Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I’ve had a couple of questions about revisions, so I thought I’d share my revision process for a problem that was really getting on my nerves. (Boring post here! Most of us don’t really like revision.)

I want to add that this was my third or fourth draft–I don’t do any revisions as I write the first draft because it really slows me down. I like to get the whole thing on paper before I start editing.

At the end of October I was revising the latest Myrtle Clover (my personal revisions, not the editor’s.) I thought the beginning was ‘okay.’ But the more I looked at it, the more it really started bothering me.

I tried approaching it from a couple of different directions. I switched one scene with another as a lead-in.

Then I revised a long scene and made it much shorter.

I took out a phone conversation that I realized was unnecessary and instead started the next scene with the person doing the action they’d discussed on the phone.

Some of the sentences seemed longer than needed, so I broke them up into shorter ones, which made them read a lot smoother.

After all these changes, it was much better. But it still wasn’t the beginning I knew it could be.

I decided to pretend that I hadn’t written the beginning at all—that it didn’t exist.

I rewrote the entire first chapter, using a different approach. The nice thing about word processing is that we can easily see which one works better and cut and paste the different beginnings in.

The first beginning had a lot of set-up written in. I incorporated it with humor, but a duck is a duck. It was set-up. And set-up slows down the pace—and is boring.

With the second beginning, I ditched the set-up. Instead I included foreshadowing to let the reader know to keep an eye on a particular character.

I completely removed, in my rewrite, several passages that were unnecessary. For example: I needed to have a particular character at another character’s house. In the original beginning, I’d had a whole sequence to set that visit up. Boring.

In the second version, I just opened the scene with the visit and put in a passing reference to it in dialogue, “I’m glad you could come by, Jill, and help me out…”

Looking back at what I did, I’m thinking now that I should just immediately have done a total rewrite of the entire first chapter. Instead I spent a lot of time doing surface work on something that had a deeper problem. Yes, it did read better when I changed scenes around and toyed with my sentence structure. But, for this instance anyway, I got much better results with the radical rewrite.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens at the pool or the playground.

One child calls, “Mom!” and about ten women swing around.

Not a good thing to have in our books, though. It’s really distracting when I’m reading a book and wonder who the character is because there’s a Sam and a Sid. And sometimes the author doesn’t give little helpful hints to help me know which character he’s referring to (“Sam the accountant. Sid, who works at the barbershop.) I try not to have names starting with the same letter in my books.

I also try to find appropriate names for my characters. Right or wrong, there’s definitely baggage that comes along with certain names. If I were going to write a beauty queen, I probably wouldn’t choose the name ‘Gertrude’ unless I was trying to be funny. I wouldn’t name my intellectual Biff…again, unless I was trying to make a point. It would be too much work to try to undo the readers’ quick leap to stereotype.

Every book I seem to change a character name at least once. After eight chapters, they may not be the same person I thought they were in chapter two. By chapter eighteen, they might have changed again.

The last book I submitted needed a character name change in the 11th hour—the name was already taken by a real person…an actual author at another publishing house.

I’ve had fun playing around with names with my Myrtle Clover series. Some characters’ names have literary or historical references.

Name generators are also useful. The one I usually use is Seventh Sanctum.

Some names just fit particular characters beautifully. My favorite is Voldemort. Have you got any favorite character names? How does your character naming process work?

After I write this (right now it’s Wednesday morning), I’m going to knock out revisions on two separate books, then get back to writing my second book of the Memphis Barbeque series.

This will be my 5th book. I’ve got two books on the shelves (one of them is out of print but still out there, mainly in libraries), two books in production, and one just starting out on a Word document.

Each time I start the process I feel a little at a loss. How do I do this? How did I do it last time? Because each time I’ve written a book, the process has been slightly different.

I try different approaches to see what I like best. The only problem is that sometimes I can’t remember what worked.

I’ve written books all the way straight through (A Dyeing Shame, Pretty is as Pretty Dies, Delicious and Suspicious). I didn’t even stop for chapter breaks—just put them in during revisions.

For Progressively Dead (in production), I wrote every chapter separately –I numbered out 18 chapters and just randomly picked one and wrote in it for that day. This was an odd and disjointed process and I’m not sure why I chose it. It took forever to work out the transitions between scenes and chapters.

For two books, if I got stuck at any point, I started writing a different part of the book until I was ready to tackle the part that stumped me.

The other two books, I just marked *** where I got stuck and picked up at the next scene and continued writing.

I always have a “random” file to put in all the disjointed ideas that I have when I’m writing a book. Many of them I’ll weave into the manuscript at some point.

Outlines never work for me. I have a half-finished 6th book that I’ve just put in the graveyard. Too pat when I’d outlined it. I’ll never outline again (except for my little mini-outlines where I sketch out the next scene, chapter, etc.)

I’m going to ignore my lost feeling. There’s nothing like getting words on the page to get rid of it—whatever the method is.

What works for you? Do you experiment with your process? Do you remember what worked?

I was Christmas shopping for my family last month when I saw an interesting looking top—for me. Since it was on sale, I went ahead and grabbed it. Nothing like shopping for yourself when you’re supposed to be shopping for other people. :)

When I put it on the next day, my husband said, “That top looks great on you!” He complimented it a couple more times before he left for work.

Hmm, I thought. I think I’ll get another top just like this one. They had a whole rack of different colors of the same thing. (This is how someone who is clueless about fashion thinks.)

So I went back to the store since I knew the shirt was still on sale. I got another of the tops (wearing, mind you, the first one I’d bought.)

The next day, I wore the new one. My husband wrinkled his brow. “Didn’t you wear this shirt yesterday? Although I do really like it.”

“No, this one is different, actually. Since you liked it, I got another.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, it looks nice on you.”

The next day, I had the Thanksgiving party to go to at my daughter’s elementary school. I had—important note!—done laundry and both shirts were clean. I decided that I really did need to look nice and I knew I looked nice in those tops, since my husband had so kindly assured me of the fact.

So I wore the top that day.

My husband came home from work and said, “Honey! Do we need to take you shopping? Don’t you have anything else to wear? I’m getting tired of that top!”

And so it goes.

My concern, since I’m writing two different books, is that I need to retain some of the same elements (which, I’m pretty sure, got me my gigs at these publishers), but make each book very different from each other.

Things I want to maintain in both:

Voice
Type of humor
Tone
Vivid/quirky characters
The pattern of the murders (usually 2 deaths, no forensic, keeping it amateur.

Things I want to make different:

The protagonist’s personalities (I write two elderly sleuths—but they need to approach everything differently.)

The supporting characters all need to be different.

The settings are both Southern, but different (small town, bigger town.)

One of the books is an epicurean mystery, so more of a focus on food. Actually, there is no focus on food in the Myrtle Clover series, except for Myrtle’s cooking disasters.

For those of you who’ve written two standalone books, or those who’ve got two series, how do you keep things straight? How do you keep the parts that drew publishers and readers to you but retain individuality with the stories?

I’m thinking, with the shirt, that getting the same exact thing in a different color just didn’t work. And the last thing I want is for a reader to say, “It’s the same thing! I’m getting tired of it…”

My daughter and I went to see the Nutcracker ballet on Sunday afternoon.

The ballet was amazing. The Tchaikovsky music was beautiful and the dancers were so graceful. It was easy to get swept away by it.

But…during the Dance of the Snowflakes, one of the snowflakes was decidedly off.

The snowflake seemed to have a very bad cold. Maybe swine flu? She was remarkably out of breath during her leaps. Her movements didn’t match the other snowflakes on stage. Her pace was all off—completely understandable if you’re sick—but it took me right out of the Nutcracker and into Mama mode (“Poor thing! Why is she up there being a snowflake? She should be in bed!”)

Pace is also important in books. We have to time things just right so we’re not flying too fast through important information (forcing them to reread a passage later) or boring them with too slow a pace.

As a reader, a slow pace can lose my attention. I’ve read beginnings that dragged. I’ve read dialogue that went on far past the point of accomplishing its purpose and into desultory rambling.

I’ve read scenes that were supposed to be fast-paced that had way too much description: “The murderer’s eyes were a steel-blue. He seemed devoid of all humanity. You could look into his eyes and see no empathy present. He looked intently…” Bleh. Most action scenes need action. They need a faster pace, choppier sentences…verbs.

Sometimes authors seem to be just throwing everything at me at once—there’s too much data and it’s clogging up the works. I have to actually go back and re-read—they didn’t pace out the delivery of the information well.

Sometimes, I feel like I need a breather in a book. Do you know what I mean? Maybe there have been a couple of really intense chapters in a row—you’re caught up in the depiction of a tragic death. Or maybe there has just been unrelenting tension in a thriller. You just feel like you need a break. Humor might be difficult to infuse in those situations, but I’d like to see just some sort of down time to catch my breath. Obviously…it can’t be too much of a break because then the pace will be too slow again.

I usually read for pace during one of my revision readings. Reading out loud helps give a sense of the speed of the scene. This is when I’ve realized bits of dialogue have dragged or that I needed to cut out short scenes that I liked, but that only served to slow down the plot and general pace of the story.

How do you set pace?