Tag: process

New Stage of Revision

Laura Highcove

My writing process involves a lot of: ‘oh I’ll add that foreshadowing later’ or ‘I guess I’ll need to stick in an extra scene sometime’ or even ‘well I’ll get around to explaining that.’ in it. Now, for the first time, I have reached a stage where I actually have everything I wanted to do in the story. It’s not all perfect and beautiful and flowing, to be sure. But it’s all there.

And since it’s out with beta readers, I sort of hit a spot where I have no desire to work on it. It feels like a little switch in my head got flicked to ‘done’, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not, in fact, done.

So I am using this blogging time to both blog, as well as plan what the next few steps will be, still holding to the DIYMFA revision pyramid, which for it’s simplicity, is so powerful. I have the bottom of the pyramid done. I know my pov. I have my character development done. My plot and story structure is all there.

That leaves making a list!

World building:

  • Make sure I have enough artifacts floating around that the world feels like it has artifacts.
  • Make sure all my magic is logical (As well as Tabitha’s progression through learning it.)
  • Hashing out the syntax of commands used for the Storybook.
  • Figuring out syntax for using remnants.

Description/Dialogue:

  • Mark all the places where description needs a boost. (Most of the fights fall in here.)
  • Make sure every person’s voice sounds right in their dialogue.

Theme:

  • Choice vs Fate
  • Everyone needs friends

Line Editing:

  • Print out the story on paper and see what typos pop out.

Now, the world building is still something I can do while the story is out with the beta readers, because if any of the feedback involves “well, I dunno about this world having magic” then I have other problems. The rest of it should wait until I know what scenes I may be adding or subtracting or moving around. Line editing won’t happen until I’m ready to submit to an agent. (I’ve only line edited one story before. It was annoying, and that story was only 12k words.)

I think the biggest thing I got from this week is remembering the benefits of sitting down and making a plan. Even though I never cleave 100% to the plan I make, it just helps to organize everything in my head and makes everything seem attainable as well. And it’s always important to give myself a little ego boost from time to time.

Embracing Your Zero Moment

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

I wrote this blog post in response to a prompt from DIYMFA.com. I’m a bit behind the curve in terms of timing, but I wanted to write this post anyway, so it gave me an excuse.

Embrace Your Zero Moment
The hardest step in your creative development is the “zero moment,” the point where you go from doing nothing to doing something. The distance between the zero moment and being a newbie is far greater than the distance between newbie and pro, yet rarely does anyone celebrate this pivotal, important step. Today, we want you to celebrate. Think back to your zero moment and do something to celebrate that incredible leap of faith.

The zero moment I remember the best is for my current story, probably because it’s most recent. I have always wanted to do a story based in or around fairy tales, due largely in part to The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey but for a long time I didn’t have a way to make it work or any real inspiration.

Then, in March of 2014 I was skimming through the “fairy books” by Andrew Lang which were published online. I was reading through different fairy tales until I stumbled on one called ‘The Little Wildrose’. As with all of my ‘research’, I don’t so much take what is, as use what I read to come up with a spark of my own. As soon as I got to the point about the Wildrose being raised by eagles, my mind immediately went to gryffins. (Because I love gryffins, but that will be a future post.)

And as basic and uncomplicated as this tale is, this was the spark that I needed to throw me into the whirlwind of creating a new story. I forget why I decided to make Wildrose a guy instead of a girl. I think it may have started as an idea to have all the roles in the fairy tales gender swapped, as an early version of this story had Wildrose attempting to stop a female Bluebeard from collecting and killing husbands. As I wrote my early drafts I kept coming on the issue of needing another character for Wildrose to play off of.

Eventually Tabitha popped out and took over as the main character of the story. I wrote a chapter or so and then the story sat there until October of that same year when I decided I was going to do this story for NaNoWriMo, only one month wasn’t enough, so I gave myself a goal of 40k words for October, and then did the 50k words in November as well, leaving me with over 90k words by the end of November.

During December I organized what I had written (I don’t always write in order, and I tend to go off on a lot of tangents while writing a rough draft) as well as had a mentor call with Gabriela that helped me to make a plan for tackling the revision. This story is actually what started me on my ‘post a week‘ habit as I wanted to keep track of what I did.

Now everything did not go nearly as beautifully as my plan would suggest, but I certainly did a lot of editing and character development and world building in the next five months. I ‘completed’ my revision only to realize the story was only 55k words.

After a break to let the story rest I came back and did more development work until I threw myself at NaNoWriMo again in order to hammer out the second half of the book. (Which I had really struggled with.) Then I stopped and reassessed.

I had my husband alpha read the story at the beginning of this year, and then I just started hammering out problems over and over, until we get to the present, where the story is out for its first beta read. It really is encouraging to be able to look back at the zero moment to see exactly how far I have come. Two years is a long time, but I’ve also gotten a lot of work done, as well as improved myself as a writer. Even with all the ridiculous doubts along the way, it really is all about not giving up.

Out to Beta Readers

Laura Highcove

So this week I finished up my rough draft of The Storyteller. I then went through and did a quick read of the entire book, fixed up a few things, held myself back from fixing other things, and then compiled and sent it out to my beta readers. There’s not much more to my week than that, except in that reading the story in its completion, I got the sense that maybe the bad parts aren’t quite as bad as I thought they were. It needs work, sure, but it might actually all be there. Now I just have to wait for my beta readers to get back to me. Hopefully they’ll have some helpful advice that will help me improve the story even more.

Colorizing my Scenes

Laura Highcove

In case you haven’t noticed yet, I like colors and I like organization. I had a color system for my notes and so it shouldn’t surprise you that I have a color system for my files within Scrivener.

Here’s a picture of it:

Dark Red = Concept. Those are scenes where there’s not even necessarily a scene there. There might be simply the idea for a scene or I might just know I need a scene. It might be a bunch of attempts at writing the same scene. Basically, if I handed it to another person, they would think it was a lot of gobblty-gook.

Red = Rough Draft. This is a scene where I’ve actually written the scene, hence there is actually prose, but the scene might not be complete, there might be notes for elements I still need to add. It’s the roughest form of a scene that is actually still a scene.

Orange = First Draft. This is when I have all of the elements or ideas put into the scene, and they are in order. Doesn’t mean it’s pretty, but it’s all there.

Yellow = Second Draft. This is the first stage that I would consider ‘readable’ by a third party without explanation from me. At this stage, the scene should have all it’s elements and should flow. This is where the story needs to be for beta readers.

Green = Revised. Yes, technically I have to revise to get between each color, but green is the color where not only are all the pieces there, and it flows, but I have sat down, played with my word choice, and beautified my prose. This is the stage at which a read would hopefully be able to tell that I’m a writer, and not just some smuck.

Blue = Finished. Blue is post line-edit. This is the “and now it gets sent out to an agent” step. Blue is the best I can do.

Purple = Notes. I have notes, lots of them. You can see the ‘Notes’ folder (technically the notes file should be purple, but default for new file is red and I haven’t changed it yet.) This is so I can leave a notes file within a chapter and not get myself confused.

Magenta = OOP or Out of Place. These are scene I write where I have an idea for later (or earlier) in the story and I write it whereever I am at the time. Later it will get moved to where it needs to go, but when I’m in “words on the page mode”, stopping to do that while writing is just a distraction.

Pink = BTS or Behind the Scenes. These are scenes I write that are not part of the story. They might be from a different character’s pov or just be something that gives me inspiration or detail that I want to keep but doesn’t really fit anywhere.

Gray = Obsolete. I rewrite scenes in new files in order to not loose old versions. (I don’t like the idea or execution of Scrivener’s snapshots, so this is how I do the same thing.) The different color keeps me from accidentally reading the wrong scene and wondering why my changes aren’t there.

And as for the file structure, which yes I did leave in on purpose, you can see most of Draft 7. I am currently on Draft 8, which you can see the last chapter is ‘the hero’s return’. I know, spoilers.

The colors are also updated on the folder. The color there is the color of the lowest ranked file within that chapter. As you can see, the beginning of the story is rather clean, with all of that yellow. Later in the story things dip into a lot of rough draft.

Since I am currently revising from the end of the book forward, I hope this means that it’ll be slow going at first, but pick up once I get closer to the beginning of the story. My goal for now is to get everything to the first draft stage. Then, hopefully, there will only be a few tweaks needed to get to second draft.

It took me a week to get through one chapter. If that holds, it will take me over two months to finish this revision. I’m hoping that some of the chapters will go more quickly than that, especially the ones that are already yellow. A scene can lose it’s color if I realize there are new elements I need to have, but yellow still means the scene is rather clean to start.

Now My Rough Draft is Really Done?

Laura Highcove

I finally completed the last fight of The Storyteller. However, it’s hard to give myself credit for it when I know how much more work there is to do. I know I should give myself credit for finishing, but when I say it’s done, I feel like it really should be done …you know?

At this point, all of the plot is there. According to my own ranking system, now the rough draft of my story is officially done, as all of the prose is there. No more unwritten scenes that need to be added. Well at least not that I’m aware. I’m confidant there is still a lot of work to do. My next step is to go through the story in reverse scene order. My hope is that it will help me greatly with foreshadowing because I’ll know the things I need to foreshadow before I get to the scene where they should be foreshadowed.

Technically this draft is supposed to be ready for beta readers by the end of the month. That’s still my goal. After this next week I should have more of a plan of how much actually needs to be done. I have a feeling my timeline may end up needing to shift. That’s okay, because it’s getting better.

Miniatures to Play Out a Fight Scene

Laura Highcove

So I wanted to do this post last week, and then life got in the way, so here I am getting it done now.

Last week I worked on the final fight in the Cinderella tale, which has a lot of moving parts. I decided the best way to keep track of everything was to pull out a play-mat and some miniatures and play out the positioning and movement of everyone in the fight. I took the pictures with my camera phone, so some of them are blurry, but I labeled them so you can see where everyone is.

You can see the terrain drawn onto the map if you look closely.

Yep, that says ‘large hellbeast’.

Wildrose is kiting.

omg, what is the Prince of Goldfield doing?

Everyone in a pile.

And it ended up helping me more than I thought it would to have it all laid out here. Mostly because it showed who would be able to see what better than me just picturing it in my head.

I also fell behind on my writing because of life happening last weekend, so I’ve been working hard to catch back up. Not sure if I’ll be done by May like I planned. Then I only have a month to smooth everything out for my beta readers in June. I suppose if I have to push it back a few weeks or a month it won’t be the end of the world, but I’m going to try and keep that from happening.

Remembering the Process

Laura Highcove

Now as you may or may not remember, The Storyteller is currently in my husband’s hands for alpha reading right now.

I made the decision to work on Jeremy Five-five, but I talked myself out of that after a bit, then I wandered through working on Blessings of the Nerial and to some background work on The Storyteller.

It took me until just recently to figure out why I was having such a hard time focusing on a project.

Firstly, I didn’t give myself a goal. I need to know, at least, what I am trying to accomplish in order to stay focused.

Secondly, I was attempting to work around my process. I know that my process is discovery writing, and that I have to discovery write multiple versions, and go back and tweak until I finally get an ending at which point I can actually start pulling the story together.

This is the step I am at with The Storyteller. It is not the point I am at with any of my other stories. However, I did attempt to start pulling Jeremy Five-five together and it was working out very poorly for me, then the same thing happened with Blessing of the Nerial.

This is just another of those reminders life likes to throw at me, that when things get super hard I need to take a step back and figure out why. I usually figure out that I am working against myself instead of with myself. I can’t pull a story together until I have discovery written to the end. Otherwise it’s like trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces, and some pieces from other puzzles.

So now I am back on Jeremy Five-five, with the plan to write toward the end. I am also giving myself a goal of 1000 words a day through the 29th. At that point my husband has to give me back The Storyteller and then we’ll see what wonderful mistakes I can make and learn from then!

Year In Review

Laura Highcove

I just read through a post by Brandon Sanderson, which was extremely long, and was basically an overview of what he got done this year.

It gave me a few moments of panic and self-doubt. He’s turning 40 this year and has already been publishing books for 20 years. It’s easy for me to regret that I’m not further along than I am with my writing career. I mean I have been writing since the second grade. I wish I had realized earlier what I could do with that. Or that, at least, I had put a little more focus and discipline into it.

But then who knows what my world would look like if I had. I’d like to assume I would still be in a good place, but who knows what turn my depression may have taken had I not ended up at Advantage Ranch. I might not have gained the mental fortitude to get through the process of writing a book, and so I would have ended up writing my whole life without ever being able to stay with something long enough to make it good.

And, because I like making lists, here’s what I accomplished this year in the Storyteller:

I spent January through June working on the first revision pass of The Storyteller. It taught me a lot about my process and even ended up spitting out an improved rough draft.

I then took a month off. It was good to do, and I struggled a lot with what to write about on my blog when I wasn’t talking about what writing I was doing.

At the beginning of July I made a new plan to read through my story and add notes about everything that needed to be tweaked and changed without actually doing any of the changes yet. I was a little overwhelmed by how much I felt like wasn’t done. I had to do a lot of self encouragement during this time (and it helped that I went to Writer’s Digest in the middle for support from other writers)

The end of July and beginning of August was a lot of travel for Otakon, Writer’s Digest, and then a horse show in Florida. It really wiped me out. I got back on track by using Dungeons & Dragons to flesh out my character and their fighting styles.

At the beginning of September I refocused my plan. The plan only lasted two weeks until I decided part of my process is repeatedly going back to the beginning of my book to clean it up. So I stopped trying to fight it, and embraced it instead.

So I got through my revision of the first half of the book, and made the plan to completely rewrite the second half of the book during NaNoWriMo. I did that and I spent up until today putting what I wrote in order and ironing it out.

The plan from here is to go over the story once more and make sure everything is ironed down before I give it over to my husband on the first of the year for an alpha read. My husband is great at plot and pacing, so that should help to tell me what I’ll need to do next.

New Goals

Laura Highcove

This week I have been very down on myself. I have been scared about being confronted with the possibility that I won’t be able to meet my deadline. I am beating myself up about not working on my novel as much as I “should”. And I’m hesitating putting my fears and worries out there for people to see. Ironic because I also worry about how few people read this blog.

I’ve been human this week. It’s nothing I haven’t felt before, nothing I haven’t beaten myself up about before, and nothing I will not do to myself again in the future.

Yet despite all this doubt and fear, somehow I am always willing to keep going. I’m not sure why I haven’t given up yet. I wrote about 600 words of complaints and childishness before I got to what you see posted here. Maybe writing out this reflection really does allow me to put it behind me somehow.

This week I finished going through the Cinderella tale. The fight at the end is still rough, and I think it ends rather abruptly, but I have cleaned it enough for this pass.
12 weeks left. Let’s shift some things around. I spent four weeks going through the first 28k words (Four chapters). Seems rather slow, though I did have to do some serious rewriting so I technically did Chapter 2 twice.

I still need to finish going through the first half of the novel, which is another 4 or 5 chapters. Let’s see if I can get that done in three weeks. At that point I will better be able to judge how long the second half of the book should be. For those of you counting, that means I’ll end up with a book that’s way too long, but right now I’d like to run into that bridge.

This week’s goal is to get through the next two chapters.

Grinding and Polishing

Laura Highcove

I’m not sure it ever properly came across to me from the advice of other writers just how horrible first drafts actually are. I think that was one of the biggest ‘Ah Ha!’ moments for me, and I know some people’s first drafts look better than others, but I’ll tell you, I think I am at the bottom of the heap. What I started out with is just so far gone from what the story looks like now (and I’m still not near to publishable ready) and it really is turning into something great.

This is my second week where I planned to work on scenes involving Archer and Slayer. Since I finished those last week, I decided to go back to the beginning of the story and clean it up. I have been able to put in some more foreshadowing, nailed down some of the wavering character motivations at the beginning of the book, and now they all actually have fighting styles!

I love going back to the beginning of a story because it’s always so much more polished than the end. It makes me feel good about how far I’ve come before I get back into the still rough later part of the book. I just push the polish forward a little bit at a time with each iteration and eventually the book gets ‘done’ and then I just go back over it again and again.

I’ll have to play around with balancing how often I go back to the beginning and how often I put my nose to the grindstone and push through the new material, since the obvious downside of this method is that the beginning gets a lot more polish than the ending bits. But recently I think I may have been grind-stoning a little bit too much and I was just finding myself discouraged and stuck in a place where I didn’t think any of my writing was any good.