After that comes the part that everyone thinks of as revision: editing, polishing and proofreading. That’s where I call back in my inner perfectionist (keeping it on a very short leash) to start noticing all the times I used the same unusual word twice in one chapter, or just have a godawfully awkward sentence construction, et cetera, et cetera. Not to mention the times where a scene has lapsed into two disembodied voices chatting at one another (ugh).

This is why writing is much more of a test of stamina than intelligence or talent. Nearly everybody’s first drafts are weak, with maybe a few flashes of brilliance. The number of subsequent drafts you can do (and of course the amount of work you put into each one) and the quality of attention you bring to the whole process determine the outcome far more than what you originally scribbled in your journal or typed out in the initial heat of inspiration.

So if you’re in the middle of a project, KEEP GOING.

The two articles I found most helpful are the ones by Knight and Witchey, in boldface below (Knight & Witchey – sounds like a storefront in Diagon Alley, doesn’t it?). Knight’s is short and sweet, Witchey’s is more in-depth, and both offer practice exercises to help you get the hang of the techniques they suggest. Both articles are a couple of years old, but you can dig them up at your local library.

• Card, Orson Scott. Characters and Viewpoint. 1st ed, The Elements of Fiction Writing. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1988.
• DeMuth, Mary E. “Deepen Your Stories Today: Tips on Creating More Powerful Fiction by Writing ‘From the Inside Out.’” Writer 122, no. 2 (2009): 28-29.
• Franco, Marjorie. “Follow an Actor’s Approach in Your Writing.” Writer 121, no. 9 (2008): 9-9.
• Goudge, Eileen. “Focus on Emotions When Writing Love Scenes.” Writer 120, no. 9 (2007): 13-13.
• Knight, Michael. “Get Real Emotion onto the Page.” Writer 121, no. 10 (2008): 38-38.
• Kress, Nancy. Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint : Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints. 1st ed, Write Great Fiction. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 2005.
• Lowenkopf, Shelly. “Good Dialogue Betrays Emotion.” Writer 121, no. 10 (2008): 12-12.
• Witchey, Eric M. “Get the Emotion into Your Fiction.” Writer 120, no. 9 (2007): 28-32.

I haven’t had a chance to read either of the books yet (by Card and Kress), but I’ll try to report back on those when I get a chance.

If I’m feeling brave, I may also post some before and after bits from the work in progress as I revise for emotional heft — or at least the “after” (!).

Anybody have any other books or articles (or web resources) to recommend? Add ‘em to the comments!

On the plus side, getting a new operating system has also forced me to degunkify my desktop, which also serves to clear my head via a process of sympathetic magic. Being gone for seven workdays (eleven calendar days!)* has also helped with the head-clearing. And now I get to learn some new computery stuff about the operating system and new versions of various software tools I use for work (Windows 7 and Adobe CS5).

The head-clearing quality is especially welcome as I dig into novel rewriting before and after hours (I’m changing the ending as well as continuing my previously planned rewrites) — about 9 weeks of work.

When I arrived in Kansas, I learned that they set the grasslands on fire here on purpose, typically early in the spring, to clear out the dead stuff and make room for new growth. It’s called a controlled burn. It’s a useful concept, and beautiful to see in real life: both the sweeping flames and huge columns of smoke (DON’T try to drive through the smoke) during the burn itself, and later the lush new green that makes the hillsides look like they should have hobbit children playing on them or maybe riders of Rohan thundering across them.

But maybe that’s just me.

*I was at the CSSF2010 Repeat Offenders workshop (for science fiction and fantasy writers, not convicts), which was a worthwhile endeavor, BTW.

What’s working for me: Ray lays out an actual step-by-step process to complete a novel revision, and has a raft of tools to help the struggling writer think about the structure of the novel-in-progress, as well as the characters and their arcs within the larger story. He focuses on revising subplots, which I’m finding immensely helpful, because it’s the subplots that give a book texture and make it seem like a whole, three-dimensional world.

By the end of the first draft, I had a pretty good idea of what the protagonist wanted and was going to do to get it, but the other characters were still pretty thin, and many of the scenes…well, they didn’t exactly crackle with dramatic tension. This book helps a lot, because Ray gets you to focus on revising key scenes, the ones that serve as lynchpins for the plot and highlight characters’ individual struggles and turning points.

Just as a sample here’s the “quick scene fix” from Ray’s book, designed to help you develop ideas for and rewrite shorter scenes:

1. Use sense perception to lock down the point of view.
2. Use action to express emotion.
3. Put a second character in the scene. If you’re writing a crime novel, the other character could be a witness, a fellow sleuth, a supervisor.
4. Write some dialogue.
5. Now lock down the object in the scene: a book, a chair, a computer for research, drawing materials, a cell phone, a fountain pen, a weapon.
6. Bring on the intruder. Witness, boss, suspect, etc.
7. Describe the setting. Is the place a bedroom? A prison cell? A library? A local pub? A cave?
8. Ratchet up the suspense by adding a time limit. What if the mission has to be completed by midnight?

Ray writes mysteries, but the revision strategies in the book work for anyone, and the books he uses to illustrate his ideas about plot and subplot are Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby, so even those with genre anxiety will get something out of it.

What I discovered in looking for books to help me with the revision process is that the revision process and the language used to describe it is highly idiosyncratic. I’d gotten excited about Karen Wiesner’s From First Draft To Finished Novel: A Writer’s Guide To Cohesive Story Building, because I’d read a good article about novel structure she’d written for Writer’s Digest.

When I got the book, though, I found that the way Wiesner described the process didn’t really match my experience of writing and thinking about a novel very well, so the book just sat on my shelf, looking at me in a somewhat accusatory way. Drat.

Melissa Scott’s Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel is also on my shelf, because my friend Lane loves the advice Scott gives on world-building and recommended it to me, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’ll probably pick it up when I’m starting the next novel.

That’s all for now — back to revising those subplots!

I just read Black Blade Blues, the debut urban fantasy novel by J. A. Pitts and first of a series of three from Tor, and it was a LOT of fun. The the book features left-handed lesbian blacksmith and martial arts expert Sarah Beauhall, who

• inadvertently reforges a magic sword,
• befriends a six-foot tall dwarf (the supernatural kind, not one of the Little People),
• works out some issues of internalized homophobia with the help of her equally kick-ass girlfriend Kate, and
• fights dragons, ogres and trolls to saves the world (naturlich) with the help of various friends from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).

Not necessarily in that order. Also, at one point she gets hit on by a Valkyrie (squee!).

It’s an imaginative story, the pacing and plotting are good,  and the main character is flawed enough to be interesting while still sympathetic (and not overly hard-boiled and wise-cracking, which seems to be the default first-person voice these days). Kudos are also due to Pitts for showing Sarah’s struggle with her religious fundamentalist upbringing in a realistic light, and showing some growth in her character on that front. There’s a lot more going on here than just broad-shouldered wimmin swinging swords and pounding steel with a big hammer.

The one criticism I would level is that the transitions between scenes told from Sarah’s point of view (in first person), and the other scenes (told in third person) were jarring for me. Maybe that’s because there wasn’t enough contrast between the two voices (the main character’s voice and the voice of the third person narrator), or maybe it’s just a challenge inherent in switching from first to third person, but I’ve read other books that were able to pull it off. (Anybody else care to weigh in on that?)

Regardless, I thought it was worth reading and enjoyed it a lot. I’m especially happy to read a book based on Norse mythology (though in modern setting) that has substantial queer content. In the old stories, Odin was queer in the broad sense and a gender outlaw in many ways (Loki too), so the stories that “straighten up” everything, even if they are really good (Diana Paxson’s books, for instance), are on some level unsatisfying. I mean, take Valkyries: unmarried, childless women warriors. Wouldn’t you expect at least some of them to be lesbians?

The book is just out in hardback, so I’m afraid I’m in for a long wait for the next installment of Sarah Beauhall’s (mis)adventures. O-well.

In the meantime, you can learn more from this guest posting from the J. A. Pitts on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, and the author’s own web site.

OK, I’m back! Real life has intruded on my blogging quite a bit this spring, some of which I want to write about in some posts soon. My partner and I have been taking care of her 88-year-old Grandma Ruth, who had been ill for a long time with stage 3 breast cancer and passed away earlier this month. That whole has been a struggle for all of us, but I am ultimately grateful I had the opportunity to know her and have her become part of our family.

On a more positive note, I also got to participate in the first-ever Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Citizen’s Academy (and I now have the fancy embroidered polo shirt to prove it!). It was ten weeks long, four hours a week, and our group of 14 participants got to do a lot of things and learn a lot of things about how cops do their jobs, how jails are run, etc. We also got to meet Kilo, the drug-sniffing dog, and I hope to someday be as excited about my job as he is about his.If you are a writer and think you might ever write about the police, crime, jails, or the courts, I highly recommend looking for a program like this one.

I’m back on the blog and will be posting weekly, and I’m also back working on the fantasy novel, going through my third revision. More on that fun process to come. Anyway, it’s good to be back!

On the plus side, when I looked at the place where I might actually start my novel in the next draft, I discovered that it’s only 20 pages in. True, these are twenty pages that I have already slashed and burned and then lovingly rewritten at least three or four times (probably more, since they were part of the chunk I initially wrote and rewrote several times to go to the novel-writing workshop last summer), but still, it could have been worse.

So now I’ll do more slashing and burning and will use my jedi-ninja mind tricks to insert the necessary information from those pages elsewhere in the story as exposition and possibly a flashback or two.

Also on the plus side, almost every scene I’ve written in the second act is a keeper–I just didn’t bother to write the connective transition bits that would keep the narrative flowing and keep the reader from stopping and saying, “Huh?” So that is the task of this draft.

And finally, it’s day two of Daylight Savings Time, and I am up writing at my customary time, which is sort of miraculous. Hearing the little birds chirping outside my window helped with that tremendously; I figured if they could get up and get moving even without the benefit of hot running water and electric coffee machines, then I really had no excuse.

P.S. – Although I didn’t touch the manuscript, I did spend time thinking about it, and doing some related research about desert survival and medicinal plants, which was fun. My next research task is to go back to Hank Reinhardt’s Book of Swords and take the notes I should have taken the first time through. I have lots of people carrying around metal implements (copper and bronze) and want to make sure I don’t have them driving their dagger points emphatically into solid wood tabletops or anything like that. (Hint: bronze is softer than iron; copper is MUCH softer!)

P.P.S. – Currently listening to: The Weepies, “Painting by Chagall” (“Sometimes rain that’s needed falls…”) from their Say I Am You album. Also Iron & Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog. Highly recommended.

Yes I did see this, and it ticked me off because it’s insipid. There’s too much poetry! The good stuff gets lost! MFA programs are cranking out too many writers! This is the sort of non-news, non-thinking blathering that pontificators of every generation seem to spout.

[CORRECTION: David Alpaugh himself has helpfully pointed out that the italicized portion of the preceding paragraph, which was originally placed in quotation marks, is not in fact a direct quote. He's absolutely correct; it's my characterization of the tone and main point of his op-ed. I hope the five other readers of my blog are not too disappointed in my lapse in rigor.]

Look a the final paragraph:

“Every now and then someone asks me, ‘Who are the best poets writing today?’ My answer? ‘I have no idea.’ Nor do I believe that anyone else does. I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art. That would be the most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable.”

No one has EVER had ANY idea who the best poets of their own times were. It is unknowable. Blake and Dickinson are perfect examples – they were both “buried in the overgrowth” IN THEIR OWN TIMES. Why should our time be any different? And why blame changes in media and publishing for it?

And why have an uneasy feeling about it? Relax, read the stuff you love, look around for more stuff that you might love, acknowledge the unalterable nature of Sturgeon’s Law, recognize the 95% of everything that is crud for what it is (fertilizer for the other 5%), and enjoy life.

That is all for now.

While you’re there, you might want to check out Lyndall Gordon’s article about Emily Dickinson, which I believe is excerpted from her new biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns.

On the upside, revisions of the novel’s second act are going swimmingly.

I’m confident that I’ll still get my fair share from each e-book sold. But as an author, I’m not after your money. Well, not only your money. I have my sights on a much more precious commodity: your time. We enter into an unspoken pact, you and I: Give me a few hours, stolen moments on the subway or after the kids are asleep, and I promise to inform and entertain you. Frankly, that’s always been a tough sell, given the sundry ways you can spend your time, but at least I had a fighting chance. Curled up with a pinot noir and my book, your attention was mine to lose. Not anymore. The new generation of e-books will, in essence, merge the laptop and the book. Now if my narrative starts to drag, or I digress, readers can click onto their favorite news site to see what’s up with health care, or click onto TMZ to see what’s up with Brangelina. How do I compete with that?

Is this a reasonable worry? How much time do most normal people spend curled up with a pinot noir (or in my case, decaf coffee or  maybe a good pale ale) and a book these days?

Well, as a matter of fact, I read a whole book uninterrupted just last night, a debut YA fantasy novel from a cracking good writer and storyteller, Malinda Lo (the book is Ash, and I highly recommend it). I read it in print, a hard copy edition that I borrowed from the library.

I’m also in the middle of reading SHE by H. Rider Haggard on my iPod touch. It’s a bit of a pain to keep flipping “pages” on that tiny screen, but when I’m waiting in a doctor’s office or yes, even when I’m in bed before I turn the light out, it’s very convenient. I got that book free, too, from Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the thing: I read at least one or two books every week, and I live in a two bedroom apartment with three large bookcases that are already full. Up to this point, I’ve had what amounts to a one-in, one-out rule for book purchases. (Ash is quite possibly good enough to qualify for a purchase–but I have to decide what I’m getting rid of. Back issues of Tin House, I’m looking at you.) With this fun new device and a downloaded app or two, however, I can exponentially expand my collection of books without running the risk of being featured on that hoarders show.

Here’s what that means to those in the publishing industry: I’m the customer you can get back with e-books, if you play your cards right. Also, an e-book (like that pale ale?) is not a purchase for me, it’s a rental, so please price it accordingly. If I have the choice between paying a buck or two to get instant access to a book I’m interested in reading, or waiting a few weeks (or months) to get it through the local library, that’s something I’d be willing to pay for. If the e-book in question is $10 or $20, well…there are plenty of fish in the sea, and a lot of other books I can get right now and read while I wait for the library’s copy.

Here’s what it means to authors: if you want me to buy your book in hard copy, it has to be one I will fall head over heels in love with and want to live with at least as long as a typical marriage lasts these days. But even if I don’t want to marry your book, I might not mind a fling (electronic, of course). Your chances are better if you make the first few chapters of your book available online, free. Consider it a first date. (Herman Melville, you had me at “Call me Ismael.”)