Tag: novel editing

Dysfunction Takes a Holiday

On August 30, 2019

For as long as I can remember, I have had a big imagination. I can’t think of a time in my life where I wasn’t playacting in some form or another. Sometimes it was Barbies with my sisters, sometimes it was movie reels in my head, sometimes it was me in front of my bedroom mirror. As an adult, it comes in the form of ‘what-if’ scenarios that play out as I clean or drive or, most often, walk the dogs.

The result of this big imagination is that I have a pile of story ideas jostling for attention.

My first story, posted on Channillo in mid-November of 2018 and in a Halloween anthology called Chills Down Your Spine, gave me the confidence to keep writing. After that, I wrote a few other slightly bizarre short stories and started three serials. One of them, The Path of Least Dysfunction, has been shared on this website weekly since it started in January 2019 and I have been so tickled by the responses I’ve received. A couple readers even picked teams, using #TeamJamie and #TeamChris on Twitter. Talk about an ego boost.

That’s why it’s bittersweet for me to say that Chapter 35, which went live on Channillo August 26 and will post here on September 11, is the last chapter of The Path of Least Dysfunction. At least for a while.

I haven’t stopped loving the story or the characters and I certainly adore the people who have been keeping up with it all along. But my attention was fractured and everything I am working on was suffering for it. At the beginning of the summer I sent my first completed novel, I’ll Call You Mine, for editing and haven’t touched it since I got notes back. There are three partial stories that I would still like to finish. November is fast approaching and I have yet another project I want to write for this year’s NaNoWriMo.

The inside of my head is a wild and crazy place and is getting a bit crowded.

For the next month I will be editing I’ll Call You Mine and working on only that. The last thing I want to happen is to leave readers hanging or give them boring stories and sub-par writing. This latest chapter gave me a place I could pause for a while without leaving a cliffhanger. I have loved writing about Alexis and Jamie and their crooked path to wedded bliss. At the beginning of the year I hope to continue their story. After all, they have a lot more story to tell.

Thank you so much for following along! I will continue to write and to post character bios, random thoughts, and story snippets.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below and stay tuned!

novel editing, manuscript editing, query writing

Behind the Scenes: Editing Week 7

By Sharon Clark

On February 22, 2019

In Stories & Excerpts

Since this is my first foray into editing my own novel I really had no idea how challenging it would be. I’m still plugging along, but it’s not the blazing trail of triumph I had been hoping for.

One good thing – I don’t hate my story.

I did when I first started, but now I feel a bit more hopeful. At the beginning I was staring down 163,000 words. Well, after seven weeks I am thrilled to tell you that I have pared it down to 147,000. Yikes.

An upcoming workshop I’ll be attending offers professional query letter or partial manuscript critiques, as well as face-to-face pitch options with a variety of agents in attendance. While there will be one agent there that I think would be a good fit for me, I am miles away from being ready for that. Instead, I chose to have both the first ten pages of my manuscript and a query letter critiqued.

That’s some scary stuff.

Preparing the ten pages was, honestly, pretty fun. I rewrote the entire first scene, adding in some dialogue to show what a jerk one of the central characters is. When I shared the new lines with my husband he was sufficiently offended by the passive-aggressive insults, so I think I got my point across.

However, it took me a good three days to write the query letter. Condensing a full novel into roughly 300 words designed to pique the agent’s interest enough to want to read the whole story is HARD. I almost gave up several times, but I had already plunked down some money for this service.

Plus, writing is something I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember.

Editing has turned out to be more enjoyable than I was expecting. I thought that I would either sob more frequently or chuck the whole thing in a fire long before now. My goal is to finish up around 100,000 words total – fewer, if possible. There are some scenes that I know are unnecessary and should simply be deleted and there are others that can be rewritten much more efficiently. The trick is determining which is which.

I know this is my own story but I can’t wait to see the finished product! The plan is to have it ready to query by the beginning of summer. Then I need to start editing my NaNoWriMo novel from last fall and have THAT ready to query before November.

And then I’ll start the process all over again.

How do you keep yourself accountable to your editing timetable? What has been the most challenging aspect of editing? I’d love to hear from you – comment below!

Behind The Scenes: Editing Week 1

By Sharon Clark

On January 9, 2019

In Messages From Sharon

Every author I have spoken with decries editing as the worst part of writing a novel. They pour their blood, sweat, and tears into writing for weeks (NaNoers) or months (normal people), creating stunning images and weaving fantastical tales with their words. Then they are asked to take this beautiful thing they love and ruthlessly slash and burn until it’s barely recognizable.

Yep. That’s where I am right now.

This is my first time editing a novel. I wrote one years ago, I got feedback on it, then promptly put it on a literal shelf and haven’t looked at it again. The daunting task at hand is to pare down my monstrous 163,000-word giant baby into an entertaining and coherent story. I started editing earlier this week and I have to admit it’s slow going.

I’ve edited 10% so far and am 0% confident that I’ve made it better.

In an attempt to be impartial during editing, I haven’t looked at this project since July or August. This story has been simmering out of sight since then. I wrote another novel in the intervening months (Okay, practically wrote another novel…) but I think I’m still too close to this one and am struggling to edit it objectively.

These are my words and I love them all dearly.

And boy howdy, do I LOVE my words! I pack words into a sentence like I’m padding a fragile item for shipment on a jackhammer. Apparently I find it necessary to describe every single movement from action to action – saying, turning, walking, looking – and I blame my third grade teacher, Mr. Holman, and his “peanut butter and jelly sandwich instructions” exercise. *More information available on request.

And those pesky adverbs, so reviled by Stephen King and many other writers, seem to have multiplied while I wasn’t looking! That makes it marginally easier to make cuts. I’ve had to re-write some clumsy scenes and I’ve deleted others entirely, so maybe I’m not fully in love with ALL the words. Thus far I haven’t chucked my computer out of the window, burst into tears, or curled up into a ball in the corner. Maybe that ambitious end-of-January deadline could happen!

Now, if I could only find my focus…

What editing techniques do you find most helpful? How many rounds of edits do you go through before handing your work off to beta readers? Drop your advice, suggestions, and discussion points below!