Tag: Writing and Editing
Anne Rice Writing Advice
How to plan a novel in 3 weeks
Stalled with your writing? Go back and edit what you’ve done.
So I’m working on this new book/duology storyline. I have major events near the beginning defined, but I do not have as much nearer the end. I know it’s a good story so I’ve gone ahead and started writing under the assumption that I’ll work out the kinks as I go.
Well, every so often I come across a part in the story where I do not know what is going to happen next or when to put a certain scene in so it’s a little like writer’s block. To fix this and to maximise my time I go back and edit what I’ve done. I find that it gets me re-inspired to continue my story. I think it works because I’ve gone back through my storyline and have figured out a way to re-work something or add something new or find a fault that needs to be fixed 🙂
Also, I think that with this story by the time I’ve finished it’s going to be a case where I’ve already edited large chunks so that my first draft won’t be such a dumpster fire 🙂
Revising your Novel: Alexa Donne
9th draft of Jump Start done
After an unproductive morning, I finally managed to start and finish another draft. I also discovered a feature on Microsoft Word that that shows how long I was editing my story for. It was, I’m not kidding you, 333 minutes. That’s five and half hours long! And in one sitting.
For the most part, it was just line edits and proofreading. There were no structural changes and it’s nearing completion. Thank God. I’m getting tired of this story and just want to move onto the next part in the story.
The Witch’s Room: From start to finish
I completed the seventh draft of my short story The Witch’s Room and I decided that it was ready to be released into the world wide web with my name attached to it. It is currently under review on Amazon and should be up within 72 hours. At the moment I am only putting it on KDP select as a means of trying to get as many people to read it. If all goes well in a few months I’ll put it up on Smashwords 🙂
This story started with the visuals of a character entering the Witch’s Room. I thought that the scene was awesome and I shouldn’t/couldn’t let it go. So I had to work out what needed to happen for this scene to occur in a story. So I wrote it down on my work notepad and when I got home I began working on it.
Looking back on the dates of my word documents, I had the first draft completed just before 5pm on the 15th of February. That’s less than a month ago! Since then I have drafted every 2-5 days. It only took me a few hours every time to draft because of how short it is (I was also working on other stories).
I think the most challenging thing about this process was picking the book cover image. I wanted to have a stone sculpture of a woman to portray the scene in the Witch’s Room. But I was very nitpicky about it. It had to be aged and not too ornate. But I couldn’t seem to find one that fit everything because a lot of stone sculptures of women from the past were of the Virgin Mary or Angels and had religious themes to it. You can see that I found an image as close as possible to what I wanted. It’s not how the statute looks in the story, but it’s the closest.
A decent goal for any book
Here I go again: How I edit my stories
Whenever I manage to finish writing a story, I get to rediscover that writing the book was the easy part. Now I’m about to journey through the not-so-great joys of editing.
To alleviate this I watch a lot of youtube videos on the subject. There are quite a few people who go through the different types of editing. But whenever I edit, it’s a free-for-all. The line edits are forced to be with the proofreading and don’t get me started on the structural editing. It’s all one big party where I’m ripping out my fingernails because I hate parties.
My word documents all end up either covered in red (at least first to fourth drafts) or minimally wounded by the time I’m ready for it be self-published (aka getting sick of it). As revisions go on it does get quicker/easier, both because I’m getting better at killing my darlings and increasingly more confident in my editing abilities.
To people out there who think that editing is something daunting like climbing a mountain when you’ve never done such a thing, then do not fret. You don’t experience, you just need persistence. Afterall you just finished writing a manuscript. That’s something a lot of people never manage to do. Hooray!
Stephanie Haggarty 