The process.

So I’m still working on editing “In the Dark.” Oh, Christmas, you silly western holiday! How you do muck me about!

I thought I would try to share something useful here, and not just my ramblings about my own writing. Hopefully the outline blog was useful to someone, somewhere.

How does one edit one’s own work?

Here’s how I do it.

First, take some time away from it. Work on something else for a bit. Read a book. Think about other things. Give it a week or three. Don’t peek. The more specifics you forget, the better. You want to be as surprised as a reader when you go back to your work and start going back through it. If you re-read something  and think”What the hell was I trying to say here?” or “Damn, that twist was obvious,” then you know you need to make changes. The more you CAN do that, the better.

Read aloud. DO THE VOICES. Don’t just read. “In the Dark” has two voices, Ian when she’s narrating and Sebastian when I’m narrating for him (because he would never tell his own story). When I’m reading in Ian’s voice, I adopt a twenty-something funny hip girl voice, like my own but more flippant and less serious. When I’m reading my narration for Sebastian the tone is more somber, more contemplative, and more long-winded. Sebastian can get away with drawn out contemplation, he’s 500 years old. Ian is ready to move on to the next thing quickly. The writing reflects that — and I have stumbled onto more than one flippant phrase in Sebastian’s narration and overly contemplative tone in Ian’s. I skimmed them reading to myself, but aloud, my mouth doesn’t even want to say them. In one scene, I had Sebastian tell Ian to shut up. I skimmed by it a few times, then read it aloud and just about choked. I changed it to “Be still.”

I do agree with Stephen King that reading aloud is somewhat iffy — what you are writing is an art that is MEANT to be read silently, and I have found that my mind can hold some sentences that sound like hell read aloud. I compromise. I don’t read aloud — I narrate. If it sounds like your character or like it would work in a movie, you’re okay.

Kill your darlings. Seriously. I’ve found a few sources for that quote, but I heard it first repeated by Ann Lamot. What is meant by that is simply that if you’re embellishing too much, you have to cut it. Reading aloud has helped ME immensely here. When I get to the end of a paragraph, if I’m going “oof!” to myself, I have too much there and it needs paring back. Line them up, choose the cleverest, cut the rest. I don’t care if you think they’re all clever, they’re not. Pick the best and move on. If the reader thinks “oof!” when they’re done with a paragraph, they will probably put the book down and not come back.

Get to the bloody point. People (I) often spend too much time writing stage direction, or more of a scene than really needs to be written. What is the point of an individual scene? Does it reveal character? Set something up to happen later? Wrap something up that happened earlier? Okay, then it should JUST DO THAT! If someone has to walk into a room, walk them in. Don’t talk about the quality of the drapes or the deep thoughts in the character’s head as they walk. Walk them in, get to the point, and let them go. If there is no point — if the scene doesn’t reveal character or set something up, cut it. Period. I don’t care if the story has to pick back up a week later. Pick it up there, where something is happening, not the whole week of nothing actually going on. Yes, people do their laundry and go for walks and worry — that can be summarized. Quickly.

Don’t be afraid to use your own voice! I have had lots of experience with beta readers (or my insecure self!) trying to squash my voice, make my writing more . . . bland, more standard. Don’t do it! You don’t want to pepper your writing with bizarrisms in the name of originality, but a work needs to have some personality, some tooth, some bite to it. One of my favorite writers, James Allen Gardener, has his main character land on a hostile planet and immediately suffer problems that cause her to pass out. When she wakes up and notes that nothing tried to eat her while she was vulnerable, she thinks “what a wimp-ass planet.” YES! Don’t be afraid to just let that out there. Don’t overdo it, but don’t fear it, either.

And all the standard crap about adverbs, pronouns and commas applies here, too. I use too many. I have to cut them later. I confess. If you’re not sure if you should cut something, do it and look it over. You may find the sentence better with what you cut, or better without it. Don’t imagine what the phrase would look like, actually cut the questionable item. What I imagine and what comes out are often very different, and I usually like the trimmed sentence better than I imagined. Cut things like “I chopped the wood with an axe.” Turn it into “I chopped the wood.” We can infer this job would be done with an axe. If it WASN’T done with an axe, then say so. Otherwise, we got it.

Do get yourself at least one grammar book. You don’t need to know some of the more esoteric stuff, but the basics are a big deal. Nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, passive and active sentence structure, proper possessives and punctuation. You need those.

Do make sure your characters act like themselves all the way through the book and their back story. I thought this was pretty obvious, but Sebastian AND Ian both did some odd things that I had to change. Ian gets into a mean fight with her sister at one point, something my laid-back vampire would not do. I remember having a fight with my husband that day, and I’m not sure why I never re-wrote that. And Sebastian made a couple of rookie mistakes as well — I suppose that’s just learning on my part. I thought he seemed pretty bad ass. Going back, I saw that he needed to toughen up a bit, be more shrewd. I had learned how to do so, so I guess Sebastian did, too.

Hopefully sharing my process will be useful to someone at some point. I like to help others, since others have been so helpful to me. I don’t feel like I can write a definitive “how to” on writing until I’m actually selling my work and making decent money at it, but I can share what I’m doing and why  like it or don’t.

My final piece of the writing process: try to have at least one cat on your lap.