Tag: Editing

Revision: Structuring (and re-structuring) Chapters

After three days of revision work, I’ve finally nailed down the right structure for a critical chapter in my current work in progress. It took a tremendous amount of learning-on-the-job-style thinking to get it to where it needed to be, but I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve produced. Figure I’d capture some of my hindsight reflections here, because I think I learned a few important lessons.

Writing versus Revising

Step one is the first draft, always. Whether we’re talking poetry, flash fiction, short fiction, novellas, novels, there’s the moment when first there was nothing, and then there was something.

Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could get it right on the first try? Yeah, but we don’t. Nobody gets it right on the first draft. Revisions are unavoidable.

A few of the greats can get close to perfect on their first try. If you’ve read Stephen King’s memoir/craft book ON WRITING, you’ll remember that he only does a single pass on his first drafts to tidy them up. His revisions basically amount to copyedits. If you put yourself on the same skill level as Mr. King, I applaud you and am definitely curious to read some of your work. I, however, and I suspect the same is true for 99.9% of all writers, fall far short of that level of perfection on our first drafts.

Most of our first attempts need a lot of work before they’re doing what they need to do. You might be the type of writer who never looks back at what you’ve written until you type the words The End. Or, perhaps you pause to revise as you go. Regardless, everyone will have a first draft to deal with, and it will inevitably take multiple revision passes to get it right. The key is to see revision as an opportunity, not an ordeal. And, it helps to remember that this pass doesn’t have to be the last revision you do on your WIP.

First Draft

The chapter I just wrote is critical to the entire arc of my novel. It needs to pack a huge emotional punch. Readers should literally gasp as a metaplot is revealed. This is where readers get to see the engine under the hood of this beast, find out what’s really driving the characters to do all the awful things they’re doing to each other. The $h!t gets real, so to speak. My main character needs to be left winded and dizzy with the force of her revelation, and my readers need to as well.

But, I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I wrote the first draft of the chapter. I just new my main character needed to find out this big secret, and so that’s what I did. There are some craft elements that do share space in my brain as I’m writing through a first draft of a scene or chapter. For a peek at some of the things I am constantly considering, check out my post on Neuroscience that Hooks Readers. For the most part, though, it’s a pretty instinct-driven process.

It took an entire night’s sleep for me to realize there was a tremendous amount of bloat that needed to go. Too many “who cares” details and backstory slowing everything down. The chapter needed to be focused with laser beam intensity on revealing something new. On top of that, I’d left out important details that, if not added in, would create logic holes. Nothing dumps a reader out of a scene faster than a big “wait a minute” moment of skepticism.

First Revision

So yesterday, I went back to what I’d written, and I read through it with a few essential questions and reminders in my mind. What details were distracting my readers? What details needed to be added to keep readers as tightly connected to what was happening as possible? If something wasn’t helping to set the mood, contribute to foreshadowing, or build tension, it had to go.

It took me three solid hours to revise my first draft of chapter X and fix all the issues I’d identified. Three well-spent hours, if I do say so myself. I ended up with something much stronger than it had been.

That said, it took yet another night’s sleep to realize that I had an even bigger problem on my hands. I’d written a revelation chapter, and the revelation was huge. HUGE. It needed an appropriate build-up of tension and stress preceding it to have the TKO impact I was going for.

Unfortunately, I’d used only the first half of the chapter to generate tension, because I’d dropped the reveal in the middle of the narrative. The rest was all character reaction, or denouement. Whoops! That structure works for some chapters, but not for this one. This chapter needs to jack the tension and up the stakes right to the last possible moment. It needs to build readers’ anxiety and anticipation as much as possible.

Second Revision

This morning, I rewrote the second half of the chapter. I added more moments of interiority to help my readers see and feel the growing horror in my characters’ minds. I drew more attention to the meta-stakes, and I dropped the reveal where it would do the most emotional damage!

Yes!

Now I’m ready to move forward with this manuscript. I need to tweak the chapter that follows this one to make it a more effective reflection chapter. Emotionally charged, of course, but quiet in terms of plot. Readers will have a chance to catch their breath and process what they just found out. And, with the metaplot revealed and the stakes re-established, the characters have passed a point of no return. Now that the truth has been revealed, there can be no going back for anyone.

Isn’t writing fun?!

Craft Book Recommendations!

If you’re interested in craft books that discuss narrative structure intelligently and in a way that is directly useful, I have a couple of recommendations.

The first is MAKE A SCENE by Jordan E. Rosenfeld. I own this book. It is annotated cover to cover.

The second book I think all writers should own is REVISING FICTION by David Madden. It is (in my opinion) the best book in existence concerning revision work. A must-have reference. Sadly, it is out of print, so you’ll need to do a bit of searching to find a copy.

Well, that’s enough blogging for one day. Time to get back to revising. Thanks for stopping by, and happy writing to you.

How much thought do you give to the structure of your chapters as you either write or revise the first draft? Any tips or tricks to share with the rest of us? Feel free to share in the comments!

March 10, 2019
The Pros and Cons of Grammarly.com

There are a gazillion writing apps and programs out there in the digital world, some that cost money and some that are free. Of them all, I’ve tried a handful. However, after two years in grad school, chasing the dream of getting an MFA in creative writing, I’ve come to rely heavily on one in particular: Grammarly. Just to be clear, I’m not affiliated with Grammarly. I’m not getting paid to push the app. It’s definitely not perfect, but I like it enough to write a post about it.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly.com is an online writing program with a free version and a premium version. The Chrome extension is free, or you can pay a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription fee to upgrade. As you probably guessed, the cheapest per month price comes with the annual subscription and works out to about $12/month.

I tried the free version when I was putting together my application materials for Lesley University’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Everything I wrote (cover letter, personal essay, and my creative piece) got fed through the program and analyzed. The day I got the news that I’d been accepted into the program, I bought the yearly subscription because I knew I’d be using it often for the next two years.

What Does Grammarly Do?

In a nutshell, it makes your writing better. It is, for all intents and purposes, an editing algorithm. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a pretty darned good one, too.

See that fancy infographic I screenshotted off their homepage up above? Well, after two years of using the software I can say with confidences that it does all of that.

You can either type directly in the program, or you can upload a file (google doc, word doc). I tend to cut and paste in my material.

The above claim sounds a little hoaky. I mean, if you write enough stuff, your writing skills are going to improve no matter what. It’s inevitable. That said, the detailed explanations that pop up when you hover over a flagged item is a mighty great feature. I like not having to dive out to dictionaries and thesauruses and my copy of The Everyday Writer to check whether a word is appropriate or a grammatical construct is valid. In that way, Grammarly will probably improve your skills faster than they otherwise would.

Free Versus Premium:

The free version of Grammarly is legitimately decent. Heck, I used it to clean up my application materials (successfully). I only upgraded from the free version to catch stuff I’m apparently blind to: spelling mistakes, homophone errors, repetitious used of certain crutch words, etc. I can read through a written piece ten times, and the thing will still look like it was written at 3AM by a sleep-deprived college kid.

For me, all the extra bells and whistles were worth the money. On one of my earliest submissions in my grad school program, I was up against a deadline and in my stressed-out frame of mind, I forgot to run my submission through Grammarly. I’d read it over multiple times, tweaking, correcting awkward sentence structure, finding typos, and punctuation errors, etc.

My professor sent the submission back to me. She wouldn’t read a piece with more than two mistakes per page. I was mortified. Since then, I’ve never forgotten to use Grammarly to check my work before sending it out to anyone.

When you start a new document in Grammarly, you can select which features are or aren’t active. You can also help the algorithm edit to your needs by telling it what type of document it’s analyzing.

I’ve let the program run an analysis of a document in its “General (default)” setting, made note of the number of “critical” and “Advanced” issues, and then selected “Novel” format and let it re-analyze the document. The number of “critical” issues rarely changes. The number of “advanced” issues almost always decreases in novel format. I guess that means the algorithm knows that creative writers play it a little fast and loose with grammar rules.

Professional Proofreading Services

Premium memberships give you access to a feature I have never used. Supposedly, a real person will read your document and give you feedback on it. I’m skeptical. I don’t know who’s putting eyes on my stuff on the other end. It could be someone with legit editing skills, or it could be someone for whom English is not their first language. For all I know, it could be a well-trained monkey. Maybe one day, I’ll submit a document for professional proofreading, just to see what happens. I probably should. I’m paying for the feature, after all.

Drawbacks and Downsides?

Of course there are drawbacks and downsides.

First, it costs money. That said, it rubs me the wrong way when folks gripe about having to pay for things they want. As if they’re entitled to get everything they want in life for free. Sorry, but someone took the time to write a pretty massive program and debug the thing. They deserve to get paid for their work.

Second, it misses errors. After two years of using the program, I’d estimate that Grammarly misses between 30% and 50% of all the errors that exist in a piece of writing. For some folks, that’s a deal breaker. Not for me. Why? Because the program gets me 50% to 70% of the way toward a mistake free document. That saves me time, and my time is valuable. Now, maybe utilizing that nifty professional proofreading feature would catch the rest of the errors. I don’t know. The point here is, expecting an algorithm to be perfect is dumb. Especially considering the fact that most of us humans can’t match Grammarly’s imperfect error-catch rate.

Third (and the biggest downside), Grammarly undoes certain formatting features in uploaded documents. When you import a piece of writing into the program, all your special fonts, italics, and bold-faced type get converted to plain text. When you export it back to Google Docs or MS Word or Scrivener or whatever, you’ll have to paw through the piece looking for the lost formatting and fix it. I find that step incredibly irritating. Invariably, I’ll miss multiple words or sentences that need to be re-italicized. Grrr.

So yeah, Grammarly is far from perfect, but it’s still pretty darned great for anyone doing a lot of writing.

Do you use Grammarly? What do you think of the program?

March 14, 2018