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How to revise a novel, according to my commenters.

So, I hear (via the  #AWP12 hashtag on Twitter) that last night, Margaret Atwood brought the house down at AWP with her keynote speech.

I cried a little on the inside when I read those tweets, because I love Margaret Atwood and I’m sad that this was her year to be at AWP and my year to not go. But as I said a few days ago, just because some of us writers aren’t in Chicago doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have some knowledge dropped on us.

Earlier this week, I blogged about my fear of revising a novel and issued a plea for help. And, as always, my fellow writers came through in the clutch with all manner of advice.

Here, in no particular order, is the revision advice that I received this week. It’s enough to make a girl want to get revising right away:

“I go over my text a few times, says SickBoyMcCoy, writer of the online serial Bad Blood Bandits. “The first is just to enjoy it. If I can’t do that due to grammatical or spelling or just structure then it warrants change. The second time I go over it and look for ways to push what I have just a little further. The third time I try to detach myself from what I have written and try and think of the most radically different ways I could have told the story and if none of them outshine what I’ve done it stays. It’s enough to drive someone to drink.”

HannahKarena (whose blog is sadly no longer available for me to link to) recommended a technique she read about in No Plot? No Problem! a craft book written by Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWrioMo, (For the uninitiated, that’s National Novel Writing Month):
“I’m about to start revising my own novel this weekend–I’ve been putting it off for weeks because I’ve never done it before–but I’m going to try the index card organization of scenes method that everyone is raving about .”

E.S. Cameron recently wrote that she’s addicted to revision. Here’s her advice:

“I haven’t yet finished a first novel draft, so I haven’t yet revised one – but it seems to me that how you revise depends on where you are in the process. Start from the top and work down, from macro to micro. This is how I would approach it:

MACRO: The first thing I would look at is the story/plot, and fix any gaping holes/problems. Then I would look at form/structure: is this the best way to tell my story? If the answer is no, I would start moving things around until it worked.

IN BETWEEN: From here, I would look at elements like place/detail, character development, dialogue, etc. to make sure that I’m hitting all my targets in these areas. This step would probably involve adding a fair amount of text.

MICRO: Then I would go though chapter by chapter and start cutting mercilessly – any sentence/scene not carrying its weight would have to go. Finally, I would start doing line by line revisions, looking at my specific word choices and sentence structure, making sure that every sentence does what I need it to. (I feel strongly that people underestimate the importance of sentence structure.) This last step I would repeat as necessary.”

Matthew Dicks, author of Something Missing and Unexpectedly, Milo tweeted this advice: “Read aloud. Remind yourself that this is just the first of many revisions. Try not to hate yourself when it sounds like dirt.”

UPDATE: Whoops! Matt Dicks has also penned another book, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend. It was released this week in other countries, but as with all delicacies (seasons of Sherlock, fashions from Europe, etc.) we will have to wait months (it releases in August) before we can get our hands on it in the U.S. European and down-under folks, go find this book! Read it, review it and don’t include spoilers!

Alena Dillon of The Time is Write has revised four full-length manuscripts. Here’s her process:

“When I’m done with my first draft, I print the whole thing out. I too am an underwriter (you mentioned that you are in a blog a few days ago), but most times I have a feeling where I’ve gipped my manuscript. For instance, if I think a theme or a character may be lacking, I’ll flip through the manuscript and highlight whenever it/he/she appears so that I can visually see its/his/her arc. Each theme or character would get its own color: green for mother, pink for loss, etc. I like to see physical presence as vividly as possible, and when I get a sense of that, then I read through and mark where I could write more (or, rarely, less), and what I could write–but I don’t actually do the writing until later. Revision takes a lot of courage and momentum, so I don’t interrupt that if I can avoid it.

If I don’t have a sense of what is needed, I’ll read a craft book, keeping my particular manuscript in mind as I read. For the novel, I read Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyons and took notes of what came to mind that my novel might need done. Then I placed those notes beside me as I read through the manuscript AND MARKED THE HELL OUT OF IT. The more cross outs, stars, arrows to the back page with a list of what is needed, the better.”

After reading all this good advice, I remembered that I myself am not completely without revision resources. One of my mentors once told me to put work away for a month, then to read the whole thing in one day as if I were reading someone else’s work. Also, Rick Moody visited my MFA program to give a lecture on revision. His lecture, I remember, was so exciting that I couldn’t wait to get out of there and revise something.  I didn’t have anything to revise at the time, but I still have the notes from the lecture. I plan to re-read the notes from his lecture, re-read this blog post and get crackin’.

Maybe E.S. Cameron is right; maybe a writer can get addicted to revision.

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Almost like being interviewed by the Paris Review.

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I want to share something extraordinary with you. Yes, it’s another interview, and no, I don’t think it’s extraordinary because it’s an interview with me. It’s extraordinary because of the sheer amount of effort the interviewer put into the piece.

This is an interview with writer Robert McGuire. Robert is a CT-based writer and a member of one of my writers’ groups. He is one of the most thoughtful and disciplined writers I have ever met. His blog Working on A Novel, is based on Journal of a Novel, the diary of John Steinbeck kept while he was working on East of Eden. According to Robert, that journal contained Steinbeck’s daily musings about technical problems in his draft, personal family dramas that were affecting his writing and his daily page count.” Robert, who is working on his own epic American novel, does the same on his blog.

His posts are a must-read for people who are writing novels, or who are interested to what the process of a very disciplined and thorough artist looks like.

This interview was no less thorough. It took a week a do over email, and the questions made me rethink my writing process. It is also the closest I may ever come to being the subject of a Paris Review interview. Interestingly enough, Steinbeck was scheduled for a Paris Review interview himself. He was too sick to do the interview, as it came late in his life, so his interview in the Paris Review interview archives is taken, partially, from his letters in Journal of a Novel.

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Imaginary interviews are fun; real interviews are much better.

There is a scene in The Commitments in which the main character is doing an interview with an invisible journalist while he’s in the bathtub.It is one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema because I’ve been doing interviews like these since early childhood.

http://youtu.be/41L0uedGlf8

Mine usually went like this:

“Q: A.J., tell me honestly; were you prepared for this Pulitzer win?”

A: Oh, certainly, I was. I promised my mom I would put Oakville, Conn. on the map, so I had to win the Pulitzer, or at least the Nobel prize.

Q: But Oakville is already on the map. Look, there it is, next to Waterbury.

A: (awkward silence.)”

That question didn’t come up when Brooke of Books Distilled sent me her interview questions last week, but many other questions that I’ve always wanted to answer did come up. I had kind of a blast answering these questions for real. Check it out.

Will it keep me from doing more fake interviews in the bathtub, or while I’m vacuuming, or while I’m weeding the garden or driving to work? Oh, hell no. I still have to win the Pulitzer.

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This review is the best kind of peer review.

If the analytics on this blog are correct, no one visits the blogosphere on the weekend, because they’re out in the world, experiencing real life.

That’s as it should be, but I’m posting on a Saturday night anyhow, because I just got a wonderful reader review for Beware the Hawk, and I have to share.

In the interest of full disclosure, the reviewer (one Ms. Tamela Ritter) is a good friend, a former roommate, and the member of the writing group that helped me refine the first draft of Beware the Hawk, way back in 2003 and 2004.

I can hear the critics groaning now:”Why are you even excited about this? Sure she gave you a good review. She gave you feedback on the first draft. She practically helped you write the damn thing, didn’t she? And then she lived with you, so of course she has nothing bad to say about you.”

First of all, let’s address the roommate thing: Do a survey of my past roommates and you’ll find that to live with me is not to love me. I can think of at least three people who heaved sighs of relief once my stuff (and cat) were moved out of their apartments/dorm rooms.

Second of all, I’m excited about this because I have so much respect for Ritter’s own fiction. Her style is effortless, yet epic. There’s this beautiful nostalgic feeling about America – both the land and the people – in her work. The open road, traveling,  and a search for self are huge themes in her work. Her prose is poignant, but accessable. Soon it will be accessible to everyone; her novel, (I believe it’s titled From the Ashes, although that might have changed) will be released  later this year.

That’s why I’m excited that she reviewed Beware the Hawk so favorably; Ritter is one of my favorite authors.

Wikipedia defines Peer Review as “a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field.” Ritter is certainly that.

This is the best kind of peer review.

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Erin of Reinventing Erin interviews me.

Today represents Day Two of my blog-tour sojourn over at Reinventing Erin. Yesterday, I guest posted about the fears I had when the e-book was published, and today Erin’s been kind enough to interview me about my novella Beware the Hawk.

Who is Erin, you ask? Erin is a classmate of mine from the Fairfield University MFA program who is a long-time blogger. She’s a non-fiction writer, but she talked to me even though I was one of the unruly fiction types.

Check out her site. You’ll be happy you did.

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After a brief hiatus, the blog tour for my novella continues.

The Beware the Hawk blog tour continues today over at Reinventing Erin.

It’s been a few weeks since I had a guest post, but now it’s time for Round Two!

The delightful Erin Corriveau invited me return to her Defining Moments series with a guest post. I’ve already guested on this series (I posted about having two names) and it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, so I was pleased when she asked me back. My defining moment this time? The moment my book went up for sale on Amazon last month.

I decided to use the guest post to talk about some of my insecurities, because although the publication experience was amazing and positive, I still found that I was battling my fears on the day my book came out. That’s not what I expected to happen; publishing a book was to me as getting married is to a Disney princess.

You know, I publish a book, live happily ever after, and  nothing bad ever happens to me again. Except that’s a silly expectation.

So head on over to Reinventing Erin today and check it out. Also, tomorrow, she’s posting an interview we did about the book, so come back tomorrow and take a gander at that, too!

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A little accountability please: New Year’s resolutions, month one.

It was not my intention to post this evening. I had instead planned to kick up my heels at the casino, but I’m killing off the remainder of the cold that was bugging me at the beginning of the week, so I’m home, hanging with Phyllis. I was berating myself for for not updating my blog enough when I realized that whoops, it’s the fourth of February, and I completely forgot to check in with my progress on my New Years goals.

Now’s as good a time as any. It’s that, or watch The Hunt for Gollum again, and I don’t know if I can stand to watch fake-Aragorn whisper any more lines while he stares moodily into the camera. Here we go:

Finish the second draft of my novel by April. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to make the April deadline, but I’m sure as hell going to try. I have my copies of my first draft, and they’ve been given out to one of my writing groups. I also have my office mostly prepped for the writing/revision marathon that’s about to begin. All I need is to spend a day reading through my own first draft.

Get it sent to agents before summer. That will depend on how the revisions go.

Send out at least three short stories. I have sent out exactly no short stories, but I have workshopped one, and I plan to re-tool it and submit it to my next writing group. Then it’s getting sent right out.

Read one novel a month in 2012. I’ve read two since January 1: The Fellowship of the Ring and a novella, Jack the Theorist. So that’s one and a half. I’m finishing The Two Towers right now, and then I’m taking a Tolkien break to read Carry-On, a novel by Chris Belden, an MFA colleague of mine.

Make at least $20 off a piece of fiction. I may have done this already. My book Beware the Hawk was released last month, and I know some people purchased it, but I won’t see a royalty check for a while, so I have no idea if I’ve made $20 or not. Right now, it’s enough to know that I’ve made even one cent off my creative work. Until now, I’ve been paid in writing credits, contributors’ copies and warm fuzzy feelings.

I also set myself to work on two of my big conflicts, which I will write about in detail at the end of the year.

The conflicts were my feelings about my faith and my issues with anxiety. I did a little bit of brainstorming about the faith issue, but I was forced to begin work on the anxiety issue after a panic attack in January. Right now I’m sporadically reading a good book about dealing with anxiety in a conscious way, called The Mindful Way through Anxiety, but I still have a lot of work to do, if I’m going to be ready to write an essay at the end of the year.

So that’s that. Stay tuned for more Beware the Hawk-related posts soon. I have a guest post interview coming up in the next week, and I’m hopefully going to have more blog tour dates to announce soon!


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Return to real life, and my novel.

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Wow, last week’s release for Beware the Hawk was crazy in a I-tricked-myself-into-thinking-I’m-a-celebrity kind of way.

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This is what my novel looked like when I was working on it last year.

I received emails  and messages and comments from all sorts of people about my book, I mailed out signed Post-Its to people who wanted “signed” copies of the e-book, I hosted a giveaway and did the first four dates of my book tour, including a review. In short, I felt like a proper author. My family even threw me a little celebration with flowers and an ice cream cake. I would love to have been in Carvel when my mom handed the clerk the pink cake and asked her to please write “Beware the Hawk” on it in icing.

Then this week started and I came crashing back to Earth, where Real Life was waiting for me with its arms crossed and an unamused look on its face. I’m teaching my first week of spring classes, there are deadlines for my newspaper, and most importantly, it’s time to get cracking on revisions to my novel.

Oh dear. The novel. I haven’t posted about my novel in a long time, mostly because I’ve been dragging my feet.

It’s nothing like Beware the Hawk. It’s a literary fiction piece that currently clocks in at 272 pages, and that’s only the first draft. I’ll be honest. I’ve been avoiding it, submitting it piece-meal to my writing groups and wincing at the critiques. I have all of those comments and critiques in neatly labeled manila envelopes in my office upstairs.

I did sit down a few times this past fall and attempt to start a second draft. I also did some research, but for some reason,the task of actually revising the novel has seemed intimidating. There is so much feedback and I don’t know where to start.

But one of my 2012 goals is getting the novel revised by April. It’s ambitious, but I need I fire lit under me and I’d like to stop worrying about  my project and start working on it. One of my writers’ groups gave me an opportunity to get moving on the revisions in January when they suggested that I give them the entire first draft to read.

I think I might have broken out into a cold sweat when one of the people in the group said “Maybe it’s time for us to see the whole thing,” but it is a good idea, because I need to read it – from front to back – as well. I’ve only really read it in pieces, partly because I can’t read it without getting bogged down in a scene I think needs fixing, and partly because I’m afraid I will read it and decide that the whole thing is terrible and can’t be fixed and I’ve wasted a year of my life on it.

I know that last fear is adolescent, melodramatic and irrational (I graduated  from my MFA program with this book as my thesis, so it can’t be that bad) but that’s what I think every time I open the file to start revisions.

So I’m not opening a file this time. This morning I ordered five printed copies of the draft from Lulu. Three are for my writing group. One is a spare. Most importantly, one is for me. When it comes in the mail, I will sit down and read the whole thing from cover to cover. And then, I’m willing to bet, I will no longer be afraid to revise.

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Day three of the blog tour and my first review ever.

Day three of the blog tour takes us back to Wordvagabond, where I got my very first book review from the proprietess, Ally. I’m not gonna lie – I’ve been nervous about this aspect of the blog tour – knowing that your work is going to be reviewed is an exciting and scary feeling. It’s a little like having stage fright, except you’re home, on your couch, not on a stage you can flee, and the audience isn’t in front of you, it’s scattered all over the place. This review, however, gives me courage to face future reviews. Check it out.

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Spy week and day two of the blog tour at the Book Den.

The book release so far has been a thundering success. I have gotten so many kind comments, people telling me that they’ve bought the book, people sharing information about my book and folks requesting signed Post-Its. (I’m still doing that, folks! Send me your addresses and I will mail you a signed Post-It. Because that’s how I sign an e-book, and because I love you.) Also, my publisher has declared the entire effort to be a  (Facebook) event – Spy Week. That’s pretty awesome.

So, what’s up next for Spy Week? Well, the book tour continues with a guest post over at the Book Den, a book site that features many dark and interesting books. (Seriously, I’m sharing space with at least five books about zombies. That’s pretty cool.) My post is about the value of authors revisiting old work. Check it out and then stick around to check out the rest of the site. Just watch out for the zombies. They might getcha.

 

 

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