editing

A Writer’s Life: Arcs Over Rewrites

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

So “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet,” my sf/fantasy sarcastic road trip novel, is in editing.  I did a few passes, but now the goal is to tighten up the plot and characterizations.

Originally I had wanted to go over the story and truly re-work it to be “what I wanted.”  The plan was to re-outline the plot, and then do a mix of cut-and-paste, writing, and rewriting to flesh out the “new” novel.  But something felt wrong . . . that kind of thing that tells me I’m doing something wrong.

So that gut feel – why did it feel wrong?  It felt excessive, it felt like a lot of effort, and it also didn’t feel like it’d bring me much.  I’d spend a bunch of time building an outline, then try to shoehorn things in, and as my past experience had told me – I’d probably find plenty of other things I’d have to change.

It’s always important to listen to those gut feelings, and this one said it was a bad idea.

At that point, I discussed this with friends.  How was I going to tweak the plot?  After a few discussions, I went back to my lessons from Agile Software development – good improvement is often iterative.  So how would I truly improve the plot in iterations?

Well, in software you rarely go overhaul everything.  You tweak the components, improving this piece here, that piece there.  My novel wasn’t flawed, it just needed to be improved.  Re-plotting it would have been as logical as doing a working piece of software from scratch just to add a few new features or improve existing ones.

That’s when I realized what I wanted to do was improve various story arcs.  So this is what I’m doing:

  1. First, I went over my notes and thoughts, and wrote down the arcs I wanted to improve or make.
  2. Under each arc I wrote down the general things I wanted to do in story order.
  3. Now with that done, I plan to rewrite just the arcs, going through the story (which I know all too well) to just add to, tweak, expand, or reduce the story to embody these new or improved arcs.

What does this net me:

  • It’s easier.  It’s just not some giant re-outline that’d be inaccurate quickly.
  • It’s about value.  Each individual arc improvement makes the story better.
  • It’s atomistic.  Each arc improvement is roughly standalone, so I can add them with relative ease.  I can also drop them with relative ease.
  • It’s synergestic.  I’m working on one arc at a time, so I get to see the synergies as I go part-by-part (which plays into iterative improvement).
  • It’s iterative.  Each arc I add or improve in the story allows me to re-evaluate progress – and re-evaluate the other arcs I want to add or improve.
  • It’s more hands-on.  I’m editing arcs much quicker as opposed to making some plan, so it keeps me in tune with the story.

I’ll let you know how this goes.  But it’s certainly less of a burden on my mind, it gets me writing quicker, and it fits my Agile experiences.

– Steve

A Writer’s Life: The Rush

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

Still working to finish the draft of “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet.”  In this case, I’ve decided to try and finish it a month early – literally about a week from now.

Usually I did 15K words on it a month.  I’ve gotten to  nearly 29K (nearly 40K for the month).  Why did I decide to do this?

First, I realized that I was committed to what I had (which has problems), so it was best to push through and get it done.  It’d be better to finish up and edit something than to diddle around with plots and tweaks.

Secondly, I’d make discoveries as I wrote.  The more I wrote, the more I learned and thought and explored about my story.

Third, if I kept up the rush I kept in the “zone” of my story, had a better more subtle feel for it.  I think there’s an ideal pace for writing something, a minimum you need to write to stay in touch with your work.  My rate is higher than I thought.  It’s probably every other day at most.

The result is that, upon review, I’m probably going to rewrite a good 50% of the story.  It won’t be bad (I’d say it’s about 60% to 70% a good story), but it can be a lot better.  The thing is if I’d really pushed myself like I have now, just stayed in the zone, I’d have been done in October if not earlier.  Also, the benefits of the replottings and rewrites I had done earlier are ones I probably could have realized in a second draft.

In other words, remember my big halfway point edit?  I am questioning if it was necessary.

This is how my friend Serdar writes – he gets it out and then edits.  I’m starting to think he has a point – but hey, as always writing is an experiment.

So now the goal is to finish up the draft of “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet” and see where I am.  Then it’ll be multiple read-throughs and edits, about 4 months at my current estimate.  When you’re dealing with a road trip type story it’s one thing, but it’s eight characters going through weird stuff on a series of weird planets that are totally normal to them.  I’ll be reporting on that too.

What can you as a fellow writer learn?  Well . . .

  1. We all have our ideal writing pace – what works for us, our subject, and our methods.
  2. You don’t find that pace until you do it.
  3. That ideal pace should let you both create a coherent (if not good) work and keep you in touch with the work.
  4. You have to be open to learning.
  5. You’ll keep learning as you keep writing.

My takeaway lesson is that I overplanned and under-applied myself.  Not entirely surprising as I was enamored of trying various methodologies.  But in the end, it’s an experiment.

I learned something.

– Steve

A Writer’s Life: The Big Edit

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

I got to the halfway point on “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet” and realized I had lots of notes, things I wanted to improve and tweak, and so on.  In general I wanted to “tune up” what I had and improve my plot outline.  So I did something kind of ambitious: I decided to review the entire first half of the book scene by scene, both adding and rewriting, as well as fleshing out the plot outline.

Yeah.  Kinda stupidly ambitious?  Probably was a good 6-8 hours of work.

It was also totally worth it.

First, it let me get in touch with my story.  Over time I’ve been rereading parts of it, but seeing the whole sweep really helped.  I kind of wonder if I need to do this at the 3/4 mark.

Secondly, it let me tone up my writing.  Always good to apply lessons learned later to earlier writing.  It’s been especially good as I’ve been “shaking off the rust” of having not done fiction for awhile.

Third, it let me improve the plot and story in both the large and small.  A big review in a short time – not quite a revision or rewrite – did wonders for making things better and tighter.

Fourth, I got the characters down even better.  Seeing them in the big picture and small, in a short time, let me tighten them up.

Fifth, I got the “mood changes” much better.  I can see the big picture and how the mood shifts (more later).

Sixth, it got me the improved plot outline (at least for what I wrote, see below).  I now have every scene noting major goals and major character attitudes.  That’s something I should have done before, but I got it now.

What was also kind of amazing is how starting to write the second half felt.  The characters felt more solid, the shift in moods more real, the sense of plot tighter.  Diving into writing after this review has taken all I learned and applied it.

(It’s probably good to keep writing after such a review so those lessons get applied).

Of course as I go on and write the second half, I want to take an hour or two to review the plot notes I have and revise that as well, which should take all my lessons here and solidify them.

(Remember I do all sorts of books on creativity to help you out!)

– Steve