Sculpting a story

I love editing.

Don’t get me wrong – I love writing first drafts as well. They’re fun in an entirely different way. But editing – at least editing my own work 🙂 – allows me to make changes that can turn a good story into (hopefully!) a great story.

These can be tiny, subtle changes, like adding in sensory details or description, or explaining the physical sensations a character feels in a particular sensation. Or they can be hefty changes, like adding a new scene, or taking a three-page section from chapter three and condensing it into half a page or so. The latter is on the list for tomorrow, so we’ll see how long that scene ends up being – and I might end up tossing it entirely. In my first novel, I chopped about a chapter and a half from the middle of the manuscript because the tension dropped to a crawl, and the story ended up being much better as a result.

I think of writing as like sculpting with clay. I create something, then add a little here, remove a little there, until things feel right. This approach works very well for me, and it’s surprisingly fun.

My typical process is to start at the beginning of a story and work from there to the end, then repeat until I’m happy. This could mean editing, rewriting, adding new text, etc. I refer to this as ‘editing’ for simplicity. I usually don’t start the next session where I end up. Instead I like to go back a few paragraphs, or even a few pages, depending on what’s going on. That helps ground me in the story again, and I often find that I notice things when starting a round of editing that I didn’t notice at the end of the previous session. Sometimes I’ll linger on a section for a while, but if I’m unsure what to do I’ll usually make notes to myself and catch it on the next round.

I make many, many passes this way. I have no idea how many times I went through the entire manuscript for With Perfect Clarity, but it had to be at least 20 times. That was a special case – I started that manuscript years ago, when I wasn’t as good at writing, so I had to correct things the less-experienced me wrote as well as do my regular editing. That said, I made two full passes through the manuscript the weekend before I published it, and I found tiny things on both passes. At that point I was focusing more on copy editing (em dashes, ellipses, etc.), but I still reviewed the text on each pass just to be safe. And for the record, I missed one thing… There is a tiny factual inconsistency that one person (my dad!) pointed out to me. Ack! No one else has noticed it – or at least no one else has mentioned it. 🙂

And so I am now in the editing phase. I’m almost to the end of chapter one, so tomorrow morning I’ll start at the beginning of the scene I’m in the middle of, and go from there.

2015-11-19 Dakota Ridge

Charts and lists and plans

I now have a scene list for the novel, as well as an outline, and it’s been tremendously helpful. In the past I’ve worked with what was essentially a combination of a scene list and an outline, but for this book I wanted to track more details, so I have two separate documents.

My old approach tracked the following:

  • chapter
  • each scene in the chapter
  • which viewpoint each scene was from
  • details of what happened in each scene
  • chapter cliffhanger
  • time/day

That sounds fine and dandy, and it was definitely helpful. But because the details of each scene are listed out, it’s hard to get a high-level feel for what’s going on. This novel has 5 viewpoint characters, only two of whom are main characters, and I wanted to make sure the secondary characters were staying in line and not taking over anywhere in the story.

Here’s what I’ve got right now:

scene list

The elements I’m currently tracking are:

  • chapter
  • # words per chapter
  • whether or not the scene is a flashback
  • very short summary of each scene
  • # words per scene
  • whose viewpoint each scene is from
  • cliffhanger
  • time/day
  • which characters are present in each scene

Note that I don’t have all of the details written – for example, I haven’t added the cliffhangers yet. And I may not – I may keep them in the outline.

Seeing the novel represented in this form helped me identify scenes I needed to add (in pink in the chart), and I was able to get a feel for where the story was weak or felt unbalanced. I shuffled several scenes around as a result, and the story feels more complete as a result. I used different colors for each viewpoint character, and that helped identify places where there was too much or too little written from one character’s point of view.

I used to track word count per chapter separately, but I added that to this chart, as well as word count per scene. I always look at the chapter word count because I generally want all the chapters to be roughly the same length. They don’t have to be super close, but if I had a 7,000-word chapter followed by a 2,000-word chapter, I’d want to have a good reason. Otherwise the pacing can feel off to the reader.

I’ve never tracked word count per scene before, so I’m curious to see how helpful this is – but it seems like it could be useful in the same way. I have a chart showing word count per scene by character, where I use different colors to represent the different viewpoint characters. So far it’s interesting, but I don’t know if it’s going to identify anything in this novel since I’m so far along.

I feel much better about where I’m at than I did a week ago. I started with a complete manuscript that I knew needed a lot of work – all the planning and organizing I’ve done has helped me identify exactly what I need to work on. I have tons of notes in the manuscript as well (I use Word and comment balloons), but those are at a lower level. I really needed to see the big picture. I’m planning on finishing the outline later on to make sure I’m covering every tiny detail, but right now I want to start filling in some of the larger holes I’ve identified.

2015-11-11 Dakota Ridge

Let the laboring begin

The past week was full of extracurricular events – the best was going to opening night for the opera Aida. It was so much fun I’m planning on buying season tickets next year. Next year they’ll have a performance of La fanciulla del West, which was originally set during the Gold Rush in California (no, I didn’t know that, but Wikipedia did). Next year’s performance will be set in Colorado instead. How awesome is that?!? I often write historical fiction set in the old West, so for me at least it’s pretty awesome. 🙂

Now that all that fun is out of the way I’m buckling down. My deadline for finishing my next novel (and hopefully settling on a title) is the end of the month. This isn’t because of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, which is always in November) – the dates are merely coincidental. I started November with a complete draft of my novel, but it needs a lot of work. In some places it’s pretty solid, and at most will need additional sensory details and description. In other areas it’s very sparse and quite a bit of content written. And, of course, once all that is done I’ll need to make several editing passes before I send it to my editor. Participating in NaNoWriMo, where the goal is to finish November with a first draft – not a final one – would have been far less work!

My first step is to write a detailed outline for the entire novel. I’ve completed my outline through chapter three, and am working on chapter four. This is not a fast process because I need to read through what I’ve written, or if I come across one of the ‘holes’ I need to think – in detail – about what isn’t yet written. When I find something that isn’t clear, or if I make a reference I want to tie in later in the story, I make notes.

For example, here’s a portion of the outline from the start of chapter one. Mark, the selkie, is the viewpoint character when the book opens. And if you’re wondering, everything in this chunk of the outline will be present in the book description/back cover copy – just much better worded. 🙂

  • Viewpoint: Mark
    • SETTING
      • The attic in Katy’s house.
    • Mark goes to the attic in Katy’s house to get his sealskin.
    • He’s ready to move on, and spend some time in his seal form.
    • His sealskin isn’t where he left it.
    • He remembers the tales about selkies having their skins stolen.
    • TO DO
      • Make this more powerful. Assume the reader knows nothing about selkies. Make it clear that if his skin is gone it’s dire.
    • He searches the attic and finally admits it’s gone.
    • That evening over dinner he tells Katy he lost something, a ‘kind of coat’
    • Katy says, “I know.”
    • CLIFFHANGER
      • Katy has stolen Mark’s sealskin.
    • SCENE GOALS
      • Introduce Mark. Show he’s a nice guy, loves the ladies, and that he’s a selkie.
      • Explain what a selkie is.
      • Explain how important a selkie’s sealskin is, and how dire it is if someone steals it.
      • Show that Katy stole his sealskin.

There’s a lot that isn’t mentioned, of course. For example, I want the reader to like Mark, to feel his pain when he realizes his sealskin has been stolen, and to root for him to get it back. This means I need to make Mark engaging, charming, and sympathetic – but not weak. His sealskin is gone, his world has been turned upside-down, but he can’t be passive about the situation – even though he has no idea what to do. That’s an awful lot to work on, and for another story I’d note that in the outline. For this story, I’ve already put a lot of work into all of that, so I felt I didn’t need to write it down.

One of the things in this part of the outline that is crucial is providing information about what a selkie is and what the legends are. Some people reading this novel will know more about Celtic mythology than I do – some won’t know anything at all. I want this story to work for both types of readers, so I need to present information about the myths in a way that explains them to some readers while not annoying those readers who already know all about selkies. I have a TO DO so I remember to work on this when I’m editing. I also list this in the scene goals. By the time the reader gets to the end of this scene, he/she should understand enough about selkies to know why Mark’s sealskin being stolen is so terrible, and should also have picked up on the fact that Katy – who clearly took it on purpose – might not be a super nice person. This is also the cliffhanger for this scene, as well as being one of the scene goals.

I will probably tweak my outline approach as I work with it more, but so far it’s proving to be very helpful. For example, I thought I’d done a good job at explaining the selkie myths, but in thinking about that as a goal of this scene I realized what I’d written needed a bit more work in order to make it clear how awful this theft is.

And now … back to the outline!

2015-11-03 Dakota Ridge