revision
You know, there might just be lots of extra pesky words cluttering up your manuscript now and then.
Oct 03, 2010
See what I did there? Haha.
Anyway. It’s no big secret I’m trying to cut my manuscript right now. It needs to drop about 12,000 words to fit within the YA fantasy word limit of 100k. I’m getting a lot of help from other writers who’ve taken a look at my manuscript, especially Amie Kaufman and more recently Kat Zhang. Ultimately, though, I’m the one who has to make the call on the cuts.
Do I stand by my manuscript, and query agents with it even though it’s over the magic word limit? Or do I cut it, potentially at the expense of the story, so that it fits, and make certain I don’t alienate agents who are turned off by the high word count?
10 Things I Have Learned About Revising (aka, how not to die)
Aug 02, 2010
In no particular order:
1. If you’re writing along, plowing ahead in order to finish a draft, and you think of stuff you want to change later but don’t right at that moment because you want to finish, MAKE A NOTE OF IT SOMEWHERE. You aren’t actually going to remember later, no matter how sure you are at the time that you will.
2. Outline outline outline. Even if you’re a writer who abhors outlining ahead of time (like me), do try outlining your plot after having written the first draft. This makes it so much easier to see the problem points, and visualize the pace of your plot.
3. Try to leave the house sometimes.
4. Take a break between the first and second drafts. Even if you think you’re on a roll and should keep up the momentum, you are going to want to die in about a week.
5. Start the new draft with a clean document, rather than saving a copy of the previous draft and making changes to it. If there are sections that aren’t getting rewritten, then copy/paste them from the old draft to the new one in SMALL chunks. This forces you to actually look at what you’re putting in, and keeps you from glossing over it.
Correspondence from the Front: Revision update
Jul 15, 2010
I’ve gotten off to a rather rocky start with my revision process. I suppose it’s only fair, because when I started writing the first draft I got through the first 30,000 words of it almost without a hitch–it’s about time I hit some speed bumps. Part of the problem has come from outside the writing sphere–I got the mother of all migraines this past weekend, landing me in the ER for treatment and then unable to look at a computer screen for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time for a couple days. Mostly I’ve been rewriting the first chapter over and over, until I got to the point where I started feeling a bit like a broken record just skipping through the same words over and over again, stuck in that one groove.
Everything is better when it’s in rainbow!
Jul 07, 2010
I spent my weekend (and my birthday… and the two days since my birthday…) outlining my first draft of THE IRON WOOD. Granted, I have had some other things to do, like go out to dinner with my friends on my birthday, and attempt to go see the Tim Burton exhibit downtown today only to be turned away by the huuuuge line, and console ourselves with hot chocolate (such a terrible fate!). But mostly I have been outlining.
This is something I do not really do much of. I’ve always been a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person, and tend to rebel against outlining on principle. That said, I recently learned the post-it technique from my writing group back in the U.S., which is made up of Odyssey workshop grads. It was so helpful for the people who used it that I had to try it myself.