Revision: Journey to Better than Boring

I’ve been writing books for pretty much my entire life.  Before I could actually write words, I’d make picture books and staple them together.  But I didn’t really start revising books until I was, oh, in my twenties.

The main reason for this was that until then, I wrote them all out with an actual pen on paper.  This is because I’m old.

Actually, that’s not entirely true.  I also typed stories on our electric typewriter, which made me feel about as grownup as is humanly possible.  The chemical smell of the ribbon was so professional, and the big ka-CHUNK... zzzzzing! when you hit a carriage return gave you a sense of accomplishment that is entirely missing from this era of text wrap.

I started writing novels on the computer when I was around 10-ish (hilariously terrible novels, naturally), but the thing that really screwed me was my love of blank books.  I would (at the time) way rather write something out longhand in a bunch of blank books than type it on a computer.  Because blank books were clearly made of magic.

Even that’s not entirely it, though, because in high school I wrote a (godawful) novel just on random lined pads, and put it in a binder.  I guess there was something satisfying in the physicality of having an ever-increasing stack of written pages that is missing from having an ever-increasing... number of bytes?

Yeah... that’s not quite doing it for me on a visceral level.

Suffice to say that my practice up until college was to start to write a novel, either make it partway through or finish it, read it to myself in happy accomplishment, and then move on to the next one.  Because by that point, I had some other idea trying to burn its way out of my skull.

Then, at some point, it became clear to me that I needed to actually revise things and make them better.  This was scary.

After all, the book was there, complete: a single, seamless thing.  How could I break it down into pieces?  How could I figure out where to add stuff, remove stuff, change stuff?  If I changed one thing, then WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ALL THE OTHER THINGS?!?!?

I hated revision.  I just wanted to be done with it.

But that changed.  First, I learned the joys of deleting.  There is something really satisfying in cutting an entire scene that isn’t doing anything for the story — it’s easy, it gets your word count down (which is the direction I usually need to go), and it often makes things magically tighter and snappier.  Now I’ve gotten to the point where sometimes I’ll write a scene, look at it, and that very same night realize that it isn’t advancing the story and cut the whole thing.

Then I learned to rewrite scenes, which was tougher for me: taking the same basic scene, but starting it over again, approaching it a different way.  This was (and still can be) hard, because I had to be willing to let go of what I’d already written as the Way It Happened, and consider my story to be something much more fluid, that could go down all sorts of different ways.

I still have a long way to go before I feel like I’m really good at this.  But I’ve recently hit another milestone... To my surprise, on my latest major revision project, I found that I was actually enjoying revising.  I always hated it, but this time it was... kind of fun.  It was a Green Eggs and Ham moment.

Of course, that may have just been because even revising a novel is still way more fun than my day job (technical writing), which was the other thing I could have been doing.  But I’ll take what I can get.

And what have we learned today?

Everything is more epic with dragons.

The Perils of Feedback

The funny thing about getting feedback on a book is that I am entirely at odds with myself in what I want.

On the one hand, I want this:

On the other hand, if I actually get a response remotely along those lines to a request for feedback, this is my internal reaction:

Thus, I’ve found it useful to ask my test readers a list of questions that will hopefully help identify ways to make the book better while still giving them room to tell me how wonderful it is, should they feel inclined to do so.  (Which may sound greedy, but hey, after spending several months to a year on a project, sometimes you do kinda need a little validation before jumping into round two.)

Ideally, the questions get the readers thinking about specific elements of the book that worked or didn’t work for them, thereby avoiding the classic traps of feedback that is either too vague...

...or too specific...

...or too tied in to the reader’s particular worldview.

When the feedback finally comes in, I read it eagerly.  And then begins the overthinking...

...and the defensiveness:

Finally, I work through all that stuff and get to the point where I can be properly analytical about it.  Often feedback will identify a problem, but suggest a solution that won’t work for my vision for the book — but that doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real.

This time around, getting feedback was particularly interesting, because I had two readers who were actually in my target age group for the middle grade novel I’m working on (one 9 and one 11).  The kids gave surprisingly awesome advice, and they identified some things the adults missed.  There were also some parts that the kids really liked that the adults didn’t comment on, and vice versa.  It all reminded me that kids and adults read for different things, and made me really glad that I had both adult and kid readers.

It did mean that my older daughter found the best way ever to get to stay up late, however.

And what have we learned today?

You can’t post a picture of one daughter and not the other.

Making Time

Sometimes, people ask me, “Melissa, how do you find the time to be creative when you have two kids?”

This is generally the cue for hysteria-tinged laughter.  Because finding time is not something I do.  I carve time ruthlessly out of the flesh of an angry T-Rex while clinging to the side of an out-of-control bullet train with one broken arm and an alligator clamped onto my leg.  And now that I’ve written that, I need to draw it, because those are the rules of this blog:

More specifically, for the first year after I had my first baby, I didn’t find time to do creative things.  It was the first time since I was about 7 years old that I wasn’t working on a book, and aside from taking some sporadic notes on certain ideas I had for a later project, I was practically creatively dead.

If you’ve ever had a small baby who never wants to be put down and NEVER EVER SLEEPS, you might understand why.  I actually learned to surf the internet with my toe while nursing.  And I got voice software, but let’s say the technology was far from perfect.

Things got a bit better as the baby got older.  Then, finally, my kids went to school, and suddenly, for the first time in years, I actually had a few hours a day to myself.

Quickly, I learned that if I wanted to get creative stuff done in the extremely limited time I had available, I had to cut almost all other leisure activities from my life.  I allowed myself virtually no movies, TV, or internet surfing; limited social media; and even (sob) drastically reduced reading time.  It was tough, but it let me get a little writing in every day.

However, I may have overdone it a bit.

Finding a balance where I could fit things like hygiene and actual time with my husband into a day along with parenting and creative projects was difficult, but at times I managed to succeed for a while... though it meant never getting to experience many things that sounded wonderful, like Zombieland or Downton Abbey.  (For the record, I do mean to correct those sad gaps in my cultural education at some point.)

Then employment struck.  Now I work for the entire time my kids are at school.  When they come home, I have to help them with homework, spend some good mommy time with them, make them dinner, bathe them when possible, and get them to bed at a reasonable hour. When they’re in bed, I finally get to write...

...Or do I?

And what have we learned today?

Chasing down a bullet train while clinging to a T-Rex is way cooler.

Breaking the Rose-Colored Glasses

It can be hard getting enough distance on my own writing to see it like a reader sees it.  This only makes sense — the story starts as this thing in my head, without words, and I have to find the words to describe it.  But when I read what I wrote, I still have my memories of the original, wordless source material, so I’m basically cheating.

On top of that, there’s the rose colored glasses factor.  Because early on in my relationship with a story, I’m still very much in love.

And you know how it is.  When you’re in love, you’re blind to your loved one’s flaws.

This can be a problem when it comes time to make edits.

The best way to get enough distance from my writing to look at it rationally is probably time.  For instance, I recently went back and reread a novel I wrote a couple years ago, and I found I could see the book in a far clearer light.  (For instance: BOY, did I overuse semicolons.)

Of course, the falling-out-of-love effect can go too far.  When I’ve been working on a book for a long time and have done a few editing passes, the bloom is sometimes well and truly off the rose.

This is no good, because I’ll want to stop editing just to be done with the darn thing, rather than because the book is as good as I can make it.

So I’ve tried to find other ways to take a fresh look at my writing, and to show myself things I’d never notice on my own.  I’ve found at least two that seem to be working very well.

One is simple, unbiased, and brutally effective.  I pasted the entire text of the novel I’m currently working on into Wordle.  (For those unfamiliar with this site, it creates word clouds from the most commonly used words in any piece of text, with the words appearing bigger the more often you use them.)  This is a great way to very quickly see what words you’re overusing.

It’s also a great way to immediately hate yourself.  Wordle doesn’t lie.  Wordle doesn’t soften the blow.

The other method I’ve used for getting a more distanced look at my writing is one I tried after hearing a writer friend mention doing it with her own work: my husband is kindly reading the whole book aloud to me.

This helps on a bunch of levels.  For one thing, I can hear my own language interpreted through someone else’s voice.  It’s much easier to spot awkward phrasing, places where I get too flowery for my own good, stiff dialogue, voice slippage, and so on.  Another way this is proving hugely helpful is with pacing.  When someone’s reading your work aloud, it’s painfully clear when you’re rambling on for too long.

Again, this technique can be painful, and this time there’s someone to witness your humiliation.  But hearing my words in someone else’s voice gets me that objective distance immediately.  Which is really useful when I’m getting ready to go into a big round of edits.

Remember, kids, running with scissors is dangerous.  Don't try this at home.

Of course, no matter what the ups and downs of my romance with a writing project, in the end, the result is always the same.

And what have we learned today?

That dress DOES make your book’s butt look fat.

The Cliff of Absolution

Kids’ adventure stories have a problem.  Every hero needs a good villain, right?  And of course, our hero must ultimately defeat the villain.  But... what happens then?

It’s a kids’ story, and chances are good the hero is a kid, or possibly a cute animal.  We can’t have kids wantonly murdering villains like their grownup counterparts do.  (Whether their grownup counterparts should be doing it either is a whole ‘nother question I’m not going to get into right now.)  There are several tried and true (or maybe overused and hackneyed — you be the judge) solutions for this problem, which seem to come in and out of vogue over the years.

There’s always the Hug it Out solution, where our hero reforms the bad guy.  All the villain ever really needed was a little love (or his teeth pulled out by an amateur elf dentist — you know, whichever).

Anime and manga have a fun variant on this wherein bad guys turn good after the hero defeats them in combat, for no other apparent reason besides getting pummeled (often going so far as to join the good guy team).

Sometimes redemption isn’t an option, though.  In that case, some stories go for the Ironic Ending They Deserve, in which our villain meets his demise in a means that he brought about himself through his fatal character flaws.  You know, sucked into a turbine by his own cape, trapped in a lamp due to his own lust for power, that sort of thing.

This can be a great solution when it fits, because it’s very satisfying, and it comes about due to choices the characters make rather than through handy coincidence.  It can still come off as a bit overly pat if not handled well, though.

There’s also the fist-shaking ending, in which the villain would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those darned kids.  This can end either with our villain thoroughly defeated — handed over to law enforcement, like all the fools who ever went up against the likes of Cam Jansen, or just all played out to the point of complete powerlessness and humiliation, like Cruella deVille in the wreckage of her car — or with the door open for them to try again later (next time, Gadget).

There is one solution that I feel is far more popular than it deserves.  It’s been used, to be fair, in some very good movies and stories... but at its base, it’s a cop out.  And that is the Cliff of Absolution.  This is, naturally, when our hero doesn’t need to kill the villain, because the villain conveniently falls to his or her doom off a cliff.

Death by plummeting is, as it happens, a common enough fate for villains that if I were to launch a nefarious scheme to take over the world, I would make absolutely sure not to go near steep dropoffs of any kind on general principle.

This phenomenon has been well documented in other places, such as the classic website TV Tropes.

I’m sure you can also think of plenty of examples if you stop and think for a minute.  Or even a few seconds, really.

The reason I’m not nuts about this method of villain cleanup is that it delivers death as the perfect solution while absolving the hero of any culpability.  This might be OK once in a while, but watching guilt-free killing become one of the most prevalent problem-solving methods in popular stories for kids is a little... weird.  And, frankly, it’s less satisfying storytelling.  I’d rather see our heroes defeat the villain through their own efforts rather than have fate intervene with a convenient tumble off a handy precipice.  And finally, villains are often cooler when there’s enough complexity to them that killing them is not the best and neatest solution to the problems they pose.

This is not to say that stories (be they movies, books, games, etc) for kids should never end with the villain getting killed.  Sometimes that really is a highly appropriate ending to the story.  I’d just like to see more thought put into it than “...and then he falls off a cliff to his death.”

Thus, whenever I’m tempted to wrap things up a little too neatly in my own writing, I just think of the Cliff of Absolution.

And what have we learned today?

No horseplay on the edge of a volcano!

* Note that Gollum wasn’t the villain, and his end was very much the result of character actions and decisions rather than an arbitrary twist of fate.  But still, seriously, kids, no messing around up there.  And Sauron?  Safety railing next time.  I’m lookin’ at you.