The Golden Redepennings

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When you break eggs, make omelettes

I’ve set myself a challenge in the epilogue of Farewell to Kindness. My secondary character David, who is hero of the book I plan to write next, is reported to be missing. No-one has heard from him for four months.

I don’t know where that came from. It was in the plan to send him searching for his heroine, known in Farewell to Kindness as Mist. But four months? Where did she go? Where did he go? What is holding them up and why? I have absolutely no idea. And I don’t know how the answers are going to affect the already plotted chapter outline of Encouraging Prudence.

I started Farewell to Kindness thinking I was a planner. And I am. But the bits of the book that excite me most are the ones that came out of nowhere and insisted on changing all of my carefully structured plans. My main villain turned out to be someone quite different to who I intended, the book ended a month earlier than intended and in a different locale, and several characters that weren’t even in the first draft demanded their own place in the 3rd.

I’m tentatively learning to trust my subconscious. When I find I’ve dropped a whole heap of eggs all over my plot, I’m learning to give a cheer and enjoy the ensuing omelette.

I came across this article by Juliet Marillier that talks about characters taking overeggs. What she says rings true to me:

So here I am, getting to the pointy end of this manuscript with my characters in increasing peril from external sources and at the same time beset by internal conflict (there’s a strong thread in the Shadowfell books about conscience and responsibility – can lies, deception and violence be justified if they’re the only way to achieve a greater good?) I know already that my two protagonists can’t come out of the story without significant psychological damage. And now one of those protagonists has started making choices I didn’t plan for him. Awful choices. Crazy, unwise choices. What’s going on?

I find while I’m writing the last part of a book, the part where I ratchet up the tension and present my characters with impossible choices, I sleep fitfully, dream vividly, and think about the story and characters most of the time, often to the detriment of whatever else I’m supposed to be doing. I get a lot of ‘brain churn’, a not-especially-helpful overload of story details bubbling around in my mind. I become quite disturbed when my characters have to face terrifying situations or sink into a mass of dark thoughts. Perhaps that’s because their stories, though fictional and including fantasy elements, are not so different from the situations some people still face in our world, in places where tyrannical regimes use terror as a tool of control. Or perhaps it’s because my protagonists feel like real people to me, and I, the author/God of this creation, have chosen to subject them to hell on earth. Now one of them is challenging me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.Go on, push me. Push me to the edge. See how much more I can take before I jump.

Characters don’t exist independently, of course, however real they may become to us. They are indeed all in our minds. If another writer came to me for advice on the situation outlined above, I’d say keep writing, let the character have his head, finish the novel, then go back and rewrite that section if you’re not happy with it. If a character seems to be pushing or pulling hard, chances are that’s the natural direction for the story to take. If the guy is in your head all the time, urging you on, what you write may well be inspired.

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Why do I need a beta reader?

betasThe third draft of Farewell to Kindness will be finished this weekend; probably later today. Some wonderful people have volunteered to read it for me, and I’ve been fishing around for clues on what I should say when I brief them. I found a fabulous resource by Belinda Polland at Small Blue Dog Publishing. It explains what a beta reader is, and why we need one. It then goes on to link to more articles about how to find beta readers and how to brief them. Great stuff. Here’s Belinda’s list of reasons:

The fact is, we spend so much time on our own manuscripts that we can’t see them objectively — no matter how diligently we self-edit. These can be some of the outcomes (there are plenty more):

  • We create anticipation or an expectation early in the book, but forget to deliver on it.
  • We describe events in a way that is clear to us but not clear to a reader who can’t see the pictures in our head. (At least, we hope they can’t see them. Are you looking inside my head??? Eek!)
  • We leave out vital steps in an explanation and don’t realise it, because we know what we mean.
  • The characters in our books (whether fictional, or real as in a memoir or non-fiction anecdote) are not convincing, because we know them so well we don’t realise we haven’t developed them thoroughly on paper.
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#amediting 3

Cover showing woman archer on village green

I’m in the final pages of the third draft of Farewell to Kindness. From this point on, almost every row in my plot-line spreadsheet has notes in the ‘needs work’ column. I’ve been averaging 35 pages an hour (the train trip to and from work takes an hour, so it’s easy to work out), but today’s output was six pages. Still, I have another trip tonight, and then the weekend.

Next, I do a final check for filter words and egregious spelling errors, and format it for the beta readers.

 

 

Cover page shows woman with horse

I have a whole lot of super people who have volunteered to read the novel and tell me what they think. I’m pretty nervous, but very excited.

While it’s with the beta readers, I plan to leave it alone, apart from writing the artistic brief for the cover and book trailer.

Oh, yes, and rewriting the book blurb on this site and on Goodreads.

I don’t expect any of those to take long, and I’ll mainly be focusing on the next writing projects.

 

Shows masked woman in a forestI want to write Candle’s Christmas Chair (a short story or novella, depending on how much I write, that I want to have ready to give away for Christmas). And, if I’m to have the first chapters in the back of Farewell to Kindness, I need to finish the chapter outlines and main character sketches for Encouraging Prudence and A Raging Madness.

So no boredom on the horizon yet, then.

In January, I plan to do any changes that come out of the beta read, then read the whole book aloud into a recording App on my iPad. This will let me be my own reader/listener for a complete copy edit, which can be my train-time project for January. I’ll send it for a professional proofread once I’ve done my own copy edit. And then whole heap more jobs to actually publish. I’ve got a little list. (But, if you’ve been reading my blog, you will have guessed that.)

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A necessary sacrifice

ackermann_mourningdress1819On the train today, I decided to kill one of my favourite characters. I’m sad, but I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do.

I completed the third draft edit on page 135 of 506 pages, so he has around 340 more pages to live. At the current rate, he’ll be dead by next weekend.

I’ve lost over 2000 words in the edit so far, but it’s still a bit of an epic (127,000).

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#amediting part 2

I’ve always agreed with the aphorism that good books are not written, they’re rewritten. All power to the elbows of those who can write once and publish. I’m not one of those writers. So how am I editing?

First I went through the draft as I did it, each day checking what I wrote the day before.

Then, after attending the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference in September, I completely rewrote the 30,000 words I had up to that point.

Then, as I came up with new ideas, I went back and planted seeds in earlier chapters.

So by the time I finished Farewell to Kindness, I was calling what I had the second draft.

As I approached the end of the writing, I read up on editing, and I posted what I found.

Next, I worked out my own process, which was a kind of an amalgam of everyone else’s with a few of my own ideas thrown in.

I took a long weekend, and – in a marathon 35-40 hour sprint – went through the whole book in hardcopy, page by page, writing character names, plotpoints, story outline, and any ideas or discrepancies in a spiral-bound notebook.

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Then I decided that I needed to put some of this into a spreadsheet.

So I’ve spent every evening for the last week (and a few midnight hours) creating a three-tab spreadsheet. Tab one has all the plots across the top (four strands to the major plot, and 16 subplots), and all the scenes down the left hand side. I’ve marked where plots start, where they end, and where I’ve got lost somewhere in the middle.

This let me work out that I need to drop a couple of the minor plots because they aren’t needed, I need to work in a bit more about the Revenge strand of the major plot, because I pretty much forget about it in the middle of the book, and I need to close off some minor plots that I left hanging.

On tab two, I’ve listed all the characters in each scene. I’ve found (and fixed) some name changes by doing this. I’ve also put descriptions of characters when they appear in the book, so I could check that I didn’t change a person’s eye colour, height, or other personal characteristics.

Tab three is a calendar. I’ve added the phases of the moon, and moonset, moonrise, sunset and sunrise where they’re significant to the plot, and I’ve put the scenes in day by day. This allowed me to find out that Rede had an extra day up his sleeve, and could have been back in time to save Anne, so I’ve worked out something to delay him (which, not just incidentally, also allows me to close off my dangling plot lines before we get to the grand finale).

So here’s the spreadsheet. You’ll see it goes right from the left of my desktop screen to the right of my laptop screen.

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It’s been a little tedious, but I’m finding it a remarkably efficient way to work. My mind goes off on flights of fancy while my fingers are filling in character names, and all of a sudden a difficulty resolves itself.

Next step (already started) is to rewrite to bring all the ideas into the third draft. I’m pretty happy with the preface and first three chapters, and I’m excited about the changes and new scenes coming up.

The plan is to get the third draft done then prepare a copy for beta readers within the next fortnight. I’ll let you know how I get on.

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Is that a rooster in your pocket… ?

A row of roosters and their hens at the local agricultural show. I think the one on the right is my Mr Peep.

A row of roosters and their hens at the local agricultural show. I think the one on the right is my Mr Peep.

I’ve been researching the c–k term since I mentioned on Facebook that I’d included a joke around it in Farewell to Kindness. (Anne’s sister has a pet rooster which the heroine brings with her to stay at the hero’s house, allowing the heroine’s cousin to make jokes about the hero needing a prize-winning c–k).

One of the commenters said that the term in England was cockerel, and that the term c–k wouldn’t be used.

The same conversation came up on a Goodread’s thread, where another novelist asked about acceptable and time-appropriate terms.

It turns out that the one I wanted to use  was in common use for both male birds and male members, and was not considered unfit for polite company (even when referring to male domestic fowl) until Victorian times, about 25 years after the setting for my book.

And a cockerel was, until Victorian times, a young male chicken – under 12 months old. The Victorian English applied the junior bird term to all male chickens of any age, while the Puritan Americans reacted to the double entendre a 150 years earlier, and adopted the term rooster.

So I can keep my joke and remain historically accurate, though Alex’s pun would have had him banned from the dinner table if the more innocent ladies at the table had understood his double meaning.

Other writers have clearly faced the same challenge, and some clever person has responded with a timeline diagram for male anatomy terms, taken from Green’s Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green.

I could go for man Thomas, though there are a number of other possibilities. Calling it a battering piece might break the mood of my love scene, don’t you think? And shaft of delight, while authentic, is rather too congratulatory. Tickle tail is funny, and gay instrument might be misunderstood by today’s readers.

Here, by the way, is the equivalent timeline diagram for female anatomy terms.

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He was drunk. But not nearly drunk enough.

the_abandoned_rakeI’ve rewritten the first chapter, changed the POV, lost 500 words, and turned it into a prologue.

He was drunk. But not nearly drunk enough. He still saw the boy’s dying eyes everywhere. In half-caught glimpses of strangers reflected in windows along Bond Street, under the hats of coachmen that passed him along the silent streets to Bedford Square, in the flickering lamps that shone pallidly against the cold London dawn as he stumbled up the steps to his front door.

They followed his every waking hour: hot, angry, hate-filled eyes that had once been warm with admiration.

He drank to forget, but all he could do was remember.

I’ve posted the whole prologue on my excerpts page. Take a look and see what you think.

 

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Editing the book

editing novelSo here’s my to-do list for the next three weeks. All going according to plan, I’ll have a draft ready for beta readers by mid-November. Of course, it’s a bit heavy to lug on the train with me. 🙂

Prepare

Update the outline as it is

Update the plot spreadsheet as it is

Hand edit

Need: single subject spiral bound notebook, 3 to 4 colours of pen, printed draft, Outline Notebook, maps.

Read.

Write down:

  • Chapter numbers
  • POVs
  • Name of each character as that character is introduced
  • Plot lines as they begin
  • Events in each chapter

Mark:

  • Writing that needs work
  • Writing that works

Questions:

  • Does this character have a place in this book?
  • Has a character changed appearance?
  • Has a character changed in other ways? If so, do I explain why?
  • Are all plotlines carried through?
  • Are all plotlines resolved?
  • Have all conflicts been resolved
  • Does this scene matter?
  • Have I followed the rule of 3? (If it appears twice, it should appear three times)

Talk things out

Discuss my proposed solutions with my PRH and my lovely sister

Plan and plot

  • Rewrite the outline
  • Rewrite the plot spreadsheet

Rewrite, reorganise

Now fix all the things I thought were wrong, rewriting and reorganising as needed.

ADDED: Check that every chapter ends in a way that keeps people reading, and that every chapter begins with a hook.

Edit for spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice

  • Check capitalisation
  • Eliminate qualifiers
  • Evaluate adverbs
  • Remove superfluous movement
  • Tune dialogue attribution
  • Check whether ‘that’ is needed
  • Remove filter words

To See (See, Sees, Saw, Seeing, Seen)
To Hear (Hear, Hears, Heard, Hearing)
To Feel (Feel, Feels, Felt, Feeling)
To Look (Look, Looks, Looked, Looking)
To Know (Know, Knows, Knew, Knowing)
To Think (Think, Thinks, Thought, Thinking)
To Wonder (Wonder, Wonders, Wondered, Wondering)
To Realize (Realize, Realizes, Realized, Realizing)
To Watch (Watch, Watches, Watched, Watching)
To Notice (Notice, Notices, Noticed, Noticing)
To Seem (Seem, Seems, Seemed, Seeming)
To Decide (Decide, Decides, Decided, Deciding)
To Sound (Sound, Sounds, Sounded, Sounding)

Read out loud, marking anything that doesn’t work

Fix, and let it go to beta readers