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Back to Writing….Soon

After a 2-year hiatus (almost) from working on my book, during which time I got a new, very demanding job leading a seven-person marketing department at a law firm; read and loved many, many YA books; and otherwise lived my increasingly busy life, I am just about ready to get back to the editing process. I am grateful for the break as I think it will give me a better perspective on the story and some fresh eyes.

Why the return? Someone I know recently published her sci-fi YA novel, and is now on her book tour, and that has inspired me to get back to it! It is Elizabeth Norris, author of the newly released Unraveling.  Anyway, it is high time that I got back to my book, as I owe it to the characters to tell their story!

Show Don’t Tell – Rewritten Scenes Part 1

Show, don’t tell.  Show, don’t tell. Repeat after me, please.

This has been the story of my life for the past few months as I have struggled to take the advice of an excellent and generous literary agent (read all about her here: http://fineprintlit.com/about-the-agents/suzie-townsend/).  Her biggest comment was about one of the most common first-time author mistakes: telling rather than showing what happens in your story.  I’ve decided to post, over the next couple of weeks, a few excerpts of scenes that I’ve rewritten in my WIP as a result of her advice as well as the advice of other literary agents via their blogs.

Example 1:  Reading a book about the Battle for Allyria

Context:  After being transported from modern-day America to the medieval world of Allyria, main character Lex is traveling with the handsome warrior Ash as he seeks to help save his homeland from barbarian invaders.  Lex shows him a book she has found about an ancient battle between their ancestors and the same enemy.

Before:  “Come look, Lex,” he said softly, completely absorbed in the book, and my depression melted.  I spread out my bedroll and lay next to him on my stomach.  I looked where he pointed, and he explained what the diagram meant, and how the plan that Elendor and Maia had made for the battle was flawed, and resulted in the burning of part of the city.

Together that evening, in our little refuge, by the glow of a single candle, we learned all about the Battle for Allyria, and wondered aloud how we could learn from their plan, including the things they did right as well as their mistakes, to protect Archam from attack.  Even though I had read this book before, it was all new to me as seen through Ash’s eyes.  Viewing the book’s illustrations from the perspective of a person who had been in battles and who understood military tactics, I was able to understand more than I had reading on my own.  He explained things so well, not impatiently, not patronizingly, just simply and frankly.  From there, it was an easy matter to continue talking about all manner of things.  It seemed that once our tongues were loosened, we had no trouble keeping the conversation going.  It was probably well after midnight before we blew out the candle and fell asleep.

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The problem:  Oh my, where do I start?  Once it was pointed out to me that I was telling instead of showing, scenes like this began jumping off the page at me.  I had just been lazy, lazy, lazy.  It’s so much easier to tell about a conversation than to choose the exact words your characters will say.  My new mantra: if it advances the plot, it’s worth showing through dialogue and gestures; if it doesn’t, it should be cut out completely.  Here’s how I rewrote it.

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After:  “Come look, Lex,” he said softly, completely absorbed in the book, and my depression melted into something warm and glowing in my chest.  I spread out my bedroll and lay next to him on my stomach.  I looked where he pointed.  The book’s hand-inked parchment glowed in the candlelight.

“See how the Varangians were able to surprise them and gain the walls?  The people of the city were trapped, Lex.  We can’t let that happen in Archam.”

“How will you stop it?” My voice in my ears sounded gentler than usual, and I hoped he didn’t notice.

He waved a hand across the page.  “Archam’s defenses are different.  Our bridges will prevent an attack from the river, and our walls and towers are higher and stronger.”

“Won’t people still be trapped inside the walls, though?”

He gazed at me for a moment, the candlelight reflected in his eyes.  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.  You and I will have to think of a way to prevent that from happening.”

As he went on about the weapons the Varangians had brought and the primitive ways the Marrocans had fought them off, I hardly heard him.  A flush went through me.  You and I, he had said.  The candle threw the planes of his face into sharp relief; as I gazed at the spark of light in his eyes, the warmth spread through me.

It was well after midnight before we said goodnight and moved to opposite sides of the shelter.  A tiny flame of something continued to flicker inside me long after the candle was extinguished.

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Please let me know if you like the rewrite and have additional suggestions!

Advice from a Literary Agent

I have received some extremely valuable feedback from a literary agent I know, who very kindly read my entire Allyria manuscript and e-mailed me six pages of suggestions.  All I can say is, “Wow.”  I have spent the last ten days digesting the feedback and thinking about the main comments she had and how to fix them, and I’m just about ready to dive back into the manuscript.  Here are the major pieces of advice she gave:

Show, don’t tell.  Her biggest concern was the many places in the manuscript where it was “all tell, no show.”  Everyone knows this one, right?  And yet still I made this mistake.  She provided me with numerous examples where I’ve done this.  I had already identified this as a problem as I read other books in YA (see previous posts) and the specific examples she provided will help me immensely as I re-read and edit on this next round.  Now that this has been pointed out to me, I am fully confident that I can fix this trait in my writing.  (25 years of writing and rewriting for business will help me here.)

Provide closure to the ending , even if it’s an ongoing series.  Another concern which she mentioned was the unsatisfying ending.  “Even if you are [planning a sequel/series], there needs to be more closure – most books won’t sell unless they can stand alone.”  I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I can make this more satisfying and bring a little more closure.  Yes, this is just Book I, so I can’t resolve everything at the end of this book, but I can totally bring some of what happens at the beginning of Book II and put it in Book I.  At least some more of the questions will be answered, and that will also satisfy the directive of “show, don’t tell.”

No vivid details.  Another suggestion was the lack of vivid details to bring the fantasy setting to life.  Again, lots of examples that will be so helpful.  Here’s one example she gave.  ” ‘The setting for this stage of our journey couldn’t have been more beautiful. The desert was dazzling’ can be cut, because the next sentences show us the desert’s beauty.”  Wow.   I was so worried about word count that I didn’t stop to consider whether one uninspired sentence of generic description could be replaced with two or three sentences that told how the setting impacted my narrator’s senses.  This will be a fun challenge for me to fix, as I struggle to bring the Allyria in my head to the page.

Plot inconsistencies.  The category that I appreciated the most, because it was so surprising and eye-opening for me, was the plot inconsistencies that she identified.  The first one made me laugh out loud, because I had never even considered it.  It involved a character knowing something really important, but dying and leaving only a cryptic message about it that took the MC the rest of the book to decipher.  Her point was, if this character knew this information, why didn’t she send a message to someone as soon as she learned it?  Why indeed?  This and another comment are leading me to restructure this part of the story.  More mystery, more agony, less certainty.  No one is going to know everything, and only Lex will be able to put the pieces together.  Even the advice about those inconsistencies I thought I had fixed was valuable, because perception is reality when it comes to the reader.

There were a variety of other comments, all of which I agree with and will take seriously.  The funny thing is, she didn’t mention as problems the things I was most worried about in my previous rounds of editing — pacing, cutting backstory, and word count (although she did identify a few places where I told too much and took too many words to do it).  I guess that’s good news that my previous editing apparently fixed some of these glaring problems.  Now I can move forward with the next round of edits and make the story better.

She also mentioned two strengths that really warmed my heart — she liked my strong but flawed fantasy heroine, and she liked the romance between the heroine and hero.  These are the parts of my story I liked the best too, so I’m a happy camper.

I realize I am very lucky to have someone so knowledgeable take time to read the manuscript and give me such great advice.  Now it’s time to act on it!  As I write this, I am growing excited to dive back in and tackle the manuscript again.  I’m going in!

Reviews are coming in….

My beta reader’s circle has been widened for my #1 novel Allyria, and I’m starting to get tweets and e-mails from friends who are reading it.

I KNOW these people are not reading it with a critical eye, and I’m not sure they would tell me if they thought there was something wrong, but I thought I’d share a few of their comments. 

From one of my best friends, whom I have know for 35 years, who is reading it with her 17 year old daughter:  

“I am loving the book.  I am so impressed.  I can’t believe you wrote this.  This is a real book.  I am on chap. 5 and want to keep reading, but my eyes are hurting….Yardley is loving it too.  I will ask her how she feels about the fantasy/other world part of it.  I am liking Ash despite his poor hygiene.”

From the intern at work, who loves YA fiction:

@CNC999 I am [reading it]! Haven’t been able to put it down – thus i missed your tweet. This is really REALLY good! Lex’s thoughts crack me up 🙂 6:50 PM Feb 28th via web in reply to CNC999

(followed by this) 

@CNC999 Just finished it. Now you must hurry with the 2nd one bc that ending has left me on edge! I need more! 8:21 PM Mar 3rd via web

From my third pair of readers, I haven’t heard anything yet — the daughter is 11, and the mother is PTO president this year, so it’s going to take them a little longer.  I am trying to be patient!  🙂

I still have not done any more writing of Book II since my revelation last week that I need to put the characters in more agony.  I am contemplating putting the manuscript into that program that allows you to chunk the book by scene and then switch scenes around, but I can’t remember the name of it.  Does anyone know the name?  If so, please leave a comment.

That’s all for now.  Life gets in the way once again.  (Go Duke!)

Ideas for Making It Better

Wow, I have been inundated in recent days with ideas for making my MS #1 and my WIP even better. 

First, a confession.  I haven’t written a word all week.  After my trip to the YA section of the bookstore on Monday, I read two fabulous books this week — Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers and the heartbreakingly beautiful Shiver by Maggie Steifvater.  I’m resisting the urge to run run runout today to get the second book in the Steifvater series.  Oh, Sam and Grace!  The raw emotions of these two books are going to have me taking a second look at how Lex deals with her feelings.  I have to remember that 17-year-olds can’t always identify exactly what they’re feeling.  I like how both of these authors show that.  I know, I know:  show, don’t tell.  I think I finally get that where emotions are concerned.

Second, an update on my three-part strategy to distract myself from the fact that my manuscript is in the hands of a literary agent.  The three steps were (1) widening my circle of beta readers, (2) continuing the writing of Book II, and (3) getting comments on my query.

I have distributed my manuscript to three new readers so far; they are reading and promising to give me feedback.  One of the readers is a 17-year-old girl — who has been charged with making sure the voice of my narrator doesn’t sound like a (*ahem*) more mature woman in places. I’m really looking forward to their feedback and will take all comments seriously.  I have three more readers waiting in the wings for when those three are done.

I have not yet written any more of Book II, but I did make a major breakthrough.  I figured out why I had stalled on the project and had identified the vague but nagging sensation of dissatisfaction with it.  All of my favorite YA fiction — The Hunger Games & Catching Fire, Some Girls Are and Shiver — has taught me one very important thing:  my characters in Book II are not in enough agony.  I was so happy to (*spoiler*) reconcile Lex and Ash that I couldn’t bear for them to be unhappy in my first draft.  But happy=uninteresting, so I’m going to suck it up and make them miserable.  And yesterday, I finally had the big idea on how to do it.  Now I’m really excited to pick back up and insert the angst and worry and fear and…well, the world will just have to wait and see.

I haven’t yet posted my query — I need some technical help from my daughter, but I will finally post it on this blog.  Also, Melissa Garrett (@lisgarrett) had a very good idea to post some of her early writings on her blog.  Since I’ve been writing about Allyria for 25 years, I thought I’d do the same.  That will also appear here shortly.

So….I will continue to plug away!  The writing process continues to surprise and engage me, and I’m grateful for the whole experience.

MS is sent!

Well, I took the plunge — after cutting 8,000 words from my Allyria manuscript, going through four complete passes at reviewing, revising and editing (including eliminating unnecessary characters, giving up scenes that didn’t advance the plot, and eliminating pretty much all backstory), I have now submitted my manuscript to a literary agent.

Granted, she is someone I know well, and she asked for the whole thing, and she agreed to send me comments and tell me the truth about whether it is marketable.  I know she’s swamped and may not get to it for weeks or months.  So…I have a three-part strategy for distracting myself from my fears while I wait patiently for her response.

1)  I’m going to simultaneously widen my beta readers’ circle — I have friends who love to read, and who have been clamoring to read the manuscript for months.  I am going to print it out and have a few bound copies made.  They probably won’t be as critical as I need them to be, but it will make me feel good to share the story and characters I love with a few more people.

2)  Then there’s always Book II to write.  I am halfway done with the first draft, but I know with certainty after going through the edits of Book I that I will be eliminating a lot of what I’ve written.  Still, it will be glad to immerse myself once again in Allyria and see where my characters take me.

3)  Finally, I’ve developed a query and showed it to a few people.  I’m going to await the agent’s feedback before posting it here.

Feel free to wish me luck as I await the first real (aka from the publishing world) criticism of my manuscript.  I have received so much support already from past comments.  Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Editing and Reading Groups

Wow, things really progressed this weekend with editing Book I.  Once I got rolling, I was really able to make use of what I had learned.

Only problem was, I thought there was more “dead wood” in that stretch of manuscript than there was.  My pacing, as I read through it, was better than I feared.  That sounds like a good thing but, in this instance, it isn’t.  The reason?  I was deprived of some of the more obvious ways to make it a little shorter.

Time to ‘fess up.  My manuscript is too long.  Pre-edit, it stood at 120K.  I am fully aware that it is too long, so no need for lectures.  The edits I’ve done so far — eliminating non-essential characters, cutting scenes that don’t move the plot along, cutting out backstory — are all on paper still, so I don’t know what their impact will be.  They will certainly shave some of that off, but not 15K.  For that I am going to have to shorten the characters’ journey, or eliminate scenes that do advance the plot but not enough, or change the plot in some other way.  I’m sure I can make it better and shorter at the same time; haven’t we all read books and been left wanting more?  That’s the feeling I’m striving for from my readers.  Rather than the opposite feeling — is she ever going to get to the point?  But without reading the whole thing in one night, how will I ever know exactly what to cut from here?

In short, after I finish these edits, it may be time to have someone else read it and give me their opinion.

Here’s my question — I’ve heard many of you talk about critical reading groups.  How do I find one that will appreciate my story and be willing to read something in the YA romance/fantasy genre?  (I don’t want to waste time with a reviewer who really hates fantasy, for example.)  What do I have to do for them in return – do I agree to read their work?  What about copyright concerns when I send someone my manuscript?  Are these real or virtual groups?  Is there a forum somewhere where people can post their needs?  Someone please enlighten me on this process.  So far I have had only two people read the manuscript, and both of them read a hard copy.  And neither of them had a single suggestion to make it shorter!

Your help in guiding me through this scary but necessary phase of editing would be much appreciated.

Still struggling with backstory

I returned to my Book I manuscript last night after three weeks off (working full-time meant every spare minute had to be spent getting ready for the Christmas gift-giving and entertaining activities).  I picked it up last night and looked at the edits I’d made longhand on my original manuscript.

There were more questions there than answers.  I’d written things like, “Consider condensing and using in Book II” and circled things rather than deleting them.  I am just having so much trouble deciding what to keep.

I’ve gotten great advice in answer to a previous post, and I’ll try to summarize it here, as much to inspire myself as to inform others:

• Look at each scene and consider how it advances the plot.  If it doesn’t advance the plot, take it out.
• Combine characters or eliminate them entirely if they don’t advance the plot.  (Think Tom Bombadil in LOTR.)
• Let a friend read the manuscript and put a checkmark in the margin whenever they are a little bored.

I will do all of these.  I’m going to go back through my characters’ week spent in a certain location, which consists of activities during the day and conversations with their host in the evening.  I’ll have to make sure every activity and every conversation serves a purpose.  And I’ve pretty much decided their host is not going to tell them everything he originally told them right up front.  They need to feel the questions–they need to feel a little more rudderless–to make the story more compelling.  When I think of my favorite books, life is pretty awful for the characters as they work through the plot.  I need to toughen up and make things a little–OK, a lot–more awful for Ash and Lex. 

I don’t have a huge number of characters, but I’ve already combined several of them, so I’m feeling good about that.  The others all seem necessary to me at this point, so they can keep their heads for now.

Finally, I have a friend who has read the manuscript once and only offered a couple of comments.  She has promised to read the MS with a much more critical eye on this round.  I have been writing and being edited for 25 years, so I think I can take it. 

I’ll report back here on my progress.  Wish me luck.