The Red Ink Blues, or, Revising Your Novel Without Pulling Your Hair Out, Part I

So things have been going pretty well with my revisions of Mara's story. Forgiven, is that a terrible title? That was one of the biggest words when I Wordled the entire manuscript.

Hmm.

Oh well, there'll be plenty of time to second guess my title choices before I'm ready to query.

Meanwhile, since I know so many of you made so much progress in November and will be revising soon, I thought this week I'd share some of my favorite resources for novel revision.

Today's pick is NaNoEdMo, a site devoted to editing your manuscript. There are great articles available, including one by Tabitha Olson, whose contest I recently featured. "Tell Me First" serves as a great reminder that it's okay to "tell" in a first draft, but to go into greater detail for your revisions. Another article that I'll remember while revising was "Cut it Bigger", by Christine Taylor. Don't be afraid to use all the senses, she advises, and remember to get deeper into your character's head in the re-write.

But the most useful to me was Amber Cook's "Ask Not Only What You Can Do For You, But What You Can Do For Your Editing (When March Is Over)" I've pasted in the bit that really helped me below:

"Establish what you’re editing towards.

Start general. I want to write a good book that people will want to read. Make a list of your favorite books and ask yourself what is it about them that made them such favorites. Why did you read them, and why do you care about them? Especially books you’ve either read repeatedly, or stories which stand out vividly in your mind (even if you only read it once). When you figure out what makes them, in your own opinion, so good, you’ll have an idea of what you want to be shooting for in your writing.

Now get specific about your novel. Do you want it to be a really scary story? Gut-wrenching drama? A humorous piece of refreshing escapism? A place to share your experience with a traumatic event in the hopes it can help other people going through the same thing? Which is all another way of saying: what kind of experience do you want to give your reader?

Look at what revved you up to write it in the first place and what drove you to actually sit down and write it. What makes it something you would love to share with other people?"

The bolding is mine, because I wanted to stress the importance of this sentence, which is something I never consciously think about during my rewrites. But it's something I thought of all the time while I was planning the novel, in the pre-writing, and even the initial writing stage. Somehow, once I finally get to the revision stage, I'm so caught up in what I have to do to make it perfect, I forget what it is I loved about the work in the first place.

So pop on over to NaNoEdMo for all the great editing resources there. They even have a forum, one more site to suck up the time you should be spending writing, LOL. But you don't have to be a member to benefit from their wisdom.

Happy Revising! ;)

The Benefits of Drafting in First Person

Playing around with Wordle and the first chapter of my revised manuscript of EVANGELINE. Looks like I need to do a search for "just" and see where I can use something else. Of course Evie is the most common word in the chapter now that I've switched it to third person, but I wonder if there's a way to reduce the number of times I use it. The whole manuscript would probably benefit from a chapter by chapter word cloud before I start querying again. See, Wordle isn't just for stalling. ;)

However, I did notice something quite interesting during this revision (yes, NaNoWriMo had become NaNoRevisMo around these parts, lol). Most of the prose and exposition sounds more natural being delivered by an invisible narrator than the main character-- to me, that is. Whether or not that's the truth is yet to be seen, but it's not the first time I've re-written a manuscript in a different tense.

I'm actually thinking that despite which perspective I wind up using, writing the first draft in first person was very helpful to me in getting deeper into the mc's head. When I draft in third person, I often feel there's something missing, or that I'm watching the main character from outside, rather than in their heads.

I actually began the novel before Evangeline in rotating first person with four female main charaters. Over the course of writing the novel, I decided to switch it to third, but by then I had already been privy to my character's secrets and desires, inside their head rather than a simpel on-looker. Finishing their stories in third made perfect sense at that point, and kept my novel from being unfavorably compared to an urban fantasy "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants". (Which also had four first person female povs, and even went to one of the exact same places as one of the Traveling Pants girls, as I found out too late. Grr...) And I know I was able to get a better feel for each character by starting off in first person, as if they were telling me their story in private.

My current WiP, Mara's Story, is the first novel where I didn't have to struggle to get into the main character's pov. So it will likely stay in first person, which I think is the only way to tell that particular story. Since it is a mystery, I like the limited point of view, and I enjoy the intimacy and tension that I used to show the main character's inner-struggles. I can't imagine this story NOT being told by Mara.

As for EVANGELINE, this month marks one year since I began it during NaNo 2008. I couldn't resist dusting it off and trying to breathe some new life into it once this year's NaNo story fizzled out before it got started. I'm also shamelessly soliciting for betas-- either to just read and give me your thoughts, or for a full-on critique-- after I get it cleaned up in the next week or so.

Anyone learning any other tips for writing first drafts? Especially those of you still cruising along on your NaNo without looking back. Any fun new tools for stalling-- er, I mean drafting that I don't know about?

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post on free mind map software!