Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Last Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, I took a trip to the North Carolina mountains with my father. My sister and her husband were in Blowing Rock part of the time, too.

Taking trips without the kids isn’t something I get to do very often, but it’s fun when I do. I definitely miss the children, but it’s nice to pull away for a little while and not have to consider eating at restaurants that have chicken tenders and French fries on their menus.

Daddy is an English professor and was on spring break. He was excited to have time to read a couple of books he’d gotten for Christmas and his birthday. I was able to do a lot of revision work while he read—and I was even able to take some great pictures—including this rainbow we saw out the back of the cabin.

Doing something out of the ordinary is a great way to recharge your batteries. I have to admit that my batteries needed some recharging. I have one book for one series at the publisher waiting to hear what they think, a book for the other series I’m doing a final proof on before its July release, and a book I’m turning in on April 5. Sometimes it felt like all I was doing was searching and destroying my own mistakes—these novels were all either recently revised or currently being revised.

My head felt really clear in Blowing Rock and I don’t think it was only due to the mountain air. I could see some fresh approaches to my book and I think it had a lot to do with being in a different place and doing different things.

It’s easy for me to get in a rut. I’m a pretty quiet person and I frequently do the same things day in and day out. But occasionally I change things up a little and it always seems to help me out.

These are some (really minor) things I’ve done to shake up my routine sometimes (you can see how conservative I am with changes in my routine!) :) —

• Abruptly driven down a road I’ve never driven down before.
• Read a genre or subgenre that’s completely different than something I’d ordinarily read.
• Listen to different music (I listen to just about every type of music, so to be different I’ll try listening to the stuff my son does. Hmm…it’s different, all right…)
• Go to different library branches to write (Okay, y’all are laughing at me now. But this is a big change in routine for me!)
• Try some different activities—I’ve been gardening lately, which has been impossible due to the cold, rainy weather. Now with temps in the 70s, I’m able to get outside—and even write outside after I’ve done my yard work.

How about everyone else? How do you shake up your routine and get out of your ruts? Does it seem to help with your writing?

I’d like to welcome L. Diane Wolfe to the blog today. As a professional speaker, Diane travels extensively for media interviews and speaking engagements, maintains a dozen websites & blogs, manages an online writer’s group, and contributes to several other sites. In addition, she’s the author of a YA series, Circle of Friends, and her 5th and final book of the series, The Circle Of Friends, Book V…Heather released March 16th. More information about Heather is at the bottom of the post. Thanks Diane!

Elizabeth invited me to share some tips on editing. Call me weird, but I love this phase! I enjoy revising my work, improving the writing and tightening the scenes and dialogue.

Editing comes with an added bonus – it can re-inspire! If we’ve grown weary or find we are stuck, rereading can ignite our passion once again.

Every time we pass through our manuscript, we’ll discover something that requires improving, changing, or fixing. Allowing our work to sit for a week or two helps us attack it fresh as well. We don’t want to start running circles around our work, but we can’t skimp on this process, either.

What do we need to look for when editing?

· Grammar – Is grammar usage correct? Is the punctuation in the right place and capitalization proper?

· Overused terms – Are there words or phrases we use too often? Do we repeat words in a paragraph? Do we find clichés? What can we fix by consulting a Thesaurus?

· Excessive description – Are we following the adage “show don’t tell?” Are there scenes best left to the reader’s imagination? Do we describe scenes or people that have no relevance to the story? Do we provide details a character wouldn’t notice depending on gender?

· Continuity – Do colors, names, and places vary from one scene to another? Are there glitches in the timeline?

· Staying in character – Is behavior consistent? Is dialogue consistent? Are there changes in personality for no apparent reason? Do characters respond in a manner that’s gender appropriate?

· Point of view – Is our POV consistent? Do we suddenly take on the roll of narrator? Do we head hop too often or too fast? Do we reveal things outside of a character’s POV?

· Story flow and pacing – Do scenes feel rushed or overlong? Does the story move quickly in the beginning and then drag in the middle? Does anything feel forced or contrived?

What can we do to improve our editing technique?

· Read large chunks at a time. Sometimes it’s difficult to gauge flow when we only read a page or two. Uneven lulls in the story become more apparent when we follow a scene from beginning to end. Continuity mistakes are easier to spot as well.

· Read aloud. Uneven dialogue is easier to spot when we hear the words spoken. We catch stilted, unnatural exchanges. Reading with a partner of the opposite sex exposes improper gender words and phrases. Flow of story and narration also benefit when we read aloud.

· Employ a test reader. We are close to our material and sometimes miss the obvious. A neutral test reader often spots flaws and mistakes we may have missed. We know the story by heart, but a test reader can’t read between the lines and will question items and passages that don’t make sense.

We are not the ultimate editor of our work. A professional is still required before submitting or self-publishing. However, we can improve our story and present our best effort if we learn to master the basics of editing. And growing as a writing is what it’s all about!

– L. Diane Wolfe, Professional Speaker & Author www.spunkonastick.net www.thecircleoffriends.net www.circleoffriendsbooks.blogspot.com

***********************************

THE CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

BOOK V … HEATHER

BY L. DIANE WOLFE

When confidence turns to frustration…

A new beginning awaits Heather Jennings. The position at Clemson means she will finally realize her dream of coaching basketball. Heather is ready to focus on her duties, using sheer force if necessary to prove her independence.

Sadly, her triumph is hampered as her father and greatest advocate lies dying of cancer. Battling her grief, she must also deal with a sister who appears incapable of responsibility or achievement. And once basketball season begins, a talented but cocky player who resembles her in every manner challenges all that remains of Heather’s patience.

Heather’s life changes when she encounters a man capable of handling her bold and feisty attitude. Straightforward and smug, he entices her to date him, and despite his gruff nature shows a great capacity for compassion. However, the last thing Heather needs is a serious relationship with a man equally fixated on work and opposed to marriage…

Release date: March 16, 2010, Dancing Lemur Press, L.L.C.
$19.95 USA, 6×9 Trade paperback, 282 pages, Fiction/YA
ISBN 978-0-9816210-5-0 / 0-9816210-5-8

“Heather deals with real life and real situations.” 5 Stars

– Teens Read Too

“Curl up onto your favorite reading spot and journey along with Heather as she seeks the balance of family and work relationships. Be prepared to be pulled into Heather’s world and you will find yourself cheering her on and wanting to scold her at the same time. L. Diane Wolfe has created amazing characters with believable attributes and flaws; making Book V in the Circle of Friends series a true gem.”

Book Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn7tSWQqdYc

I thought I’d do a short post on chapter breaks today—because I’m currently going through my manuscript and sticking them in, so they’re on my brain!

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I write the text straight through and then put the chapter breaks in later. Although this isn’t a technique that works for everybody, it helps keep me from worrying about the formatting of the novel until I’m done being creative.

My books are about 75,000 words, so roughly 230 pages in a regular font like Times or Calibri. I do convert the text to Courier (where it’s more like 285-290 pages) and times the pages by 250 to get a better estimate of my word count…my books have a lot of dialogue and white space on the page.

This text, for me, usually ends up being nineteen or twenty chapters. I also use scene breaks within chapters to break up the material within the chapter. I like having good stopping points in books as a reader (I’m a distracted reader), so I try to put them in my books, too.

I don’t always end the chapter at an exciting moment because that seems a little gimmicky to me. But I do have cliffhanging chapter endings probably 3-4 times out of the 20. I also try to end chapters at points where readers want to read on instead of putting the book down—points where they want to see what happens next. And I try never to end a chapter with something boring happening or else the reader might not ever return to the book.

The length of my chapters varies. I do have usually one or two pretty short chapters and then a couple of chapters that are a lot longer—where maybe there wasn’t a great stopping place in the chapter. I try to break where it makes sense. And I make sure no chapters are excessively long—I’m a reader who likes knowing where the next intermission is, and I don’t want it too far off.

Have you got a chapter breaking method?

Please join me tomorrow when author and professional speaker L. Diane Wolfe guest posts on “Edits and Revisions.”

I love doing small things to recognize holidays—even St. Patrick’s Day.

But I went too far when my daughter was in kindergarten.

Remembering the tradition that involved the leprechaun playing harmless pranks on children, I put different things in unusual places in our house while the kids slept. So my daughter’s toys went into the bathroom, her backpack was moved into my son’s room, several chairs were moved upside down, and my high heels were placed prominently in my daughter’s room.

It backfired.

My 5 year old daughter came into my room, shaking and crying, in the middle of the night. The leprechaun had been in her room! She felt positively threatened, invaded, and scared. She thought my (very large) high heels belonged to the leprechaun. It boggled my mind that she’d envisioned a malevolent, cross-dressing, giant leprechaun in her room.

My son? Snorted when he saw the leprechaun mischief and rolled his eyes a little at his mom’s nonsense.

Where I went wrong with my St. Patrick’s Day fun was that I didn’t take my audience into account. This was the SAME daughter who’d wanted strong assurance the year before that the Easter bunny limited his activities to the downstairs. She wanted no large rabbits skipping around her room. Having a mischievous leprechaun invade her space was terrifying. I could have done this trick with my son, but not my daughter.

I hate the rules that seem to crop up from editors, agents, and other writers—we all are creative people who need to do our own thing…and want to do our own thing.

But I think it’s incredibly important for us to know our audience…especially if we’re writing genre fiction.

If we don’t there are definitely risks involved. The biggest are that we won’t get our book published at all and that we’ll alienate readers who might skip buying our next book, if we do get the book published.

Let’s say I write a cozy mystery that involves graphic depiction of a child’s murder. Then I ship it off to my editor, Emily, at Penguin’s Berkley Prime Crime.

First of all, she’d think I’d lost my mind. She’d tell me to take it all out. It’s not a cozy mystery at all—it could possibly work for a police procedural or a thriller, but not a cozy. And I’d have missed my deadline and messed up their production schedule because I’d have to do a major rewrite. And I’ve labeled myself “difficult to work with” because I’ve cost my publisher a lot of wasted time.

Let’s say that somehow Emily has lost her mind, too and the book gets published (leaving out the whole editorial board at Penguin…they’d have to be crazy, too.) But let’s say it does happen and it hits the shelf.

Berkley Prime Crime is associated with cozy mysteries. The book would be shelved with cozies. It would have my name on it (my Riley name) and I’m associated with cozies. And my readers, who I’m starting to build a relationship with, buy my books—expecting a book without graphic depictions of violence.

The readers? They’re furious. They’ve been tricked into buying a book that isn’t what they want or were promised. It was specifically sold as a cozy and it’s not a cozy and they’re mad. They take our their disappointment and their anger at wasting money out on me with negative reviews at Amazon, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and DorothyL. It might not be career-ending, but boy, it doesn’t help.

I saw it happen to another cozy writer on the DorothyL list—the readers were absolutely livid with the writer’s departure from cozy standards.

So what have I accomplished? I haven’t done anything to enhance my industry reputation or readership.

It’s important to write what you want to write—but be careful where you send it. If it’s edgy, it needs to be sent to editors and publishers who publish the type of content you’ve written. Don’t think you’ve written a rule-breaking exception to the genre you’re targeting if the publisher doesn’t print stories like yours. If you’ve written horror, don’t send it to a thriller editor. If you’ve written erotica, don’t send it to Harlequin Presents and think that they’re just going to ignore the fact their guidelines weren’t followed.

Finding the right publisher for your manuscript:

Know your genre. What are you writing? Is it horror, fantasy, sci fi, thriller, lit fiction?

Read the genre. Enough to be familiar with it.

Go to the bookstore and spend some time there. Get a bunch of recently published books in your genre. It’s usually fairly easy to tell the gist of the story by flipping through.

Check online. Look at the publisher’s guidelines. See what kinds of things they’re looking for. Now they even have lists of what they’re not looking for.

If you’re already a published writer, making a big genre change, consider a pen name. You can always cross-promote under your real name–mentioning each time that the new book is a departure from your others.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! :)

My husband and I had a rare night with no kids last weekend…our son was camping and our daughter was spending the night with a friend. We didn’t exactly know what to do with ourselves with no kids, so we decided to go to the movies and see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

The 7:00 movie was full, so we bought tickets online for the 9:40 show. It was in 3-D (and it was a Saturday night), so we wanted to go early and get a good seat.

I encouraged my husband to take a book with him so he could read while he waited and I’d take a notebook.

“We’ll look like geeks,” he said.

I completely acknowledged that fact. But then, I’ve always been a nerd.

We arrived at the theater and found some seats. My husband said, “We’re the oldest people here.”

I said, “No way!” Then I looked around and saw that, yes, we were—by FAR—the oldest people there.

I owned the fact that I was a geek. Being the oldest person in a room? That hadn’t happened very often to me. I was so sensitive to it that when my husband asked (about 5 or 6 times during the movie), “What did she/he say?” and I was hollering in his ear, “She said…” I thought about our age. And the fact that my husband had gone to way too many hearing-damaging live concerts as a teenager.

In my books, my characters are really not on a journey of self-awareness or realization. They do make discoveries about themselves and other characters, but the discoveries are not integral to the main plot—finding out the murderer is.

But I read many books where the protagonist is making self-discoveries that affect the course of his or her life. In fact, the internal conflict these characters face is frequently the major source of conflict in the book.

How does the character react to these self-realizations? And how are we, as readers, kept in the loop as they’re happening?

As a reader, I’ve noticed this self-discovery being revealed through:

Internal monologue—Maybe this is most noticeable in first person POV, but works fine in 3rd, too. I’ll admit to only being patient with internal monologue just so far. If it stretches over too many paragraphs, I usually lose interest until it’s really written well.

The character’s actions—Here the character’s shift in perspective is revealed through his actions and demonstrate his self-discovery. The protagonist finally stands up to his father. The protagonist quits the uninspiring day job. The character joins AA or attacks his problems head-on, or retreats from his problems altogether.

Sidekicks (reacting through dialogue)—Sidekicks can be useful for filling our reader in (in a natural way) on our character’s thoughts and feelings. If our protagonist has a close friend that they confide in, then we can relate our character’s progress of self-discovery to the reader, in the protagonist’s own words, through dialogue.

Do your stories concentrate on a character’s self-discovery? How do you reveal it to the readers?