My literary forest needs thinning?

So, I haven't done much posting about Raoul's tour of the literary agents. I don't like to, frankly... when there's major good news I'll share it, but I personally am not a fan of listing details of rejection letters on my blog. a) you never know who's reading your blog and b) unless they're funny or otherwise entertaining, who wants to read them anyhow?

But yesterday I got one that really made me think. She liked the idea and thought my writing was decent but said my pacing was too slow in the four pages I'd sent her. My dialogue tags (the lines before and after the dialogue, basically) and my descriptions were too long and were slowing down the story.

I've never been told this. In fact, I've been trying to ADD to those things (hmmm, suddenly the reason I've never been told this but now I AM being told this comes clear... did I swing too far??) to make the story deeper and richer.

Now, I've posted before about the 10% solution ebook I use to get unnecessary filler words ('that', 'this', '-ing words', etc.) out of my writing. I put Raoul through this process and I really thought it was clean.

But, as Mr. W said yesterday, all of the trees are good ones but perhaps they don't all need to be there. Basically, I've made sure the words are the right ones but I haven't focused as much on "do I need words here at all? does this truly need to be explained?"

So I took the pages I'd sent to this agent and set to work. Below, I'll paste the first paragraphs I sent and then the revised version.

Original version:

I locked eyes with my fellow job candidate, trying not to smile at his surprise. "Yes, I'm serious, Joe. Turn around."

A mottled flush crawled up his neck. "I can't ask you to do that." He shot a glance at the receptionist, the only other person in the late-70's-style waiting room plastered with Toronto Hogs hockey team posters and memorabilia, but her focus on her computer remained absolute.

"You didn't ask, I offered. And your shoulders are right up to your ears. Don't look a gift massage in the mouth."

Since I'd already been waiting a good ten minutes, although they'd flown by in his company, I probably didn't have long before my interview, but I couldn't leave such a nice man without at least trying to reduce the awful tension I'd noticed in him.

Besides, I'd get to touch him again, like I'd wanted to since our brief introductory handshake. Something about him, and not just his cuteness, called to me. He felt wounded somehow. Fragile, despite his height and clearly muscular body.

Total word count: 174

Revised version:

"Yes, I'm serious, Joe. Turn around."

"I can't ask you to do that." He glanced at the receptionist, at her desk beneath a poster of the 1974 Toronto Hogs hockey team, but her focus on her computer remained absolute.

"You didn't ask, I offered. And your shoulders are right up to your ears. Don't look a gift massage in the mouth."

I probably didn't have long before my interview, but I couldn't leave such a nice guy in such discomfort. Besides, I'd get to touch him again, like I'd wanted to since our introductory handshake. Something about him, not just his cuteness, called to me. He felt wounded. Fragile, despite his height and clearly muscular body.

Total word count: 116

Do you see? I was stunned. The entire first scene went from 919 words to 538. I don't think I've lost anything, and it's so much tighter. I DID take out another example of his hesitation to accept the massage, but since I'd already had one I didn't truly need two. I took out most of the description of the room, but now it focuses on the 1974 hockey team (which will shortly be revealed to be significant) while the computer suggests we're not actually IN 1974.

It's still my story, but now it's faster and cleaner.

So what were the steps to make this happen?

1. Read each sentence as if it's the first time you've seen it, and ask yourself, "Does this sentence matter?"
   
2. If it doesn't matter at all (like the very first sentence, which I had worked on repeatedly but never recognized I didn't actually need!) cut it.
3. If part of it matters, (like that they shook hands but not that it was 'brief' - how else would an introductory handshake usually be?) keep what matters and cut the rest.
4. Repeat to the end of the scene.
5. Re-read the whole scene, checking that a) everything's still connected b) you haven't lost something important c) it still has your voice d) there aren't any more words to take out.

If you're a writer, please consider passing this along to your friends. I know it's not revolutionary but I can't be the only one who's spent hours polishing text that doesn't need to be in the book. On the scene level I HAVE done the "does this need to be here" process, but somehow it never occurred to me to do it line-by-line.

It's important to have the right words. It's also important to have only needed words.

I will be going through Raoul in the afternoons as I write Aardvark in the mornings, and I expect to be finished within a month. The agent agreed the new excerpt was much better and she's going to take a look when I'm finished. Even if we don't end up working together, we've made a connection, and I'll have a MUCH stronger book because of her.

Even a quick survey of agent blogs shows how many are understandably wary of giving detailed feedback to an unknown author. Too many writers have sent back nastygrams. But this agent took the chance and I'm so grateful, because I think this will change my writing forever.

Give it a try on something you've written. At worst, you spend a little while (I spent less than an hour on the first four pages, including the time I spent saying, "I can't believe it, it's so much better!" over and over) with your writing and realize this isn't a problem area for you. But at best... maybe it'll change your writing forever too!

Heather

Aardvark 1

I don't intend to post all of these every day, so don't worry. Today's just kind of neat because I didn't know if this would really work out.

My quasi-random number generator (AKA Mr. W shouting out a number) told me to work with item #76 on my 90-item-long list of book ideas. This idea consisted of:

a woman is an unexpected gold medalist at the Olympics and must deal with the changes in her life.

Not exactly specific, is it? No sport information, no details on changes... and I think this might be one of my MORE-detailed entries. Hmm. :)

Anyhoo, I started to play with it. My favourite techniques are a) free-writing (just keep typing and see what falls out), b) making a list of words related to the story, then picking one of those words and building a new list off it, then picking another word... and c) tarot cards. (This one needs some explanation - essentially I think of a question, like "how does she want this to work out?", draw a card, write down what the card looks like, and then figure out what that means for the story.)

This is the first time I've started from an essentially blank slate in coming up with a book topic. Raoul was similar but I had more than the line above. I wasn't at all sure if I'd get anything.

I have 8 single-spaced pages of typed notes, and I have the following description.

Four years ago, Andrea was an unexpected marathon Olympic silver medalist. This year, more mature and better trained, the country expects her to bring home an easy gold. Instead, her failure to listen to herself and her own training needs results in a dreadful performance as she lets nerves and pressure destroy her. Her husband urges her to quit competing and take the cushy broadcasting job she's been offered, but she can't live with how she performed and longs to go back for one more try at Olympic glory. When she eventually decides to do just that, they separate.

Alone, she spends all her time training, supported by the one sponsor who didn't dump her after the games. Watching the winter Olympics, she is touched by the disastrous performance, and terrible handling thereof, of a young female skier, and reaches out to support the girl. The skier becomes the daughter Andrea never had, but Andrea can't keep the girl from self-destructing and eventually killing herself just months before Andrea's Olympics.

Devastated, Andrea again considers quitting but finally accepts that she's a competitor to the core. She runs her marathon, and is in second going into the final lap around the stadium. Her competitor looks back and sees her, and Andrea sees the woman's fear. Andrea doesn't have any fear. She knows what she has to do, and she draws on all the strength she's built bit by bit over the last four years and chases the woman down. The book ends with her just a few steps from the line, knowing it's hers, and hearing the loud whistle of her husband.

Do I love it? I'm not entirely sure. HOWEVER, it's a plot line. I think there are flaws, but this is four hours' worth of work.

More importantly, it's validation for the whole "take a few words and spend a day making a book from it, then make a new book tomorrow" concept.

When Mr. W comes home I'll get him to choose a new random number and start thinking about tomorrow's idea. For now, my brain's tired. :) So I'll ask you (and rest assured, I can handle rejection :) - would you read this book?

Wordle, Polar Bear edition

After my last post, it occurred to me that a comparison of the very first (2005) and current versions of Polar Bear might be instructive. So, the first...



In which we see a frightening overuse of the word 'really'. Yeesh.

And the current version...



In which, unless I'm missing it, 'really' doesn't appear at all. Certainly not as a big word.

I also notice there are a lot fewer words in the current version's picture, which I guess means I'm using those words more and others not so much? Regardless, it's neat.

But the 'said' thing. Must really (hehehe) work on that! Not by using other tags instead, but there must be a way to reduce them.

OK, no more Wordle. For today, anyhow. :)

June 9, 2008: Seeing the scenes come alive

I tend to 'see' certain scenes for each book in my head (usually the grand finale and some big/important/fun scene in the middle) over and over. Over the weekend I got the idea to use this more consciously, to visualize the next few scenes I'll be writing. I decided to visualize four, since it gives me a good chunk of writing without being all 'visualize the whole book already'-ish.

I wrote two of them today and they flowed well. I'll keep it up, adding two new scenes to the back of the two left over ones. It seemed to help, and it'll keep me from obsessing over the ending and the big scene in the middle of Raoul. :)

Writing Project: Raoul
Time Planned: 2 hours plus type-in
Time Spent: 2 hours plus 93 minutes (overanalysis? perhaps, but the Palm keeps the numbers for me :)
Favourite Part: having something I'd planned to bring up later pop up here and recognizing it needed to be done here

Exercise: 45 minutes elliptical
One Fun Thing I Did Today: nothing yet, unfortunately. I DID watch Corner Gas at lunch, but I do that every work day so I'm not sure it counts. I'll have to think of something!

June 3, 2008: Day 2 of Raoul, off the outline :)

Those of you who were around when I got married (800 years ago this August) may remember the schedule I made for the big day, right down to the minute. I took considerable mockery for this, as I recall. HOWEVER, on the wedding day I didn't worry about whether we stuck to it. The schedule was for me, to make sure we hadn't forgotten to, you know, have the cake picked up at the bakery or have something there for me to change into afterward. Once it was all scheduled and I knew it would work, I went with the flow.

Do you see where this is going? My FIRST SCENE is not how I outlined it. I saw this starting yesterday but didn't finish typing it in until today.

And yet, I am a happy camper, and thrilled with the 5314 words (but who's counting?) I've got so far. Why? Because, armed with my outline, I know I'm not lost. I'm just taking a different route, but the destination is still the same.

Unless that changes too, at some point. :)

Writing Project: Raoul's first draft
Time Planned: 2 hours writing, as long as it takes to type in the rest of yesterday's and today's new work
Time Spent: 2 hours writing, 1 hour 50 minutes typing in
Favourite Part: "tighter than a size six bathing suit on a size fourteen swimmer"

Exercise: 45 minutes elliptical
One Fun Thing I Did Today: nothing yet, but there'll be video games tonight, and two scratch-and-win lottery tickets I found when I cleaned up my desk. :)

May 15, 2008: Crazy scheduling woman

There are probably rocket launches that aren't scheduled as tightly as I made today's plan. I launched my rocket, let me tell you. (That sounds dirtier than I'd intended.)

Raoul's outline is indeed done. The characters are itching to be written, but Seven needs to get out into the world first, so tomorrow I'll finish up some of what I've been learning in the emotions course (which is better and better with each passing lecture, incidentally) and get ready to go full-blast on Seven on Monday. (Yes, it's a holiday. No, I ain't takin' no holiday. My boss is a slave-driver. :)

As well, I cleaned out the linen closet (scoring 15 items to donate to charity - explain why two people need ten towels??), sent off my Computing Unplugged article, washed the floors, dusted, spent an hour applying the emotions course to Seven and another half hour on the next lecture... I am a beast. A tired beast. :)

Writing Project: Raoul's planning - last day, baby!
Time Planned: 2 hours
Time Spent: 2 hours
Favourite Part: How badly I want to start writing it. :)

Exercise: 40 minutes elliptical (scheduled to be 45 but I was going to be too late for breakfast!)
One Fun Thing I Did Today: I'm about to sit and relax and crochet for an hour. Heaven!

May 8, 2008: Write now, clean later!

I'd planned to work on Raoul this morning and then spend the afternoon in various decluttering projects and finishing off my article. I did the morning, and was about halfway through creating Raoul's scene list. In the afternoon, I did the article and then felt like working on Raoul.

"No," I said to myself, "you're supposed to be cleaning." And then I realized the foolishness of that. The clutter is nearly all of the hidden variety these days - kitchen cabinets and whatnot - and even if it were teetering piles of junk, why would I put off an urge to write to clean instead?

So I didn't. I spent two more hours on Raoul, I have the scene list finished, and I am ridiculously happy. So a good day!

I was going to put said scene list into Excel, as per the instructions on the Snowflake Method I use to write my books. But in the past, I've had trouble keeping track of little tidbits of dialogue or action, little "ooh, this should happen in this scene" things... so this time, I'm using an outlining program on my Palm called ListPro.

The picture shows the first few scenes. See the little plus sign? It expands to show the tidbits (which I'm not showing YOU... you'll have to read the book when it's done! :) and now I don't have to do my usual method (which involves putting all the bits into an enormous Word file and then scrabbling through it whenever I need something). The code in the note field is to tell me which subplot(s) the scene is covering. I feel so organized. 'All' that's left is to write the book. :)

The Mississauga half marathon is on Sunday. Sure hope I'm ready!

Writing Project: Raoul's planning
Time Planned: 2 hours
Time Spent: 4 hours
Favourite Part: CRAVING doing more

Exercise: scheduled rest day
One Fun Thing I Did Today: played with my new Bluetooth adaptor which I'm using to wirelessly synchronize my Palm. I am a nerd and I love it!

May 1, 2008: 10% of my writing is fluff

Apparently, anyhow. I have a great eBook called "The Ten Percent Solution" by Ken Rand, which states that nearly every piece of writing can have ten percent of the words cut without making a difference.

I used it today on a character summary from Raoul. The first version, at 145 words:

At thirty-one years old, Forrest's hockey career is nearing its end, although he won't admit it to himself. Last year, he put his heart and soul into hockey as he never had before, and it won him a trade to the top team in the league after a vicious bidding war for his services. The night the trade was confirmed, though, his fiancée died in a car accident that also put Forrest out of commission for most of the off-season. He battled back, and was in good shape by the start of the season, but he pulled his groin on the last day of training. The trainers have done everything they can, but the injury heals briefly and then gets worse again, and they have no idea how to fix it. Until, that is, a groin specialist named Tess applies to work with the team...

And the revised one, at 119 words (which is actually an 18% reduction but who's counting? :)

Thirty-one year old Forrest's hockey career is in jeopardy. Last year, he put his heart and soul into hockey as never before, and it won him a trade to the league's top team. The night the trade was confirmed, though, his fiancée died in a car accident that also put Forrest out of commission for most of the off-season. He battled back and was recovered by the start of the season, but he pulled his groin on the last day of training. The trainers have done everything they can, but the injury heals briefly and then gets worse again, and they've run out of ideas. Until, that is, a groin specialist named Tess applies to work with the team...

To my eyes, the sense of it is the same but it's much tighter. I applied this eBook to "Seven" as well, although not on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, and it's a really effective technique.

I can't believe it's May already. A third into the year, and I don't think I've done a third of what I want to do in 2008. Must keep moving!

Writing Project: Raoul's planning
Time Planned: 2 hours
Time Spent: 2 hours
Favourite Part: getting to know Forrest a little better

Exercise: 40 minutes elliptical (no weights until after the two half-marathons are complete)
One Fun Thing I Did Today: watched "Corner Gas" at lunch

April 29, 2008: A focus! YES!

As my exuberant subject line would suggest, Raoul is coming into focus. There are several sub-threads to the book, and choosing which one is the real plot hasn't been easy. But I know now. And a one-sentence description follows.

A money-driven aspiring artist's accidental new job massaging an ailing pro hockey player jumpstarts her artistic career, but her creativity disappears as her sales rise.

I'm 95% happy with the wording of the sentence, and 105% happy with the direction the book's going. It's starting to click in my head, and little bits and pieces of dialogue are coming to me. This is always a good sign. I used to panic that I wasn't getting them all down, but over time I have learned that the key scenes will run through my head again and again, and the bits that really work for me will stick. By the time I write a key scene, I can see it so vividly it's just a matter of getting it on the page. (Just. And a marathon's just 26.2 miles.)

Speaking of which, my first May half marathon is in less than 2 weeks. I have no idea where the rest of 2008 has gone.

Writing Project: Raoul
Time Planned: 4 hours
Time Spent: 4 hours
Favourite Part: when the focus clicked.

Exercise: scheduled rest day
One Fun Thing I Did Today: went out for lunch with Wes

April 25, 2008: Branch out, baby!

I spent the better part of the day at a crafting show. Yarn galore, and lots of other things that (thankfully) I'm not into. I am now the proud owner of:

a) lace-weight wool (basically, thick thread) in a gorgeous mix of purples, blues, and greens. Just like my wrist tattoo, basically, only in yarn. This will be a shawl one day. Pattern not yet decided, but oh, the fun I'll have trying to pick one! :)





b) a small skein of recycled silk. This is apparently spun from snippets of sari fabric, and it's stunningly beautiful. Mine is similar to the blue shade but with more purples and greens. Absolutely no clue what it'll become, but it refused to stay at the show and insisted on coming home with me. Cannot argue with yarn!





c) 16 balls of Bernat Black Lites, a beautiful black yarn. Mine is like the picture but with blue strands through it. It was $0.97 a ball and I sort of went crazy. I also bought a pattern book for $0.97 and this yarn will become a knit cardigan once the first cardigan is finished. Sometime in 2098, I'm thinking.


d) Five balls of Bernat Haven in a soft green. This is going to be a snuggly little wrap.



Why am I posting all of this? Besides the fact that yarn is purty? Because I have developed an unfortunate tendency to stick to the patterns in crafting, especially crocheting. I don't seem to just pick up a hook and some yarn and just play. And just playing is probably the best thing I can do, at least sometimes.

I need to play with the books too... some of my favourite scenes in my own writing are the ones where I just thought, "Okay, this is weird but let's try it out"... and being just a bit off-kilter made the scene amazingly interesting. Now that writing is my career, it's tougher to do that, and it's also probably more necessary. So I will do more of it with the yarn as well, and perhaps it will carry over into the writing. And if not, at least I'll have a neat shawl or something to wear. :)

Writing Project: none - considering today a 'weekend day' because of the craft show
Time Planned: zilch
Time Spent: exactly as planned
Favourite Part: driving along to/from the show and having bits and pieces of the book form themselves in my head - 'weekends' don't really exist when a book's trying to figure itself out!

Exercise: 45 minutes elliptical - which is great, except it was SUPPOSED to be 30 minutes and 30 minutes of weights, but I forgot and just did the elliptical. Oh well.
One Fun Thing I Did Today: petted some seriously gorgeously soft yarns, and got to see some yarns 'in person' I've only ever seen on the Internet

Choices

A great older post from Nathan Bransford's blog is about characters and choices.

As always, it's a funny read, but his point really resonated with me. If a situation is really a dilemma, the character should be able to make either of the choices and honestly have to decide between them. If, for some reason, the character doesn't have the capability to pick one of the paths, then it's not a real choice and we realize that the author is sneaking out of the dilemma.

No sneaking!

Heather

Sentences as fractals of scenes

An old, but still fabulous, post at Elizabeth Bear's blog: http://matociquala.livejournal.com/486828.html.

The topic is "sentence-level craft": how to write at the micro level. Her suggestion of thinking of every single sentence as a fractal of the scene is gold; every sentence needs the same tension and focus and drive as the scene itself.

I must remember this!

Show, don't tell

Probably the most commonly heard writing advice.

I LOVE how Anton Chekhov worded it:
"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

SO true!
Heather