revision

How to Know When You are Boring Your Reader to Tears

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This post by Jean Oram originally appeared on her The Helpful Writer site on 3/11/14.

Ever wondered why your books maybe aren’t getting purchased? Finding an agent to rep them? Or just plain and simply catching on?

There are a ton of reasons why books don’t connect. Timing, luck, voice, content, etc. Some of these aren’t controllable. But one thing is.

Boring your reader to tears, death, or worse…having them put your book down in disinterest.

It happens. We can’t connect with every reader. And if we try, well, chances are we’ll end up with a book that connects with even fewer people. (Not everyone liked Harry Potter, believe it or not. They just stay in hiding.) But there ARE things we can do to increase our chances of connecting with our readers and one of the big things is not boring them.

I know, right?

 

How to Know if You are Boring Your Readers and What to Do About It

The easiest way to figure out if you are boring your readers is to see if you are boring yourself.

Seems too basic, doesn’t it?

Right now there could be some of you thinking, “But there isn’t a stitch of boringness in my whole story!” Could be true. Maybe you wrote The Hunger Games. If so, you’re excused. However, the other several billion of us did not. So, dig deep and fall out of love with yourself for a moment (shouldn’t be too hard–we are artists, after all where self-doubt and loathing is as common as cheap bar soap).

Here are a few inklings that things aren’t as tight and as exciting as you might wish them to be in your story and you might be boring your reader.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Helpful Writer.

 

From Pathetic to Professional: 8 Ways to Beat the First Draft Blues

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This post by Ruth Harris originally appeared on Anne R. Allen’s blog on 2/23/14.

You’re happy, even delirious. You’ve finished your first draft!

Then you read it.

OMG, you think, did I write that?

Yes, you did. 🙂

It stinks. It sucks. It’s so rancid it threatens to warp the time-space continuum.

Think you’re alone? Here’s Hugh Howey in a blog post: “I suck at writing. Watching a rough draft emerge from my fingertips in realtime would induce nausea.”

So remember, it’s not just you.

The first draft is just that—–a first step.

As a long-time editor and author, I’ve found 8 strategies that can help you shape, refine and improve your draft. (Actually it’s called editing and, yes, you can do quite a bit of it yourself.)

1. Embrace the power of the delete button.

Elmore Leonard advised taking out all the unnecessary words. Cutting almost always makes a book better, more readable, more exciting.

Specifically, that means delete all the spongy, weasely, namby-pamby words—the ones that aren’t crisp and precise, the ones that drag out a scene or a description without adding anything except length.

Get rid of the windy digressions, the pointless descriptions, the info dumps, the meandering philosophical musings.

Duplicate your document before you begin in case you get too enthusiastic but, with a safe back-up on hand, go ahead and hack away. Take out everything that doesn’t advance your story or define your characters. See if the resulting clarity doesn’t vastly improve the pace of your book.

Don’t just kill your darlings. Kill everything that doesn’t move the story forward. Save your gems in a “future” file and use them in another book where they pull their weight.

2. Sharpen dialogue.

 

Click here to read the full post on Anne R. Allen’s blog.

 

Hemingway Takes The Hemingway Test

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This article by Ian Crouch originally appeared on The New Yorker on 2/13/14.

Creators of the Hemingway App Explain Their Rules for Writing

This week, in the Times, Charles McGrath wrote about a newly digitized collection of ephemera from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, which confirms that the famously terse writer was, as McGrath says, “a hoarder.” Ticket stubs, telegrams, Christmas cards, diary entries—all of it amassed in the twenty-plus years that Hemingway kept his house there. Amid the collection, McGrath identifies two notes that Hemingway had seemingly written to himself, in pencil. One reads: “You can phrase things clearer and better.” And the other: “You can remove words which are unnecessary and tighten up your prose.”

The above paragraph scored an “O.K.” in Hemingway, an app, created by the brothers Adam and Ben Long, which analyzes text and, as it promises, “makes your writing bold and clear.” The program highlights overly complicated words and suggests alternatives (my “all of it” could have simply been “all”). It also calls out adverbs (“newly,” “famously, “”seemingly”), difficult-to-read sentences (the first being “very” hard to read, while the second was just hard), and instances of the passive voice.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

Ask Questions to Find Your Story

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This post by C.S. Lakin originally appeared as a guest post on the blog of Elizabeth Spann Craig on 2/17/14.

I ask a lot of questions in my line of work as a professional manuscript critiquer and copyeditor. Sure, I also give a lot of suggestions and fix badly constructed sentences. But it’s the questions that get to the heart of the story. Asking authors questions helps them get thinking about what they’re writing and why.

So much important information seems to be missing in so many novels—especially first novels by aspiring authors. Novel writing is tricky; there are countless essential components that all need to mesh cohesively. To me, the key to reaching that goal is to ask a lot of questions.

 

Questions Create Story

Starting a novel is asking a question. What if . . .? What would someone do if . . .? What if the world was like this and this happened . . .? Then those initial questions lead to more questions, which shape and bring life to characters and story. Questions are the key.

Thousands of hours of critiquing and editing has led me to notice that there are some questions I seem to ask a lot. Which tells me there are some general gaps that many writers have in common in their novel-constructing process. I thought I’d share these questions, because maybe they’ll help you as you work on your novel.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.

 

6 Keys to Revising Your Fiction

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This post, by Chuck Sambuchino, originally appeared on his Writer’s Guide to Literary Agents blog on the Writer’s Digest site on 9/20/13.

1) Make sure you’re in love.

I’m not a genius, my stories are not born lovely and perfect, their language strong, their plot lean and exciting. I have to work at it—a lot. And I don’t mind, because I enjoy editing. But I know there’s a big difference between revising a story I love and revising one I’m just fond of.

Perhaps this is obvious but to me the most important factor in ensuring successful revising is to be working on a piece that has legs or emotional resonance for you. If not, you’ll probably give up long before it’s in the best shape possible.

So what’s the key to knowing if it’s love or just infatuation? I once listed all of the stories, screenplays and plays I’d written—over 30—and looked at the themes, characters and plot, and I was able to see certain patterns. Not surprisingly, whenever I loved a story and its themes and characters, I ended up revising it enough that it was perfect—or as perfect as I could make it. And that story usually resonated with others.

 

2) Start from the beginning but don’t get stuck there.

We all know the first pages of a story or novel are critical, have to be sharp, enticing, fresh—generally amazing. These are the pages when a reader (agent, editor or final reader if you get that far) says either “Yes! I’m in” or the dreaded, “Ah, maybe not.”

Because the stakes are so high it can be tempting to stay on those first pages to the point of forgetting about the rest of the piece. Revising can become a sort of trap in which you start to judge the material so much that you never finish. It’s important to know when to move on so that you can get to the end and have a completed piece to revise.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Writer’s Digest.