How to Revise a Novel—Step 1

If you're anything like me, your first draft is a giant mess.

Chapters? Who needs chapters? No. I don't have chapters yet. Image: "Adventures of Captain Greenland (table o" (CC BY 2.0) by earlynovelsdatabase

Before I began the revision process in mid-June, I knew I had out-of-order scenes. I didn't even have chapters. I knew that, as I pushed characters through a plot, they changed. No amount of planning prepared me for how my characters changed―even though I go through various revisions of character building and multiple character exercises throughout the process of writing so that I can understand them better. I just don't know what will come up. I knew my plot got messy and I became disjointed as a writer near the end. I knew I was not even close to committed to the end; it was mechanical, to get there and say, This draft is done.

I knew there were so many issues... so so many.

8 Reasons Why Good Books Are Rejected

Your novel is brilliant. You know it is.

So why aren't any agents picking it up?

This is not a post about delusions of the quality of one's writing. It's about why you send your book out to 10 agents and another 10, and then 10 more, and you still haven't gotten a nibble.

It takes sending a book out to more agents than you would imagine before you find the right one. And that's what it's about: finding the right person, the one who will be as committed to your book as you are.

You're not represented ...yet. Persevere. Image "rejected" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by ☻☺

5 Ways Your Dialogue Tags Suck: Dialogue Diatribe #2

Dialogue tags shouldn't be difficult. Trust me. As an editor who reads the work of new writers, dialogue tags can get really screwed up and entirely disrupt the flow of a story.

Don't take this lightly.

In my last post on dialogue, I explained the mechanics of dialogue. Today I want to talk about the tags themselves.

Make your tags invisible. Image "Memorias de un hombre invisible" 
(CC BY-NC 2.0) by 'J' Jose Maria Perez Nuñez

The thing with dialogue tags is that when people begin writing fiction, they often begin to see that they are writing he said and she said and it feels like a lot of repetition. As writers, we're taught to avoid using the same words too often, so we want to fix this problem. Unfortunately, in attempting to fix dialogue tags, many writers wind up with bad ones.

The Courage to be Average Before Brilliant

I'm writing to you today from the Pima Writers' Conference in Tucson,Arizona. The ice broke on the Santa Cruz River on Friday. There is no water in the river; it just means the temperature reached over 100 degrees for the first time this year. It's been that way for two days now and it'll be that way today, too. Ugh. Take me to a writing oasis!

Refresh the writing soul. Image "Oasis and Wonderland" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Dean Terry

13 Week Novel—Week 13 Activities: A Clean Finish

Hello. How is your week going?

Well, it's an exciting time—we're in our last week of the novel draft.

Get ready to write this! Image "3:10 to Yuma (1957)" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by twm1340

13 Week Novel—Week 12: Thinking about the End

It may seem pre-mature to start thinking about the resolution of your novel when you have just been writing 2500 words a week—you're barely over 100 pages! But with this plan, you've written a crappy first draft in 13 weeks, so you have approximately 32,500 words. It's short; around 130 pages. That's the intent.

When you write a whole story really briefly you have the skeleton to work with in the next drafts. And the drafts that follow. You have something to work with so that you can build a more complex and interesting story, so you can develop the intricacies and explore emotions with greater focus, so you can refine the language and the narrator. In my world of writing, once you finish that crappy draft, you finally have room for the joy of creating a story that is it's own.

Take some time this week to dream big. Image: martinnak15 on Flickr Creative Commons