Drafting and Editing from Artwork to Writing

Happy Labor Day! ♥
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In the first draft of a wip, I write quickly. I don't focus on details, but I give a general idea of what I want to get across. Emotion is at its most basic. Stage direction is kept to a minimum. Setting is bare bones, and the dialogue is often stilted and unnatural. As long as I get down a general sense of setting and what needs to happen both internally and externally to move the story along then that's all I need for the time being.

Just like in writing, when I draft a new art piece, I start messy. Quick, unrefined lines. Basic outline. Overall flow. No real idea yet of a background, but an idea of my light source and what I want to convey.

I am going to let you guys see a tiny snippet of the first draft of my wip to demonstrate. Be warned, it's pretty awful lol.

First drafts:

Writing:
He grinned and gestured with his head for me to follow him. We headed down the river, along the opposite bank across the docks. The Labyrinth loomed behind us as the river snaked north and the continued east towards the old freight yard. Like the Labyrinth, the residents here lived in boxcars, but they were place in rows, one level only, and with enough space between them to provide an illusion of property. It wasn't much, but Avan had beamed the day he told me he'd moved out of the apartment above his dad's shop.

Terrible descriptions. Typos. Flat. Blegh.

Art:


Messy. Rough lines. Basic idea.

On my second draft, I'll typically rewrite the sentences, this time choosing my words more carefully. I'll flesh out the descriptions to paint the image of the scene I initially had in my head.

In art, likewise the first I do is redraw the lines. Clean lines this time. Then I begin to block in color and work in large details at first before narrowing down on the finer ones.

Second drafts:

Writing:
He grinned and, once we reached the other side of the river, gestured with his chin for me to follow. We walked along the bank, the waning light turning the river to ink. We kept above the sinking mud and the stripped trees that stood like pale corpses in the gloom. The Labyrinth loomed behind us like a black shroud across the sky as the river turned north, and we continued east towards the freight yard. Like the Labyrinth, the residents there lived in boxcars, but they stood in neat rows, one level only, and with enough space between each to provide the illusion of personal property. It wasn't much, but the happiest I'd ever seen Avan was the day he moved out of the apartment above his dad's shop.

Better, but now it feels too wordy. I will have to refine in my next draft and be even pickier about my word choices.

Art:


Clean lines. Color and light source are laid out.

With each pass, I refine and refine. Add details. Take details away. Make sure the whole picture/scene blends together.

Keep going until you're done!

FINAL:

Of course, my wip isn't complete yet so I don't have a final scene to show you =P But you guys get the idea ♥

Any of you willing to share a paragraph of a first draft and then compare it with a recent version? *bats eyelashes*

Have an awesome week, guys! ♥

On Description and Senses and Distancing Point of View

I love writing that evokes all five senses. But one of two things usually happen in rough drafts:

1. Writing feels too heavy--too many descriptions and observations slow down the pace.
2. Writing uses language that distances the reader and results in the opposite desired effect.

I am particularly guilty of the first one. Fortunately, fixing it is easy.

Just cut words. Sentences. Entire paragraphs if you must. It's great when a characters sees and hears and smells new surroundings, but these details must hit hard and fast, and then retreat to let the action continue. If the description is either too long or only there to look pretty, delete it. It must serve a purpose.

My first few drafts of Soul had paragraphs of setting description because it was new to London, my MC. Several awesome critiques later, 90% of those descriptions were axed because they were only, I sheepishly admit, indulgent writing.

Fixing the second issue is also easy, although it requires a little bit of tweaking as well.

Distanced point of view happens any time you approach a description as sensed through the character: I saw, I heard, I smelled, I felt.

Remove and reword to make the reader feel more present:

I saw a temple at the top of the hill.
vs.
A temple sat on top of the hill.

I heard the church bells toll the hour.
vs.
The church bells tolled the hour.

I could smell the smoke.
vs.
Smoke burned my nostrils.

I felt the rough bark against my fingertips.
vs.
The rough bark scraped my fingertips.

You can see that, while the first sentence uses the 'sense' word (saw, heard, smell), the second feels more sensory.

Another way you distance your reader is when you include unnecessary thought tags.

Thought tags that distance point of view: wondered, thought, mused, realized, etc...

Dad probably wasn't home yet, I thought.
Mom must have left the car in the garage, she mused.
The cows were aliens, I realized.

Sometimes those phrases are necessary to understand what you want to get across so don't eliminate them all--just the ones you can reword to strengthen the manuscript. There is no right or wrong, really. When in doubt, use your best judgment!

Happy editing ♥

Editing - Easy Ways to Cut Word Count and Tighten Writing

If you're like me, you probably end up with a higher word count than is typical for your manuscript's genre. But before you start ripping out entire scenes to the soundtrack of a lonely violin, start with the basics. Simply by cutting adverbs and repeated words/phrases/descriptions, I was able to shave 3k words off my manuscript without even touching the scenes at large. Of course, THEN I addressed my plot as a whole and removed scenes I didn't think were necessary, but my word count was looking pretty good by then.

Easy ways to cut word count:

• adverbs - I'm not anti-adverbs. I quite like them. But, in excess, they tend to overpower the narrative. Less is more, and when you use them, make sure they're important to the prose and not just used to cover up lazy writing.

• crutch words - Most common I've come across are 'just,' '(a) little,' and 'sort/kind of.' These words and phrases can almost always be cut, and the sentence is usually stronger for it. If you're not sure what your crutch words are, have a beta reader evaluate for you, or read your work carefully and when you notice a word repeated even once or twice, use Word's highlight feature to find all repeated instances of it.

Click ctrl+f to open the Find and Replace box. Enter the word you want to search for and then select 'Reading Highlight > Highlight All.' It will then tell you how many times the word was highlighted and display in your document.

• extraneous words - typically words that are redundant and state the obvious

She sat down. or She stood up. - She's not going to sit up or stand down (and if she is, then she's doing something very different).

She touched his face with her hand. - It's a sure bet she's not touching his face with her feet.

She let her mouth curve into a smile. - Shortened to: She smiled. or, if you must, Her mouth curved into a smile.

She took a step back. - Shortened to: She stepped back.

His voice flutters around her, quick and elusive, impossible to track. - Repeating the same thing in a different way.

Now consider this example:

Original: Carl turned to look at his Aunt Sue who'd come to stand beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. She'd taken off the hat and now she stood in front of him, a small smile curving her mouth, gentle and warm but there was a tinge of sadness on her face, in the crinkles at the corners of her blue eyes.

Edited: His Aunt Sue came to stand beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. She'd taken off her hat. A small smile curved her mouth, but sadness lingered in the crinkles at the corners of her blue eyes.

The second version is much tighter, but still conveys everything the first version does.

Good luck editing! ♥

What Editing and the Man in the Iron Mask Have in Common

Yes, I'm talking about the 1998 film b/c I haven't read the book (I know, I'm such a pleb). No, it's not Leonardo DiCaprio.

"Wear it until you love it."
~Said by Louis to his brother Phillipe. He followed that up with 'And die in it.' But I think that might be taking the metaphor too far. AND I DON'T ENCOURAGE EDITING UNTIL YOU DIE OF IT, JUST SAYING.

When I began editing, it drove me nuts. The overwriting! The horrid dialogue! The minutiae! Of course, six months and a far better manuscript later, I began to realize I really liked this editing thing. Good thing because it took another four months of editing to reach where I'm at now. I wielded my mental red pen (b/c I edit on the computer and marking up the screen with red ink is only fun in theory) like an ice sculptor's chainsaw and hacked away the large, unusable bits. Then I picked up the chisel and worked on the finer details. Editing, I discovered, is fun!

"I wear the mask. It does not wear me."
~Said by Phillippe when he's rescued, yay!

Editing is something you can't avoid. Kind of like writing stories. Stuff you just have to do if you want to be an author. Unless you're Snooki. And yeah, sometimes it begins to feel like editing has transformed into this suffocating mask that hides you away from things like sunlight and your family and the shower.

Seriously though, editing is one of your greatest tools as a writer, but when you want to stop and put it down? Go ahead and put it down. Trust me, it's detachable (unlike Phillippe's mask).

Hope you guys had a great weekend. ♥ Stay safe!

On the dangers of complacency

Years ago, I started writing fanfiction partly as a fun way to keep writing when I was dry on ideas for original fiction and partly as a means of honing my craft. What I didn't know then is that writing fanfiction breeds complacency, and complacency is detrimental to an aspiring writer.

Instant Gratification vs. The Long and Winding Road

The thing about fanfiction is that it gives writers what the agonizingly long process of writing original-fiction-with-hope-to-publish doesn't: instant gratification. You whip up a story about ready-made characters fans of the canon (original source material) are already emotionally invested in, post it to a community like fanfiction.net, and BAM, an immediate audience ready to read and review. No need to wait on submission, publication, distribution, book reviews and advertising and publicity, all of which is a buttload of work and can take a minimum of a year or two to... infinitely longer.

Too Much of a Good Thing

But one of the greatest things about fandom is also the greatest cultivator of complacency--the fans. Don't get me wrong, I love a positive review. Who doesn't? Publishing is an extremely subjective business, but fandom and fanfiction is a million times more so because there are no gatekeepers and no quality control. I've seen countless fanfic writers post in their Author's Notes that they're open to concrit because they want to improve. But if a hundred people review a poorly written fanfic with glowing comments about how amazing it is, that writer who believed their writing needed improvement might begin to think otherwise.

Concrit Is Not a Personal Attack (when it's actually concrit)

The thing about being an aspiring writer is that you must be able to take constructive criticism. It's a part of growing a skin thick enough to take all the rejection that will inevitably pave the way to success. You have to take criticism and rejection. You have to want to improve, to strive, to never give up.

Learn to be Objective

I'm not saying you can't love your writing. It's perfectly healthy to write something and be protective of it because of the hours spent laboring over it and the love and effort poured into it. But it's important to also acknowledge that it could be improved, greatly even. I look at my writing and I know, without a doubt, that there's a lot I have to work on. I rely on my crit partners to be honest with me, because I have trouble pinpointing my weaknesses myself. It takes quite a bit of effort, typically, to alter your style, to make changes that you maybe aren't comfortable with, in an effort to improve. So change can oftentimes be slow, painstakingly so. But is it worth it? Heck yes.

Fandom Fame Does Not Equal Published Writer

An amazing thing about fandom is that it opens you to this community of writers and readers, all of whom share a love of the canon. I've met some of my most enduring and best friends there. But I've also seen a lot of aspiring writers never break free of fandom. They've built a loyal readership, they interact and befriend their fans, they become "famous" in their own little corner of the internet. And for those in it just for fun, then hey, I've got no complaints. But for the ones claiming to be aspiring writers, it's easy to fall under the spell of perceived internet fame and forget what you began writing for.

I spent five years writing fanfiction, and I'm still divided about it. On the one hand, writing fanfiction--and, more importantly, reading it by much better writers--genuinely, truly, without a doubt improved my writing beyond anything I learned in college. I will always be grateful for that and to the writers in fandom who are some of the best I have ever read, published or otherwise. They inspired me to keep improving, because I wanted to write like them. On the other hand, I completely put off original fiction until the last two years when I looked back at my time spent in fandom and thought, "I've wanted to be a published writer my whole life. What the hell have I been doing?"

Fanfiction doesn't apply to everyone, of course, but the dangers of complacency is very real for all aspiring writers and the message is universal.

Never stop striving to improve. Never give up. Write, write, write ♥