Still editing, as you can see–typing my comments in at this point. Apparently I didn’t much like this paragraph. I started to copyedit it, then circled it and wrote “UGH” over the text.

Indeed!

Review of Starcrossed at some point this weekend is coming, lovelies. Just wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten you.

I wasn’t going to do this post, because I feel a little stupid talking about editing. For one thing, even though this is the fifth book I’ve written, I really only feel like I’ve started to figure out how to actually edit effectively very recently. And because the process is new to me, I can’t be sure that I’m really doing it right. It also feels somehow presumptuous, talking about one’s editing process. I’m not sure that what works for me is likely to work for anyone else, and so please don’t even pretend that this is advice; really, it’s just rambling.

But Pat said he wanted to read a post on this. So Pat, this goes out to you.

A bit of history: of the five books I’ve drafted, I didn’t even bother so much as copy-editing the first two. They felt just too messy, too sprawling, too unfocused, too insurmountable. With these two books, I was really just figuring out what it meant to write a book and how to manage the actual process of writing. These were “practice books” in the truest sense of the phrase. And that’s okay.

I tried querying book 3, which I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2009. I knew this meant that the book needed to be strong, so I did a pretty thorough line editing and rewrote a few scenes.

Now, keep in mind that I know how to line edit. I’ve taught composition classes and have pretty extensive experience editing poetry, and most poetry can be fixed with some line editing and light reconceptualizing.

But a novel is not a poem. I didn’t realize that. Stupidly, because I rewrote a few scenes, I thought I was editing. I didn’t query this book terribly widely, and didn’t do very well in querying. I didn’t care too much about it–wasn’t emotionally engaged–and so, at the time, I never looked at it very closely to figure out what wasn’t working there.

(I took a look at it recently, and I could tell you exactly what was wrong with it: there were quite a few nice scenes, and the prose was good, but the plotting was scattered and unfocused, and the pacing very often wrong. But I’m not sure I would have realized that then.)

Now, I actually really liked book 4. I drafted it very cleanly. I repeated the line editing/minor scene reworking that I did on book 3. I sent it to betas with the (really stupid) message that I didn’t want to make any major changes. And I didn’t really understand why I didn’t have more success with it.

So what changed between this book and the last one? For one thing, I’m now a member of a critique group. They’ve been with me at every stage of the journey, looking at chapters, talking themes, helping me practice things like pitches and lending a hand at tightening my query. Through these interactions, I started looking at my book as a sort of collaborative work. Really, I have Interrobang Sean to thank for this. For such a young dude, he has a really healthy attitude towards feedback. He told me one day that he decided he would treat all critical feedback as potentially valid, because as nice as praise felt, it really does nothing to help one’s book. And he was in it for good books, not praise.

So I decided I’d give that a try. Rather than writing a book that was good enough to garner compliments, I decided to write the best possible book I could. I decided to excise my ego from the process. Before, when I edited, I often left sections in that I knew felt clunky or baggy, hoping that my prose was good enough that readers wouldn’t notice.

No such thing as “good enough” this round–but more on that later.

The second thing that really impacted my editing process was that I read this book, Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. Now keep in mind that I’m often somewhat skeptical of books about writing. They tend to be either indulgent and impractical (if sometimes entertaining; Stephen King’s On Writing is one of those), or they rely on the kind of preplanning of which I’m completely incapable. Essentially, anything that requires formulae (I’m looking at you, Blake Snyder), outlines, or notecards for prewriting has pretty much lost me as an audience, because I’m capricious and easily bored, and if I’m not working on the actual stuff of writing–you know, messing about in my actual manuscript–I’m likely to just never actually write at all.

But Kress’s book is different. She talks about fiction in a way that’s completely common-sensical, perceptive, and, above all, intuitive. She discusses the implicit promises a book makes, and the various ways to fulfill those promises. She talks about engaging the reader via credible prose at the outset and then discusses how to keep that reader engaged through rising tensions through the middle. She discusses the differences between literary and genre endings. Basically, she points out a bunch of stuff that’s so right that it seems like it should be intuitive, but isn’t.

She also suggests rewriting your beginning when you’re fairly well through writing the first draft of your book. When you’re drafting, she says, you can’t really know the implicit promises that your story is supposed to make. You figure it out in the writing–and then go back and fix the opening so that it fits (time travel; it’s the magic of revision! And no one ever has to know).

I decided to try her advice. Three quarters of my way through the book, I stopped, and rewrote the first ten thousand words or so. And holy shit, the beginning of my book was better. Not perfect, but it more clearly introduced the conflicts of the book, as well as the primary character tensions, right from the first page. It introduced theme and made all of those implicit promises that I hope the rest of my book ends up paying out on.

Now I’ve finished the draft and I’m editing. I’m doing something akin to Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Manuscript Revision, but just a little looser. I don’t have a notebook with my themes and sub-themes, character arcs or blurbs written down, but that’s mostly because, as I said above, I find that kind of exercise just really boring, but also because I figured all of that out with my critique group awhile ago (if you want a two-sentence statement of my main character’s primary conflict, just ask!).

I’ve already done one complete read-through at this point. I noticed early that my narrator’s voice lapses in spots, so I knew I’d be in for a pretty thorough edit on the line-level. I made a few decisions about scenes that needed to be moved, aspects of the timeline that needed altering, and plot lines that needed to be more clearly foreshadowed or better developed or resolved. I waited to hear back from a few betas, absorbed their thoughts on the book, and discussed the book with them, then ran these preliminary changes by them, as well. Comfortingly, we’ve all been pretty much on the same page.

So now I’m at the manuscript slog. I ordered a bound copy of my manuscript from Office Depot (because looseleaf is messy and inefficient) and I’m going through page-by-page and marking up every single change that I want to make. And I’m being brutal with myself–not settling for a single instance of “good enough.” I’m adding scenes back in (written on post-its) and chopping out big chunks of text and streamlining the language and making dialogue more naturalistic (one of my weak points in drafting). I’m going over every word and making sure it’s authentic for the narrator’s voice. Did you ever get a paper back from a teacher and find it just covered in red pen? I am that teacher. I am also that student. Every single page of my book looks like this:

And I’m not going to lie. It’s completely exhausting. I find I can only get through 20-30 pages of this a day before I have to go watch some television (we’ve been watching the X-files. I <3 Spooky Mulder). But it’s also exciting. I can feel how much better the book will be, almost palpably. I can’t wait to go type all of these changes in to see how awesome it will be.

But anyway, it’s 3 a.m. and I’m a tired Phoebe now. Uh, Pat, hope that answered your questions!

First thing’s first, Playthings of the Gods, that ebook anthology which includes my story “The Long Summer,” was released today! It’s available here, at Drollerie Press’s book store. If you buy a copy, do let me know what you think! In case you couldn’t tell, I love feedback!

Secondly, I stumbled across something I wanted to talk about with the blogging world today, something that felt appropriate for Typing Tuesdays. As work has been slow this month, I’ve been casually perusing freelancing sites, hoping to pick up a little editing or proofreading work. And today I found a job posting which flat out dismayed me.

It was from a formerly self-published writer, asking for help getting his novel published. But he didn’t want editing help. In fact, he specifically said (several times) that editing advice “would not endear” you to him. Instead, he wants someone to research agents and publishers, submit to them using personalized query letters, and then “get him published.” He said that marketing one’s own work is “icky” (a strange attitude for a self-published writer, but, uh, okay). And he specifically stated that he wants to pay someone with personal connections to agents or publishers to “put his work in the hands of the people who count.” He included a writing sample.

It was, of course, objectively awful.

I wish I could write to the guy and send him in the direction of Absolute Write or Preditors and Editors or one of the other multitude of sites out there that detail precisely what a writer needs to do to get his or her work published. But of course, step one is to be willing to take criticism. And this guy clearly isn’t.

In his job posting, the writer mentioned how he felt “weary” of submissions and query letters. I get him–really, I do. It’s absolutely exhausting. I sent out hundreds of submissions and queries last year, and don’t really have much to show for it.

But at the same time, I’ve been editing. Rewriting. Revising. Reading books on craft. Talking about plotting with my critique group. And I’ve grown–oh, how I’ve grown!

Last week, when all that buzz was going around about Amanda Hocking, successful self-published writer, I had a momentary lapse in patience. For a moment, I considered throwing one of my shelved novels up on Amazon under a pseudonym. I thought that maybe I could earn a few bucks from it.

So I opened up The Stone Sorter, a book I unsuccessfully queried just about a year ago, and began reading through it to see if it would be ready for that sort of thing. I remembered it being pretty good–clean, at least.

Uh.

Well, it wasn’t bad; I have enough pride in my writing to know that I’m not a bad writer. There were some charming bits. But it was poorly paced in places, and the world building was woefully underdeveloped and there were lapses in logic that I hand-waved away. Sure, I’ve read worse books, some even released by mainstream publishers (yes, Virginia, bad books do exist). But it’s not the kind of book I’d really want to go public with. I think I’ve written better–I think I’m writing better now.

In short, I can see why all those agents rejected it. And it’s not because they’re meanies, or they have it out for me. It’s not because I lacked personal connections.

It’s because my work could have used more work.

I’m glad to say I’ve grown since then. I hope I’ll continue growing, learning to pin down this elusive, bookish stuff. I hope the stuff I’m writing at fifty is better than the stuff I’ll write at thirty.

But this kind of growth doesn’t happen if you’re not humble. It doesn’t happen if you’re not willing to find people who will tell you the hard truths about your writing. You can’t just magically pay people to make your problems go away. And that’s a good thing, really. For the readers. And for yourself. The world doesn’t need bad books, ones that attain publication through shortcuts or tricks. It needs good books. Books that are the output of writers willing to work hard.

There are no shortcuts. At least none worth taking.

If you can’t tell, I’m pretty hung up on the editing thing these days. In fact, yesterday, I did three things: cleaned up cat pee (ew!), napped, and edited. It was a good day. Except for the cat pee thing, I guess.

But damn, I can’t help but feel like it makes me a boring blogger.

Oh well. You guys will just have to bear with me for a few more weeks. Gretchen McNeil has a post today on edit progressions. This made me curious about the progress on my own first page. Here’s the first page of the first draft of THE STONE SORTER, back when it had the wonderful title of sacredgrove.doc.

Chapter 1: In Which I Take a Journey

My mother dropped me off at the curb of Newark International Airport almost three hours before boarding. When I turned to her to ask her for some help with my bags, she kept chattering away on her cellphone, so I opened up the door and struggled to lift my rolling luggage from the trunk of her Toyota myself. Then I tilted my head, walked to the passenger’s side window, knocked on it with one knuckle. She held up a finger; I was supposed to wait.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out the glossy-paged brochure that I’d tucked into the front pocket. “Sacred Grove Academy,” it said on the cover in florid calligraphy. I ran my fingertip over the embossed print. I had already memorized the image there: the school building, huge like a fortress with a stonework facade, a lush green field, dotted with orange and brown trees, that rolled out from under it like a lumpy carpet. As I started to thumb through its pages—practically salivating over the images of sweater-clad students reading in the library, or sitting at the long banquet tables of the dining hall, laughing together—I heard my mother roll the window down.

“Do you have your ticket, Miranda?” she asked. I took the boarding pass out from the back pocket of my jeans, waved it at her.

“Good,” she said, and flashed a view of her very white, very straight teeth. My mother’s had a lot of dental work done. She doesn’t like people to know that, but I think it’s clear when she smiles. No one has teeth like that, not naturally.

I stuffed the brochure, and my ticket, back into my backpack. “Are you going to help me

Here is the novel’s current opening:

Prologue

The night we first tried the spell, I looked at myself in the scratched surface of my bedroom mirror. My hair was shining and straight. My eyes were dark and warm. My olive skin looked smooth between the red straps of my ceremonial garb. I tried to see myself as Mikhail might see me, as a powerful, beautiful diviner. As a stone sorter. I was the girl—no, the woman—who would help him save his mother. I was Randy.

But all I saw was regular old Miranda. Miranda, a nerdy neat freak, dressed in a ridiculous outfit, make-up smeared ludicrously across her face.

I knew then that it wouldn’t work. I knew this deeply and truly, as certainly as I knew the streets of my hometown or the way my father liked his coffee (black and sweet). We wouldn’t be saving Mikhail’s mother that night, or maybe any night. But I couldn’t go to him and tell him that—I was in too deep already; he would never be convinced; he would never forgive me if I refused to help him, if refused to at least try. We’d already shared so much—kisses, warm, and wet, and lingering, soft strains of his music in his bedroom late at night. I couldn’t let him down, not after everything we’d been through.

So I sighed, turned away from the mirror, and went to Annie’s room. What choice did I have?

So as you can see, it’s not the same at all. In fact, the airport bit now opens chapter four. And what’s left of it is much more smoothly written: I was writing this fresh off a draft with a very rough-hewn, uneducated narrator, and that comes through in Miranda’s voice in the early versions of early chapters. It’s also frankly shorter. There’s no awkward shuffling of brochures and the luggage issue is settled in a sentence. Thank goodness.

And I got rid of my cheesy chapter headings. Thank goodness for that, too–what a terrible idea that was; though it worked to boost my NaNoWriMo wordcount, by the end of the first-draft MS, I have chapter headings like “Chapter 9: In Which There Are Issues” and “Chapter 10: Denoument, In Which the Author Wishes She Hadn’t Inserted Subject Headings to Inflate her Wordcount.”

What do you guys think? Better?