The Polish Edit is Finished

Time for celebration? After years of writing, I have a novel that I feel comfortable sending to agents and / or publishers. It feels good to have a complete manuscript, though after years of writing and editing, now I have to do something new. Market. Oh boy.

I've been working on a query letter for some time now. A query letter is basically a one page blind sales pitch. You have 300 words to sell your 120,000 word novel. Go! I think I have a pretty firm handle on the letter. Now I'm going to work on translating my working outline (with choice quotes) into a synopsis. I'm not exactly sure what a synopsis is. There seems to be some ambiguity. I'm assuming its a synopsis (and not an outline or whatever).

I'm not starting from scratch on the synopsis, I have the outline to work from, but I have to distill a lot of information. Ugh. I've had to remind myself to focus. We'll see.

I have a list of potential agents - taken from Novel and Short Story Writer's Market. I'm going to look at their websites and narrow them down to a short list of five to send out the query letters to. Depending on the feedback I get, I'll rework the pitch and send out to others. It is exciting to think that I might have an agent in the near future.

The Polish Edit

I haven't had much time in the past few weeks to work on the polish edit of the GIANT, but I've found enough time to make it through the first 40 (of 218 and shrinking) pages. It's going well, most passages flow well and I don't feel the compulsion to rewrite everything. The heaviest work I've done is moving sentences around. I'm trimming a lot of extra words out as well - I've taken 3 total pages out - for the most part individual words and sentences.

I'm wondering if I'm overediting this. For the first time in my life I've been reading books on how to write. I never took to English classes too well, and I never had a creative writing class, so finer techniques I'm not too up on. Like words that end in ly (adverbs?) and passive voice - both big no-nos. I turned on grammar check for the first time as well - thinking I would get barraged with warnings (as I did when I used it in college or high school), but apparently I've learned something - most of the warnings were for using contractions or sentence fragments. Sentence fragments.

At the same time I have had the outline for the book open. I'm updating it and adding choice quotes to it. I'll use this to construct an outline and synopsis for the book - though I'm not clear on the difference between the two. One is longer and one is a little more boring - I checked out a book from the library that tells me which is which - I'll have to recheck.

Another draft finished. One more to go?

I'm working on two GIANT related items right now - one is finding and agent / publisher, the other is writing. Having just come from the writing desk, I'll speak about writing here.

I finished up the last draft quicker than I though - it was short - only dealing with four or five chapters, but two of those were completely new. It turned out the newest chapters were the easiest to edit - there was little change needed. It was mostly pacing, dialog and typo pickups. It leads me to think that I'm finally figuring out how to write. I've read a lot of 'how I write books' lately - all by established authors. Everyone of them says they only have three or so big drafts of their novels. That worried me - I've at least doubled that number. I knew that everyone works differently and I'm still early in my writing development, but still . . . So finding those new chapters in great shape boosted my confidence.

The other half of the edit was more rigorous, but well worth it. I had earlier made hand edits to the first few chapters of the second section of the book. The chapters were really suffering from poor flow, bad description, and a serious case of Boring. I cut a ton out of the paragraphs and rearranged a lot of what was left to really pick up the pacing. Additionally strengthened the back story and main character's motivation.

After all this I started a new draft for the cleanup last pass before I start shopping this around. Though all my paragraphs were not indented and had spaces between them. This made it handier to print and correct and had a good look on the screen, but needed to be standardized. It took about an hour and a half to indent all the paragraphs - in the end I took out 30 of 249 pages just by removing white space. Whew. In a few weeks I'm going to sit back down and start the typo pass.

Another Draft is Finished!

I can feel the end of this book coming on. I finished up the new ending this afternoon. There's one whole new chapter plus an epilogue sort of thing. Before those is a chapter that was heavily reworked and a moderately reworked chapter. So . . . those chapters will need a few more passes by themselves to make sure it's fit to be included with the rest of the GIANT.

Furthermore, I have to finish up my hand edit of a few of the earlier chapters and make the digital revisions. Barring any outside life scheduling conflicts, it's about a month's worth of work. After that I'll need to run through the whole thing once for for at least a spelling and typo check and, I hope, at worst a minor here-and-there touch up. It may turn out that it will be a light revision and I'll need a typo check follow up after that. The last thing I want to do is send this thing out and there be a bunch of stupid typos or confusing sentences.

Writing a New Ending

I've had the opportunity to devote a lot of time to writing as of late, and feel that if I don't take the opportunity to do it now, I'll never have it again. So, I've been writing and editing, writing and writing a lot these past few weeks. I think its paying off - the proof of course will be when I try to shop this thing around. Most of what I've been reading lately is good - there's not a lot of cutting and rewriting anymore. I'm not sighing and asking myself why I wrote so much terrible nonsense. Not to say that everything is golden - there are still rough patches here and there.

Today I made it to the end of the draft and started writing a new ending to the novel (the GIANT). I was afraid of this - I know what the ending is - I don't have an outline, but its only a chapter or two. I do have a number of conversations sketched out as well. BUT - for the most part it would have to come out of my head and end up on the screen - the screen that is blank. To counter this end of the line blankness, I pasted in a paragraph that I had cut from the old ending, but wanted to rework into the new ending, so I could fool myself into thinking I was just rolling along with the edit as I've been doing for months now.

Turns out, I didn't have much to fear. The words just poured out of me, which was a relief. It was going so well that ideas for further along in the ending were coming to me, so I wrote them in as well. Not bad.

While I've been working on the computer, I've been hand editing a few chapters from earlier in the book. They are the first three chapters from the NOW section of the novel (see earlier posts if you're confused, but NOW is basically the second half of the book). There are some ROUGH stretches in these chapters. I've discovered a shortcoming in that I have trouble describing places. Description of action comes much easier for me. This is something I'll have to work on.

As soon as I'm finished with this hand edit, I'm going to make the revisions to the digital file. Then I'll go back and edit the as yet not finished new ending. From there I'm going to go through the whole thing again and check for errors - hopefully it won't need much intensive editing. If all goes well its a spell check and I'm off to look for agents and publishers.

Rough Roads and Smooth Sailing

My slow editing, writing, and rewriting continued, but today I made it over the hump and really slammed out some pages. I know I talk a lot about the number of pages I have left, or the number I get through in a day, but it's not a quantity issue. With the revising, assuming I'm paying attention, when I make it through pages quickly it means what I'd written previously is good. Slow days indicate a lot of problems and necessary slow revisions.

I mentioned in the previous post there are two sections to the book: Before and Now. Before, being roughly present day and Now being the future. The slowness of late has been with the first few chapters of Now. The chapters set up a lot of the background (nuts and bolts sort of stuff) for this future world as well as the beginning of the journey for one of the main characters. Apparently I've struggled mightily with this part. It's getting better now, but I think I'll print those chapters and give them a hand edit.

There's two main characters in the Now section and I've reached the point where both are active in the story and I find the reading and writing much smoother and enjoyable. One of the problems before the second character joins is the lack of dialogue and the amount of information the reader needs to understand what is going on. I want to get into the story quicker, but I need to set up the ground rules first. Previously I had distributed this throughout the novel, but my editor advised me to front load more of it as she was confused in several places. I think with another physical print and on screen edit that section should be pretty tight.

Ok, Now I'm Excited Again

I was down to the last nine pages of the edit, plus the new ending chapter I had to write from scratch. It turned out that I painted myself into a corner, or wrote a story to nowhere, I suppose in this case. What to do, what to do? I tried diagramming what I wanted the ending to be, but couldn't make it fit with the story I had in place. Uh oh.

If I couldn't make the ending fit the story, I would make the story fit the ending. Here's what I did: I typed my handwritten outline and made revisions. I made a quick sketch of what parts of the story would have to change and noted that on the printed outline. There was quite a bit of red by the time I was finished. To top it off I wrote some character sketches. Some would say you should write those before your fifth? draft. Whatever.

With these vital documents in hand I turned back to the computer. Draft 5 became draft 5a and away I went. Much to my surprise a lot of what I read was actually good. The first few days of the edit I flew through 20% of the novel. Not bad. The effort wasn't the slash and burn then rewrite extensively affair that previous revisions have been. Of course, this is not a major revision, just a tweak (hence the A in the draft number). For the most part I moved around sentences and paragraphs. I did write a fair amount, but took out much less. I added about eight computer pages and only took out one and a half.

The first few days went well, but the next two (also the last two) have been a little slower. A little background: There are two sections to the book - Before and Now. Before takes place (somewhat confusingly) in modern times. Now is 100-200 years in the future when life as we know it has been destroyed. Before is about 20% of the total. The past few days I've been working on Now, which during the previous edit I added a lot to the beginning. Reading it this week, it showed.

Some paragraphs looked scabbed together while the rest were obviously untouched or completely new. It might have been quicker for me to start over, but the thought of all that white is so intimidating. Methodically I moved paragraphs and sentences around to make the story flow with the new outline. On top of that I added a few paragraphs - Now was just not flowing as well as Before. There was so much revision that I added a new chapter. It's a short one, but it explains a lot to the reader. Previously I had spread out too many revelations through the entire story. Now, in Now, the reader gets a Cliff's Notes type explanation of the future (remember that Now is in the future).

To make a long story short - I have made some good changes that will make the story purposeful and upon reading my work over I feel that all the writing is finally at a level I am proud of.

Plans for the Next Edit

I continue to make major cuts towards the end here. Granted, I did revise the plot making much of the text outdated, but during past edits I think I cruised towards the end. Before, when I was near the end I tended to gloss over errors (this is obvious to me reading it now).

My plans for the next edit, starting sometime in the spring will be to revise the first section first, then I will jump into the ending. This should give me a fresh take on the end and also allow me to tie in themes and language from the beginning into the end.

I'm going to type my handwritten outline so I can make further changes to it before the next edit as I'm still having doubts wondering if readers will completely buy into the world I have created. Still I don't feel that I have explained themes enough. Is this a case of me trying to seek higher levels of perfection, or am I still coming into my own as a writer?

Draft 5 is nearing completion

I've had a lot of time to write lately and it's been going well. The weather has been nice this week which has also lifted my spirits and cast a warmer glow on the GIANT.

I've done a lot more cutting than writing lately - the total page count has dropped by ten or so this week. It had been holding steady at 200+ digital pages (probably 400 or so printed book pages), but now has dropped under 200. Much of the cut passages were marked "already covered" as I shifted the plot back somewhat. Too many of the revelations and developments were loaded at the end - which would made for a confusing and boring read. I have spread out the big points (excitement?) to add more suspense.

I'm closing in on the end of the draft, though I'm going to add a new ending to it. Now the ending is free floating, I'm going to add a section that makes it more concrete and answers some questions that were left floating.

Feeling Good

I'm feeling really good about the GIANT now. I have only 66 pages to go and am hitting a stretch of the book that doesn't need so much intensive work. When I have to rewrite a passage or a sentence I'm never sure if I'll like it on the edit, but when I'm happy with work I previously redid, well that's doubly good. I liked it when I wrote it and I like it now.

Despite my efforts at creating an outline I've had to pop around the story to answer questions that pop up. Most of the time this has been a case of me doubting my outline (it has been pretty thorough and accurate), only occasionally did I neglect to write a point down on the outline. The short? The outline I've written post story has been helpful and accurate.

When I've been popping around the story I have run across good parts, some of which I wrote on this current draft. Isn't that good news? I still like the work I wrote a few weeks or months ago. This book just might turn into something after all.

A Thin Stack Remains

After getting through the big conversation edit and revision I come back to a thin stack of printed pages. The conversation cut and edit was a lot of work, but as has been the case previously, well worth it. Formerly the story was disjointed and jumpy - its much smoother now.

I keep track of total pages and pages to go - six total pages were cut during the last editing session. I also keep a digital file of long cut passages, usually anything more than a sentence. My packratedness certainly extends to the electronic world, but I also like to keep all the cut material somewhere in case I decide to pull it back in (I have not yet) and to see how far I've come. The cut file now contains 25,000 words. Witness the wrath of the displeased writer.

Slugging it Out

I've reached the part of the GIANT where two of the main characters engage in a long discussion - seven or eight pages worth. It's a big part of the book - where the characters make decisions and the reader is let in on a few secrets.

My problem now is that I have tweaked the plot and sequencing of the story so much that the conversation had to be reordered and revised. During my recent hand edit I was able to lay out all the pages in front of me and resort the paragraphs. I broke the conversation into nine sections and noted the draft as such.

However, I could not put my hard work to use as during this digital edit I revised the plot just enough to make this new conversation inaccurate. A third of the conversation was cut entirely while another third was reworked. It was tedious work, referring to my original notes, scanning through the pages on screen, and trying to make sense of it all. I wanted to give up and leave it for another day, but I'm trying to put in as much work as I can, so there was no quitting.

Thankfully its finished and I'm onto smoother waters.

This Isn't Bad

I have focused on numbers lately, but I have been doing a lot of good writing as well. I've been keeping a list of questions dating back for a year or more. The questions are pretty much the result of my not having an outline. Have I properly explained this plot point? Is this idea believable? Was this made up word previously defined?

In addition to this draft being a response to my editors comments and my revisions, I'm also working hard to answer all those outstanding questions. Lately, as I've entered the thick of the story, I'm crossing off a lot of the questions and the GIANT is shaping up quite well. The plot flows and has really become intricate.

There's substance to the story and some mystery, and not the fake mystery the story had before. When I originally wrote the GIANT, I had a rough idea of the plot tucked neatly away in my head and no idea what the ending was going to be. I remember the gleeful day when I told my wife that I knew how the book was going to end (I have since changed the ending). Not knowing what was going to happen, I inserted a lot of false mystery that did nothing but confuse the reader - as my editor pointed out to me. I groaned many times reading through my work and wrote more than one "where are you going with this?" in the margins. If I cannot answer that question now, I cut out the false mystery.

Halfway There

I have devoted a lot of time to writing lately and I find myself halfway though the edit. There are many ways to measure progress, the most obvious is quanitative. I can look at what number page I'm on in the physical print and see how many pages remain, though this is not too accurate. Through better formatting and more description, I have added about twenty pages to the digital book, so the paper version is out of date. Additionally when I printed the GIANT, I increased the size font on the second part of the book. I'm not sure how it happened, but it artificially lengthened the book.

Now I'm working in an old version of Mircosoft Word, but in the past the GIANT used to be a .rtf file. My .rtf editor had no page numbers, so to keep track of how far into the edit I was, I would measure the position of the scroll bar cursor on the screen. I would make sure not to resize the program, so I could keep consistent numbers. The length of the scroll bar was six inches. I can remember good days where I would cover a quarter of an inch in one day of editing, which would be about four percent, and that same amount of progress today is also a good day.

Now, I track progress by the pages remaining on the screen compared to the total number of pages. I'll make wholesale cuts one day and add pages the next. At the beginning of the edit I had 180 digital pages. The total number has grown to 206 at its height, most of the time hovering around 200. Therefore, there might be a day where I only take away four pages from the pages remaining column, but add three pages to the total column - which works out to a total of seven pages worked on.

Crawling Along

A few weeks later it's still slow going, but this was a particularly slow (even boring at times) stretch, so all the work is worthwile. I think I'm about through this passage and should be making some good time soon - I hope. I've been working on the GIANT for many years now, and I worry that I may never finish the thing.

I'm not a writer, but I am a creator. I make things. I have always enjoyed writing, but have never found any great feedback from my work and I'm trying with teh GIANT to find that recognition. I don't know what motivates other creative people, but for me its about 80-90% for the sake of the work and the rest for compliments.

A New Year

The first part of the GIANT is complete, it's now onto the second. I had thought that the second part would go more quickly than the first, but so far I'm moving no more quickly than before. It seems like I've been working on some of these pages for days at a time.

The slowness, however, is for the betterment of the book. During my hand edit I noticed the text is often empty of description and place setting. I made a note for myself about setting the scene - sights, sounds, smells, emotions, etc. I taped this on a shelf next to my computer monitor. In my print of the text, where the story needed better description I simply wrote "SET SCENE".

I haven't taken a lot of writing courses, so I forget about some of the visual communication to the reader. I'll find myself picturing the scene in my mind, but negelecting to describe it on paper.

Draft 5 II

There have been a number of personal issues that have delayed my work on the GIANT. There was time here and there for me to complete the first section of the book. Despite cutting significant amounts, the first section grew considerably in length. I added quite a bit - a lot of supportive and visual material that I feel makes the work much better.

I had originally planned on following up Draft 5 with a spell check on screen gloss over, but with the addition of text, I'll have to give it a more through look. At least for the first section - if by some chance I don't make major changes to the second section, I can give that a more casual follow up.

Draft 5

A whole new draft - Draft 5.

Things are going slower than I thought. I made quite a few markups to the printed version, but it still seems slow. Sometimes it takes me an hour or two to make changes to just one page.

On the bright side though, the GIANT is a much better story for the effort. The first section of the book, which upon reading again I saw needed more explanation, is now more readable and has a greater flow. Hopefully this bodes well for the rest of the changes.

The Hand Edit Continues

I have moved through the edit of the first section of the GIANT (which is about 20% of the book), and have made a decision. My last hand edit was an intensive affair, where I hand wrote long passages, but it was a slow process. So far, this edit is no different and has been a slow, but productive affair. I feel as though I have made a lot of good changes, but when I move onto the rest of the story, I'm going to change the pace.

There are a lot of plot points and timing issues to remember (I still don't have an outline), so I'm going to move through the rest of the edit as quickly as possible so as to not forget points. Instead of handwriting long passages, I'm going to make more broad suggestions and make the actual changes on the computer. If I have particularly good ideas, I'll write those out, but otherwise I'm going to make this a quick strike sort of affair.

Onto the Next Draft

The GIANT is broken into two sections, and it is clear from the outside edit that the first section needs a fair ammount of work. It has been months since I have read through the entire manuscript, and more than a year since I've held a physical copy of it. Additionally, I have tweeked the plot somewhat, so just a short way into the edit I have significant changes to make.

What I've spent a lot of time focusing on is pulling the reader quickly into the story. Always critical to a story's success (who wants to plow through a boring story by an unknown author?), a good beginning is doubly important to the GIANT to explain the technical structure of the story.