On Editing

Editing novels is difficult. It's necessary, but it's difficult. In the last week of working on editing my 2011 NaNoWriMo novel, I have learned that there are a few major ways of self-editing.

PART ONE
The first kind is basic copyediting - did I accidentally put a space between a word and its quote? Did I accidentally write "too" instead of "to"? This happens sometimes in any academic paper; it's just harder to catch when the document is over 200 pages long.
I'm not sure if this counts as copyediting, but I also rejoin contractions in this stage. When I was writing the novel initially, I was thinking more about word count than quality, so I didn't contract words - I said "do not" instead of "don't" and "did not" instead of "didn't," for example. This is no longer necessary and often sounds very forced, so I'm embracing the apostrophe once more.


PART TWO
The next major kind of editing is phrasing. Does this phrase sound awkward? Would this character actually say this thing? Has this person already said this thing on this page? If so, is the repetition necessary, or can I say "I averted my eyes and bit my lip" instead of "I was unsure about this plan?" Would that person do that if they were unsure? It's also a bit concerned with "would this character really say that, or would their scene partner be more likely to say that?"


PART THREE
The last major editing technique is the most important and the most difficult. This is characterization editing. I haven't gotten here much yet; right now, I'm trying to just get the novel to not sound terrible. Once that happens, I can focus more on the character traits. That's not to say that I HAVEN'T been focusing on the character traits; as I mentioned in the last heading, characterization is always in some part of my mind. Characterization editing is less involved with "would this character say this thing?" It's more involved with "What sort of voice does this character have that would cause them to use this phrase? Would they really be unsure about this action? So-and-so says that this character does thus-and-so a thing; does so-and-so have a cause to say that? Should I make sure they have a cause to say that, or should I cut that line for them?"

Formulaic Posts: Checking out Checklists

So... here I am... on the couch... trying to think of something to post about... um... TO GOOGLE!

When one puts 'Blog Post Checklist' into Google, there are an astounding amount of hits (well, of course there are, it is Google). Still, there are a lot of people who insist that there are 10-12 points that bloggers MUST hit upon before hitting 'post,' and, as expected, there isn't a whole lot of variance.

1. TITLE
Make it catchy? I think I did... did I?

2. WRITE SOME STUFF. (A cool intro is cool.)
Blah. BlahBlahblahblah. Blargh. Tada! Cool intro done.

3. BREAK UP YOUR PARAGRAPHS.
So I'm assuming that means to not write up mammoth paragraphs that only the most dedicated readers (aka my mother... HI MOM!) would actually pay attention to. I don't think I'm doing this - at least, not in this post. Not yet, anyway. This sub-section might be getting up there. ON TO THE NEXT ONE!

4. INCLUDE A PHOTO
Here is a photo of my shoes from a few years ago. I need to figure out how to format that thing. Leaving that there for now.











5. INCLUDE KEYWORDS.
So.... include words that are easily searchable? Should I add this to the Checklist pileup in Google right now? How do I do that? Google says: "Let's give out diagrams that make it probably more complex than it really is." Can I skip this step? Getting a lot of page views is not my main concern (though more page views would be nice, it's not exactly what I'm trying to do with this... right now).

6. TAG A LOT.
I will do that upon completion of the post. So... 'checklist,' 'list,' 'random ideas from the internet,' 'things other people tell me are important,' 'rant,' 'joke,' 'humor...' am I missing anything?

7. EDIT.
But I'm not done yet! What if I make a major typographical error in writing step 9 that I completely overlook because I only edited steps 1 - 7? THEN what?

8. HIT PUBLISH!
But I'm not done yet!

9. STORM ALL THE SOCIAL MEDIA!
But I don't have any social media for this blog. I'm skipping this step.

10. GO HAVE SOME COFFEE.
Why not? You deserve some caffeine from all that hard writing, titling, paragraph-breaking, photo-posting, keyword-including, tagging, editing, publishing, and social media storming that you had to do in the last nine steps. If you don't like coffee, have some other beverage of your choice.


BONUS TIPS:

- Brand yourself
   Ha. Ha. Ha. Haven't done this at all.

-  Use a Call to Action.
   Yes. My Challenge to You: GO ON THE HERO'S JOURNEY. NOW. (not really; this is supposed to ask a question or ask for responses or whatever).

- Be Cool
  But that's easy, surely.


Right, I can't do any other shenanigans that are part of a cool, legit website, because I'm not a web designer. I don't have huge plans for this blog to go viral or anything like that. Though I do like posting things that I write on the Internet, and I've considered using AdSense on the blog, I don't think it would work very well.
There are two major reasons for this: firstly, because I don't think I get enough hits to actually make anything; secondly, because I dislike ads as much as the next person - if I wanted to run a monetized blog, I would probably create a new blog and follow all the steps and try to make it all fancy like all the sites suggest. That, however, is not this blog. That might change, but I don't know.

Call to action for all you hooligans: what do you think about the content of the post? It's not intended to be a set of Legitimate, Follow-Wild-Card's-Steps-Perfectly sort of thing, but did you like it?

On Summaries

Today, I have to write a review of Les Miserables for theatre as a production critique, because that's what we do in theatre class.  I think the hardest part, for me, is the summarizing.
Why?
I know the story so well - I have seen it five times, counting the movie, and I have the soundtrack nearly memorized. If you asked me to sing a bit of any given song, I'll be able to at least hum the melody, if not the words.  The difficulty in summarizing the play in under a page is not making sure I get everything in, it's deciding what details to leave out.  Act Two can easily be summarized in two sentences or less: "The revolution fails; except for Cosette, Marius, and the Innkeepers, everyone dies. Cosette and Marius get married and join Valjean at his deathbed."  It's easy.  Act One, on the other hand, took two-thirds of the allotted page, and most of that is backstory.

How does this tie into writing?

In the event that I actually get something published, I'll need to make sure my backstory is sound but can be summarized, and that the same can be said of the actual story.  There is always the eternal question of What To Keep In And What To Leave Out, and when I get through my first Real Typing Session today, I hope I'll be able to identify that well.

Going Back

This month, I want to work on typing up and editing my NaNo2011 novel (the one I wrote during November of my senior year; it is, in my opinion, one of the better novels I have written.  It is also the only one that has an ending that is connected to the rest of the story.  NaNo2012 has an end, but I have a scene or two to add before that).  It is going to be rather interesting, I have to admit.  I have not seen most of this novel in quite a long time - the middle bits tend to get ignored in the grand scheme of typing when there are a lot of false-starts.  Since this novel is in roughly the 100,000-115,000 word range, this is going to take a long time, and I hope I can get through it.

I think there are three important things I will need to focus on when I start editing:
1. Work out characters' back-stories more, especially the principal characters.  It is probably going to take a while, but if I know their stories better, I will be able to work out whether they would actually do or say something, or whether I was just putting a certain statement in to be punny or tack onto my word count (it's been known to happen).
2. Work on general plot arc/ subplot arc.  General plot arc comes first, then the subplots.  I made a list the other day: there are five plots in this novel (one main and four subplots).  I need to work out which should stay and which should go (or perhaps should just fade, but not leave entirely).  From there, I need to...
3. ... Work on scene selection.  I think this is going to be the hardest part of the entire thing, which is why I'm going to be doing it last (it's also last because I can't really do it well if I don't have 1 and 2 sorted out properly).  This step is where I add and subtract scenes to make sure it's actually going to work in the general plot.  I predict that my word count will shrink rapidly if I work on this step for a long time, and go thoroughly through step 2 (though step 1 might add a few scenes).

At this point, I need to stop thinking in terms of word count and start thinking in terms of MAKE THIS A BETTER NOVEL.  I am no longer in NaNoWriMo: I'm in WiCaEdMo (Wild Card Editing Month), in which word count and word quality are not the same thing (they never were, but the NaNo mindset tends to force you to ignore that).

Also, this is not an April Fool's Joke.

Final Weeks

My J-term class ends on Friday. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm excited that we're going to be on break and that spring semester is coming, but I'll be sad to see the excessive amount of time leave.
More relevant, I'm also not sure how I'm going to feel about the final product of the class. If there's one thing I've learned about my own writing process, it's that the editing part is never done. I have a measly seven scenes - I originally had eight, but one got cut before it got typed up - but all of the editing won't help my nerves, in the end.  Does the pacing work?  Are the characters relatable?  Will anyone be able to pronounce Siofra's real name?  Am I using too many cliches?  Is the timing right?  The list goes on.

I know the reason that I'm getting nervous about it, too - more nervous than my other writing.  It has nothing to do with my peers accepting it as decent work - that was what I had issue with at the beginning of the course, a long time ago when I only had to write five pages.  At this point, the trouble is me accepting it as decent work.  When you spend just as much time editing a piece as you do writing it (more time, actually), you tend to worry about it.  If this were a longer work, it would be like a child.  You want the best for it, but sometimes it gives you hell.  A lot of times, actually.  Some things you love to go over, other things you fear to even glance at.

Though this is not my longest work - it barely counts as 30 pages, even with the title page, the character list, and the page-happy formatting that a script must follow - it's still causing me a bit of worry.  In comparison to some other people in the class, I think I'll do fine, and I don't mind how it's written, but sometimes I wonder how it would turn out if I had done things differently.  I could have killed my main character.  I could have made the future relationship of two of my characters less ambiguous.  I could have made one character more sympathetic to the antagonistic party.

When it comes to it, though, I'm glad I had the chance to do this course.  It taught me how not to format a script, and it taught me what to look at and what to ask when going through the editing process.

another week of writing

I'm halfway through the second week of J-term now, and, for the record, J-term has come with a few surprises, not all of them bad.

Good things:
1. I have way more free time than I do during the normal semester.  If I don't want to go to the gym in the morning, I don't have to wake up until 9:30 or 10:00.  After maybe 1:45 or 2:00, when I'm done with class and lunch, I have almost nothing to do except homework until 6:00, which is our normal dinner time.
2. The spare time has led me to actually get to the gym, which is always nice (except when I get scared of judgement from the actual athletes).  Also, I actually have time to write for my class, which is nice, but I also tend to procrastinate on my own writing because of podcasts and yarn.  Nevertheless, J-term has been fun so far because of all the time I can actually use now.
3. Since I actually have time to do homework during the day and I don't have to wake up early, the evenings can be spent doing things other than sleeping (sleeping does get involved).  These new activities include Apples to Apples, Capture the Flag, Marco Polo (played on the football field and not in the pool), and Hide and Seek.  All of these activities have commenced at around 10:00 PM and proceeded until midnight or later, which is fine, because I can still get sleep.
4. The course itself is really interesting - though it is a workshop class, the feedback really helps with what I'm writing.

Bad things:
1. Though the class is fun and I like that I get to write, sometimes the peer editing aspect can get kind of irritating.  Don't get me wrong: I do like to read and comment on other people's writing, as well as receive feedback on my own.  However, quite a few people in my class seem to be unaware that Spelling and Grammar check is correct on many occasions (there are times when it is incorrect, but when one is in college, one should be able to tell the difference).  Sometimes I have to edit my classmates' grammar and spelling as I read their work because it can get rather distracting.
2. Sometimes having all of the extra time can get kind of boring.  Though it's easy to find ways to pass the time, afternoons can get long, tedious, and unproductive.


In all, though, I'm glad I took the J-term class that I chose: at the very least, it shows me how not to write a script.

Writing Style

I have been mentioning this topic for a while, so it is time I do a post on it.

Obviously, writing style is important. A distinction should be made, however, between writing style and grammatical correctness:  Like a Tide Laundry Detergent commercial mentioned, "Style is an option; clean is not."
Similarly, WRITING STYLE is something that differs depending on who you read, because everyone's voice is different; even if Barnes and Noble classifies an author under specific genres or styles, the Vampire Kisses series is not written in the same style as the Twilight series, though they are both vampire romance novels.
However, GRAMMATICAL CORRECTNESS is ALWAYS MANDATORY, unless you are writing a fan-fiction that you intend to be a bad thing on the Internet.  Grammatical correctness needs to be a requirement for any published novel or story, regardless of whether or not it was self-published.  Small things that are easily overlooked are excusable if they are few and far between; constant misuse of words and/ or misspellings SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED.  Do not rely entirely on your computer's Spell Check, because it can be faulty - sometimes it will tell you to switch around a word or two that may affect the meaning.
I would like to point out that the phrase "I'm just a bad speller" is never an excuse.  If you ask your friends to read and edit your writing (make sure your friend is an English major or at least has some interest in literary quality), you can easily catch any errors.  Additionally, though you should BE AWARE of Spell Check, that does not mean it is your enemy.  Though it can be annoying at times and sometimes it can be wrong, it is frequently correct, and you should note when it is telling you something.

Writing style in and of itself is something that can be interesting to study.  Though it is not entirely the same thing as a writer's voice, the two are very similar.  The writer's voice is how you hear the narration as you read it; the writer's style is how the author writes it.  Style can be genre-specific (but not always), whereas voice is always subjective.

Really the only way to improve your voice and figure out what sort of style you want to use (even if it's one of your own invention) is to practice.  So go forth and write! :)

On Finishing

Last night, at 12:17 AM, I finally completed a novel.  I don't know how many words it is, though I know it's about 300 pages (290-something, to be more precise) in my handwriting, and I don't know as of yet how well that translates to typed-up-ness. If I had to hazard a guess based on the infamous things called Math and Approximate Words per Page, the Math tells me it would come out between 103,000 and 115,000, but that seems way off to me.  If it's not way off, then I wrote more than I actually needed to, but that happened in November when I started the thing.
Also, cool thing: Chris Baty acknowledged the existence of the Ending of my novel.  I feel really cool.

Anyhow, onto the real thing:
Though I have written the last words of Romeo's journey in pen, the typing and the editing still needs to happen.  I need to see how many words I actually wrote, at the very least, but then I need to make it sound better than it already is (this is a very, very easy thing to do; it's the first draft, so it's its job to be kind of sucky).  I don't know what I'm going to do with it after I type it up and edit it a bit; maybe I'll edit it some more and then do something with it.  I really don't know.
I guess I could send it to a publisher, but I don't want to yet, because I'm a total amateur and I don't know what I'm doing.

But the significant part is over: the manuscript is written.  I haven't been through the entire process of writing/ editing/ editing/ sending a novel, so I don't know what the hardest part is.  But my personal major roadblock has been knocked down.  HUZZAH!