of a story that lead to a dead-end. The end result is a workable story--but the plotting and planning occur, for the most part, down in my subconscious, where I have little access and less insight.

I have a notebook full of story ideas, or story concepts. One-line pitches that I hope to turn into a completed story someday. (And it's nice to leaf through the notebook occasionally and see the ones I've actually written--and sold--crossed out. It helps, on the days when I feel uninspired, to remind myself of my successes. I also have plenty of incomplete stories on my hard drive, anything from a few pages to ten thousand words. I open them up occasionally and look at them, and from time to time I find inspiration in one and finish it.

But on a purely technical level: I sit (or stand, as the mood takes me, my writing desk being at a height where I can stand or sit on a stool) in front the computer, open a blank file, and start writing. Sometimes I have a killer opening line. Sometimes I have a scene I want to start with, or a scene I want to get to. Sometimes I have only a vague idea of what kind of story I want to tell.

Flying High began with a visual of my (super)heroine seizing the hero by his shirt and flying high into the sky, where she proceeds to have her way with him. Writing the story consisted of figuring out to get to that scene, which involved deciding who the characters were, and what would motivate her to do that.


Fast Friends began with the notion of making the hero's pursuit of the heroine a literal pursuit. The characters changed considerably over the course of writing that story. It began as another superhero story, but along the way I abandoned that as an unnecessary complication. In the end, hero and heroine are runners--but completely human.

The science fiction novel I just finished (not a romance) came about when I read an article about a man who makes his living repossessing airliners when the owners default on their payments to the bank. It occurred to me that there'd be a need for a similar service in a universe where starships are common. I started with a list of tricks deadbeat starship owners might use to hang onto their vessels, and tricks my hero might use to retrieve them. I had an image of my hero in mind, but very little more when I started the novel.

My hero's personality changed and deepened as I wrote my way through the novel. He acquired a love interest along the way (which I had not intended when I began). One of his targets early on became an ally and eventually his best friend--another unexpected twist. I worked out the geography (astrography?) of the universe, the details of FTL starship travel, and the legal systems of several worlds on the fly.

Not all of it hung together, of course. I had to cycle through the novel a few times, cleaning up inconsistencies. I had to cut most of a very steamy sex scene that ultimately didn't fit the rest of the story, but which I had fun writing at the time. I had to go back and tweak the names of people, places, and starships to get rid of the sorts of amusing, self-referential or joke names I tend to throw in as placeholders when I'm writing on the fly. "Al Mondroca", for instance, became Al Martinez. It scans the same, but it's no longer a joke.

When I began the novel, I had no idea what the final shape of it would be. If that sounds nerve-wracking, well--it is. I've written two novels to date, and both of them involved ping-ponging between confidence in my writing and a conviction that I was kidding myself, that I'd do better to scrap what I'd written and start over on something else. But my toolkit helps with that. I have two very important tools I use whenever I write.

First, a kitchen timer. I set it for sixty-minute intervals. Once I start it, I must write for an hour, without pausing more than momentarily, and without editing or deleting anything. That discipline prevents me from making repeated false starts, or dithering about how best to write scene (and thereby giving my internal editor a chance to interfere). I must simply write. Once I've written, then I can edit. But not before.

My second tool is my copy of Robert Heinlein's Rules For Writers, about which I've written before, both here and elsewhere. Following them won't guarantee success, but failing to follow them will almost certainly assure failure. The rules are:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must not rewrite except to editorial order.
4. You must mail your story to an editor who will buy it.
5. You must keep your story in the mail until it sells.

Each and every one of them a pearl of wisdom, and I'll have plenty to say about them as this series progresses. But for now, that's a glimpse into how at least one "pantser" starts new works.