Archive for the ‘Publishing Isn't for Sissies’ Category

How You Re-Write 3: Method over Madness

Wednesday, July 13th, 2016

The philosophy I share with all students and editing/coaching clients? Anyone–ANYONE–can deconstruct and rewrite a manuscript. Anyone can learn to rework a story one element and scene and character at a time. Last week I shared some of my basic techniques for  understanding the key characters in your completed story draft (at a high level). Click here and here for those posts, to catch up or refresh or try to niggle a bit more out of each one.

This week and next, we’re diving into the actual method of deconstructing. My method. The title of this series is HOW YOU RE-WRITE, and the overall blog category is HOW YOU WRITE. So, disclaimer time: this works for me and many of my clients and students, but the only way you’ll know if it works for you is IF YOU WORK ON REWRITING SOMETHING OF YOUR OWN. Eh-hem… Sorry, it’s a nit for me.

writing is rewriting

What’s the deal, you ask?

Just as a refresher: re-writing is hard; looking at what’s not working with your characters and plot points and themes and secondary everything can be a nerve-wracking, soul-sucking, insecurity-making exercise; and a lot of people listen but never try many of the basic, not-so-hard-to implement exercises I recommend. Which is too bad, because learning to rewrite (and we’re all ALWAYS learning, with every new project) is your job. It’s not an option. And I can’t tell you the number of clients who fade away or students whose enthusiasm wavers after a course ends or followers contact me years later to say they still haven’t finished that book they were working on back when, but they’ve started 5 new ones since…and not finished them, either.

Which is unfortunate, sad and avoidable. Just do the work (or in this case the re-work). Do it. We all have to. All of our pretty babies are drafted in the shadows of “ugly.”

writing pen

It’s madness to think yours won’t, and inexcusable as an artist to let your creative drive for approval (especially your own) block you from learning and applying the craft that will better enable you to bring your unique voice and vision and stories to readers who are languishing these days, in a sea of often poorly-written, poorly constructed, badly delivered free or so-close-to-free-it-doesn’t-matter digital content.

Rant almost over. Except to say this: make what you create matter as viscerally and beautifully and impactfully (not a word, but you get the gist) as it can, by understanding it, honing it, and ruthlessly re-working it to the best of your ability. (more…)

How You Re-Write 2: Actually, it’s Beginning-END-Middle…

Thursday, July 7th, 2016

Re-Writing Lesson 2: Taking a closer look at my recommended method for using the B-M-E Chart!

Or, if it helps you more easily remember today’s discussion… My Beginning-End-Middle Chart.

BME Table

First, be sure if you haven’t to brush up on Rewriting Lesson 1, where I begin discussing my methods and philosophy for deconstructing and re-writing manuscript drafts.

Then grab all those notes you’ve made from your own Work-in-Progress, because you did your homework and have been looking at your current draft, right? Right?! And maybe you had a bit of a struggle encapsulating what’s happening with your characters at these key story turning points (Inciting Incident, Midpoint, and Black Moment). If so, welcome to the club. These aren’t high concepts most of us have nailed down when we first begin to draft.

So, let’s take another stab at it. Even if you’re happy so far with what you’ve learned about your story from using the chart, indulge me and lean into Lesson 2 and your draft with a fresh set of eyes.

The B-M-E Chart Process

Some quick definitions as we begin. Just summaries, for the sake of this exercises and post.

  • Inciting Incident: the first key turning point in a manuscript, when something happens that has never happened before, propelling the protagonist and antagonist together into the external flow of the story.
  • Midpoint: the center-most turning point in the manuscript, the tent post “propping up” the external and internal arcs of the story;the “ah-ha” moment when the protagonist realizes the “true” goal/conflict of her/his journey and pivots (through a shift in motivation) toward pursuing the objective that will drive her choices and actions for the second half of the novel.
  • Black Moment: the pinnacle moment where all that is at stake for the protagonist is revealed and all hope is lost if the the protagonist hasn’t learned enough throughout the story’s arc and/or isn’t ready to make the no-going-back, life-changing choice being asked of her.

Step 1: Can you isolate these turning points in your draft?

Not theoretically, not as you think back about what you meant to do with your story. Actually, physically, can you turn to these places in your printout (PLEASE, when you’re deconstructing a drafted work-in-progress, print it out and work with a hard copy. I swear, developmental/content editing is so much more effective at the analytical stage if you work with hard copy rather than scrolling through a digital copy)?

seriously

I have a method I’ll describe in a later re-write lesson for isolating specific scenes while deconstructing a novel, and how to learn the most you can from that exercise. But for now do the best you can and put your finger on when these three critical events happen to your protagonist. Not what you planned to do, or what you meant to do, but what you physically wrote as you drafted. (more…)

How You Re-Write 1: Revise with the B-M-E Chart

Tuesday, July 5th, 2016

Re-writing is your friend. No, seriously. Re-writing is your BEST creative friend of all… Revisions, if you will. But when I teach and keynote and author coach and content edit, I make a clear distinction between line and copy editing and proof reading and the creative work of developmental editing, also known as re-writing.

And since for most of us mere mortals, our first full draft of a project rarely tumbles out of our brains fully realized, just dying to be written, part of our job–arguable the most important part of your job–is re-crafting that draft until it’s its best self. And that ain’t easy. In fact, resistance to re-working and re-writing and re-imagining the whole that’s sprouted from that kernel of an idea that drew you to write a story is the Number One reason a lot of authors never publish traditionally, and why a great deal of independently-published novels will never find a home in a reader’s heart.

Rewriting isn’t an easy friend. It’s overwhelming work, and creative fatigue and doubt and frustration can win the ensuing battle if you let them. But you’re a professional writer. Say it with me, “I’M A PROFESSIONAL WRITER.”

And your job is to take control of your creative process every step of the way. And for the purposes of this How You Write post, your job is to rewrite your draft for however long it takes for the story and characters and journeys you’ve created to connect with the reader on every level possible. You’re the boss, not the draft. You’re ready to work through the exhausting process of diving back in over and over. Really, you are ;o)

The way to do that?

Simple.

No, the process isn’t simple. But you job is, so to speak. All you have to do is break your draft down into simple parts, so you can effectively execute the work left to be done in manageable chunks.

simple

When you’re drafting with a plan (and you have a plan, right?) or rewriting with plan (because you revamp your plan for your story before you rewrite, right?), you give yourself a chance to conquer the overwhelming, sinking feeling that you can’t succeed at something as complex as creating a novel. You allow yourself to focus on one piece of the story at a time, until the whole manuscript finally begins to take shape. But what is your re-writing plan???

I’ll get more specific about my re-writing approach in my twice-weekly July How You Write blog updates. But for now, accept for the sake of argument that writing is a process (while creativity and voice and the compulsion to share story with the world through the written word is a gift, bless you heart…). And as part of that process, re-writing can be learned and executed and mastered by anyone determined get better at her/his craft.

To help simplify things today as we dip our toe into re-writing…

I encourage every new student and client to do what I do with a freshly drafted first pass at a story–focus on the beginning, middle, and end of your characters’ journeys, as you deconstruct what you’ve achieved with your novel. Before you rewrite the first word, you first have to understand (to “conquer”) what you’ve already written.

First up! I teach students and clients to pinpoint the emotional focus of a character at the inciting incident of a story,  at the midpoint, and at the black moment.

beginning middle end

Make a chart (easily done in Word or Excel or freehand on a notepad). A simple one, with a row for your protagonist, your antagonist and perhaps one significant secondary character. Three columns: Beginning, Middle, End.

BME Table

Then read through those three key turning points in your story draft (inciting incident, midpoint and black moment) and see if you can define the state of each character’s internal journey. Jot down only a sentence or two for each turning point and each character. You should be able to summarize very specifically how a character is growing or wanting to change at each critical juncture. Once you’re done, take a look…

Is each character’s emotional state dynamic and arcing throughout the story? (more…)

“Live your life from your heart…”

Monday, July 7th, 2014

“Live your life from your heart. Share your heart. And your story will touch and heal people’s souls.” ~ Melody Beatti

Grateful habit wm

THIS is why I write, create, wake up in the morning and work through the night at a job that shouldn’t be a job, but the business of it is the only way I reach the readers I’m blessed to.

So I’m grateful–insomnia and anxiety-riddled rough drafts and painful edits and all.

“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” ~ Melody Beatti

I’m so grateful to life the life I do.

Writers. Read…

Tuesday, July 1st, 2014

“Change is inevitable. Progress is optional.” ~ Toni Robbins.

kicking cans

Should Barnes & Noble and punt their forever-failing self-publishing selves?

Read more HERE.

No, really, if you’re a writer, publisher, agent, editor, READ.


Barnes & Noble breaking from Nook…

Thursday, June 26th, 2014

Barnes and & Noble spinning the Nook to its own business unit that will be separately traded going forward, and possibly sold to a private investor as soon as 2015?

nook

Not unexpected, but still very sad.

Publishing is forever changing, and what works today might be the worst possible solution to tomorrow’s problem. We all know that.

But when a book selling giant like B&N (or Borders or Waldenbooks or, say, Harlequin or Penguin or…) can’t make the business work, no matter how hard they try (or stumble around, as the case has been much of the last five years of lightening-fast shifts in the book industry’s retail playing field), it’s time for writers to pause, take stock of their personal business models, and update every last thing we can to be forward-facing, rather than excessively reactive and behind the curve.

Ban My Ass…

Monday, June 23rd, 2014

I love books, and I love reading. And Readers, I LOVE you; I do. But to quote J. K. Rowling, ” A very famous writer once said, ‘A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can’t expect a genius to look out.’”

JK Rowling

Don’t read to criticize.

Don’t troll the Net looking for someone to take down (or with intent to take down, on someone else’s behalf).

Bad reviews and uprisings to ban and heated debates over who’s worse than whom leave me cold. I’ve been guilty in the past. I have definite opinions about what I read. But why tear an author or a book down, I’ve realized, simply because you’re not a fan. Or is the urge about something else: something lacking within or a sense of ill use or, “that’s not fair,” or, “why her?”

For whatever reason you dislike an author or a series or a book, by all means discuss your opinion.

But to those to rip and tear and shriek that something isn’t for them, I say, “Move on.” Just move on. Rant on, and you’re just making yourself look silly.

Duly noted, your dislike. Thanks for the feedback. But if it’s your job, in your own mind, to tell us how you’d have written the story differently–you know, the story that someone else imagined into being well enough for you to at least want to read it in the first place–then find someone else whose purpose in life is to tear at another’s creativity (I suspect because of a lack thereof within you), dig a whole, and pour all your poop in ’til your heart’s content.

The rest of us don’t care.

Or we shouldn’t care. (more…)

The Soul of the Matter: Listening…

Tuesday, November 5th, 2013

New beginnings aren’t just about action. In my case, there’s no real action yet. But I’m definitely beginning again. A new story in the works, a new release to plan for, a new PR team, a new season for my family as my son prepares to graduate from high school (whimper, sniffle, YAY!).

start

Before any challenge, and a new beginning is always a challenge, it’s the start that’s so scary, not the actual work to be done. It’s the watching and wondering and trying to subdue those pesky emotions and fears that sucks our momentum and energy away. I’m living that right now. I’m in-the-flesh proof that living never gets “easier,” no matter how much success you’ve had or how far you’ve come (in my case, raising a family and building a thriving publishing career and learning to write emotional novels that connect with readers and finding a publisher and agent and publicity team who believe in my vision maybe more than I can believe in myself yet).

But living isn’t about easy, I’ve learned.

You have, too, right?

live

To live, not just endure or survive or bide your time, is the goal. It’s the start of all that’s right in the world. Any world, whoever you are and wherever you call home. It’s never going away, the drive to live today. Just today. To make this moment count.

My mind numbs at the possibilities. The responsibilities. The choices and the weight of making them right. The possibilities and how few care what I want them to be, or how I need them to pan out.

PossibilitiesPostLetting go. As you wait and wonder and listen and try to move ahead but feel the weight of all you don’t know dragging you down, it’s tomorrow that you’re hearing, if you let go and let it in. It’s today that stands in your way. It’s worry that you throw in your own path to “soften” the impact.

Step out of those shadows with me. (more…)

Where do you buy your books? A statistical rant.

Monday, October 28th, 2013

Where do you buy your books?

I’ve heard in author discussion recently that the publishing press and the traditional publishers they front for want us to still buy that 70% of all books sold are still sold in bricks and mortar stores.

If they’re talking about only print books, and maybe hard cover books or best-selling authors (and I mean the ones who sell millions of copies of each release), then, yeah, I’ll buy that. And if you’re one of those authors who can score a decent hard cover print run or for whom it doesn’t matter where you sign your next contract you’ll sell because you’re already branded, then New York must seem quite flattering and attractive for you.

old books

If you’re mid-list author or a newbie, or even some of the best-selling authors I know (who’ve for years been hitting lists left and right and USED to score tasty hard cover print runs but not so much anymore), you aren’t buying the above statistic any more than I am. Because you live in the real world where digital is the new mid-list, mass market platform and traditional publishers have no clue how to make digital publishing work except for the branded, and for the branded the money’s still in physical stores.

In the real world, at least in commercial fiction,we want to see our books in stores, but we know that 70% of our sales won’t happen there. At least we hope not, because print distribution more than sucks, it’s becoming non-existent.

I write for Amazon. Montlake. They’ve made me more money in a year (my first novel with them launched the end of Oct., ‘12) than my primary traditional publisher has in my entire career (and that would be over 8 years of being “successful” on their lists). Montlake finds readers who love my work (reviews prove that), buy almost exclusively digital (95% of my sales) and come back for more (proof that my new team understands their marketing business and doesn’t care that we’ve been blacklisted from most physical stores). They’ve sold more of each title so far (including the one that’s currently been out for just a couple of months) than my traditional publisher could through their “successful” print distribution when I walked away.

Do I wish that my Mimosa Lane books were in print bookstores?

I do. Print readers would love them, too, and I trust my publisher to make that connection for me when they can.

Do I regret that I’m making TEN TIMES the royalty rate on my digital sales at Amazon Montalke than I have at any of my traditional publishing houses?

I do not.

Do I believe the publishing press that doesn’t want digital publishing to be the end of the print publishing model as we know it (notice I don’t say the end of print publishing, just that the way it’s always been done is going to have to change) includes my and my peer’s digital sales in their calculation of “book sales” to come up with their 70% statistic?

Don’t make me laugh.

How We Write: Day 2 of Rewriting Is my B**ch. Simple, right?

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

Yeah, I said it. Because part of what I teach is that at this point of the process–the rewriting of a full draft that rarely wants to be rewritten–your job isn’t easy. Either the overwhelming work to be done is going to win, or you’re going to win because you’re a professional writer. And the only way for you to win, is to take control and show the rewrites or the new draft or whatever stage you’re in, that you’re the boss.

The way to do that?

Simple.

No, the process isn’t simple. You have to keep it simple.

simple

When you’re drafting with a plan (and you have a plan, right?) or rewriting with plan (because you revamp your plan for your story before you rewrite, right?), you stop the overwhelming, sinking feeling that you can’t succeed at something as complex as creating a novel–by focusing on one piece of the story at a time, until the whole manuscript finally begins to take shape.

I encourage students to do what I do…focus on the beginning, middle, and end of your characters’ journeys, as you plot or deconstruct or draft write a novel. I also teach students to pinpoint the emotional focus of a character at the inciting incident of a story, then at the black moment, and only then at the middle of the book. If you can define for yourself or me or a critique partner what your character’s internal journey will be at these three story points , you’ll never be writing or rewriting into a void.

An example?

My protagonist/heroine in my Mimosa Lane WIP (Book 3 of my Seasons of the Heart series) grew up in a dysfunctional family. That could have made her angry at the world and rebellious (as it does our hero, but that’s another blog post). Instead, while she’s wary of ever making family work for her, it’s made her a champion of other families and of the kids she teaches and cares for in her job (she’s an amazing assistant elementary school principal, whom you get to know in Seasons of the Heart Book 2, Three Days on Mimosa Lane). Sound interesting? I hope so.

But that’s only the beginning. It’s nowhere close to a full story arc. Not yet. And if I’m going to rewrite my muddled and wandering draft into the best story it can be, I need to understand my protagonist’s emotional/internal journey as I weave her in and out of the external story points I’ve already created–I need to motivate her carefully and throw the right conflict at her for the right reasons (using my hero and key secondary characters), so that she’ll change and grow and achieve a goal by the end of the book that she/we wouldn’t have thought possible at the beginning–claiming the happy family she’s always wanted, even if that family can never be the perfect thing she dreamed of as a little girl.

The simple part
(that’s taken me a long time to arrive at, longer than most other stories I’ve written, because of the complexity of the characters and community I’m writing about)

Heroine at the story Inciting Incident: She’s surround herself with love and family (other peoples’), focusing on her job and helping the ideal community she’s grateful to be a part of. Her success at her job helps other families and the children she’s responsible for thrive, and that makes her happy, or so she’s convinced herself.

(more…)