Tag: revising

More on Beta Readers

So I found several beta readers after all for Hurricane Baby. One has finished reading and reported in that she does not like Mike and Holly’s storyline–the guy that has a huge crisis of faith. She said it reminded her too much of the Fireproof movie, where all they needed was Jesus and everything turned out fine.

I countered that I had wanted at least one story to turn out to have a happy ending. She wasn’t convinced. So depending on what other readers say, I may be back to the drawing board on that.

This sort of feedback is why you want beta readers. You need people who will be honest with you about how stories come off to them. Beta readers are not necessarily editors–their role is to tell you if the story hangs together or not. For this reader, who I’ve known since I was eight years old, it didn’t. It’s just one opinion. She loved the Wendy and Ray Magnum story and the James and Lori King story. But that other one just stuck in her craw; she couldn’t swallow it. It means more work may need to be done on it, or to maybe ditch it altogether. We will see what others say.

Eyes On Your Work

What do you do with a manuscript once you finish it? I always try to get someone else to look it over. I am about to reach that stage where I will be finding another pair of eyes to read and see where the story needs revising. I have a few more pages on my last story to do and then I will be ready to get another perpective.

You can go about finding readers several ways. One avenue I have taken is to go to my MFA mates that I still stay in touch with and offer to switch manuscripts–I read one of theirs, and they read mine. Both of you get a new perspective. and all you’re out is a little time. Cooperation is a wonderful thing. Maybe you have a writing group or people you met in a conference or workshop. A swap can really work in your favor.

Getting different perspectives from your readers is something else to think about. I am getting another writer’s thoughts from my MFA friend. I have another friend who dabbles in writing but also reads voraciously. He can give me a reader’s perspective–does the story hang together? Where is he tempted to put it down because it’s boring? Etc.

Free options are the best options–but if you want a little more professional opinion, Facebook groups or Twitter searches are always a option to find a professional developmental editor. Be sure to vet someone first–see if other books they have worked on have eventually sold or if they are good enough editors for their own work to sell. If you’re paying for it, make sure it money well spent.

So when you finish a manuscript, celebrate your accomplishment however you choose. But know that the work is not necessarily done; getting other eyes on it is the next step.

Where We Are

So I picked “Hurricane Baby” back up this year to try to make it work as a series of linked short stories. I took the most dramatic episodes in the novel manuscript and am rewriting them to show how the hurricane affected the lives of various characters.

Wendy and Ray Magnum have to deal with the fallout of Wendy’s encounter with Judd McKay. Mike and Holly Seabrook work to overcome the damage done to their home and lives with Mike undergoing a serious crisis of faith. And James and Lisa King suffer through a dissolution of their marriage after Lisa decides she is never returning to the Coast again.

Each of the three storylines is told in four installments, alternated throughout the manuscript. Each of the twelve stories is told from a slightly different point of view. Wendy and Ray each have their own story, Mike’s point of view is illustrated through three stories, with Holly closing their narrative with her own story, and James and Lisa’s stories alternate from one to the other.

Writing The Story

Long story short–these characters have been alive in my mind for quite some time. The story has undergone many, many permutations since I completed that first story draft. In 2010, in anticipation of the Hurricane Katrina fifth anniversary. I took the story and adapted it to a stage play, which is when the title went from “Still Waters” to “Hurricane Baby”. That stage play won third place in the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, where a stage reading was performed on May 1, 2010.

I kept working at it and revising on it until I wondered if I had taken it as far as I could. I finally gave up on fiction almost entirely and started concentrating on blogging, setting up a blog about my life with bipolar disorder in 2014. In 2015, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women, concentrating on nonfiction. But even with that as my concentration, I kept flirting with fiction stories.

I took two semesters to write in fiction classes under Mary Miller, an up-and-coming short story and novel writer from Oxford, and Diana Spechler, a writer based in Mexico City. I wrote new fiction in their classes and experimented a great deal with flash fiction, discovering a had a knack for compressing a story down to its bare bones.