Tag: revision

Plans For Revision

So I heard back from Laurie Marshall, my workshop mate that read Hurricane Baby. We swapped manuscripts–I read her fiction chapbook and read mine. She did a wonderful job with feedback–giving me notes in the manuscript, then writing me a document that noted big trends and suggestions for throughout the manuscript.

It was all very positive and uplifting with a lot of practical advice sandwiched in that I agree with. A few things are issues I always struggle with, like descriptions of settings and characters. I try every manuscript to get better at that and am glad when someone can push me to get even better at it because I know I struggle with it.

But the cast of characters is set, the plot is set, and the form is set. So that represents a huge advance in the process. She only judged one story as being much weaker than the others, and it was among one of the last I wrote, so I’m not surprised. It’s the last section of Tommy Hebert and Cindi Delafosse’s story, the new arc I added in this revision.

Tommy’s Hurricane Katrina story opens with him doing rescue work throughout the parish, and the subsequent drinking problem he develops after seeing a scene that scars him for life. I plan to plant the seeds for the resolution that is in that story earlier in the timeline throughout the other stories in that arc and plan to put in as much work as possible to bring that arc up to the standards of the others. I’m looking forward to starting Monday on the revisions!

Proofing

So now I am at the nitpicking stage of writing–correcting commas, passive voice, etc. etc. One of my readers said I used passive voice too often. So I did a daring exercise–I ran a total find-and-replace that deleted all instances of the word “HAD”.

It worked.

I’m putting all my sentences into active voice with that one deletion. Often it came out cleanly without needing to change the sentence at all. Other times I had to work out the new tense of the action verb that it preceded. But I will be on the lookout for this in manuscripts from now on.

So in checking all my prose I am correcting grammar and rewriting sentences and doing all those tiny, tiny tasks that make a manuscript look professional and polished. I work on one chapter a day, passing the time until my last reader gets back with me with feedback on the story as a whole.

After I hear back, I will hopefully pull the manuscript apart again and make improvements and make it even better. And I think it can be better. I’m under no illusions that what I’ve done is the best I can do. But I may have done the best I can do for this story now without more input. So I am looking forward to that.

Revision Finished

Revision number I’ve-lost-track is in the books. Now I am cleaning up typos, etc. in the typescript. I have a ton of backwards quotation marks. Not sure how that happened. I’m proofing a story a day while waiting on another read by various people and seeing what they have to say, and then I’ll dive into another workover based on that feedback.

I’ve collected a list of small presses to send to in the first round–they are all hospitable to Southern lit and I hope one of them takes an interest in it. I am looking over publishing guidelines and all those details to get them fixed in my mind so the final copies will hold up.

So Hurricane Baby is a few steps closer to reality. I hope you are enjoying this trip into the innards of writing a book. I’m still going to be posting on how everything goes with the new revisions and all the developments I anticipate in this journey. Come along for the ride!

Hard-Won Knowledge

Well, something interesting happened yesterday. I have always been a very particular writer. I write it out and don’t finish a piece until every word is as good as I can make it–the first time I write it. I am used to turning out very clean copy in a first draft and not having to revise. I’ve never been one to subscribe to the “crappy first drafts” mode of writing–where you just get a bunch of stuff on the page and sort it out later.

But yesterday I did exactly that on this fiction project. I was writing one of the last stories and wanted to get everything down that was in my head about this scene, but I realized halfway through that it needed more attention than I was giving it–I was “telling” a lot in summary when I needed to be showing it in scene.

But I just kept plugging along and finally finished what I could do that day. I went back and read it and made a big cut, and immediately the scene felt a lot better. Now I need to go back and put in the scenes I was summarizing. I have never really been able to revise my own work–I think it’s all good until someone tells me otherwise, then I can see how to fix it. So I think yesterday was a step forward for me as a writer in that I know I have to fix it and know what I have to do to fix it. Instead of just thinking it’s wonderful from the get-go :).

So today’s craft tip–go ahead and write the garbage. At least sorting through it later will help you separate the recyclable from the trash and find the treasures within that you didn’t notice at first. I’m awfully late to this awareness, but I’m glad I finally have it. Happy writing!

Story Continuity

I have been having fun writing the new installments of Hurricane Baby and cleaning up what I call “continuity problems”. Since I am adapting a huge mass of already-written material to a new purpose, I have to watch for continuity problems.

These could range anywhere from calling a character a wrong name to putting someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, one story had been set between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I didn’t realize that until I was doing yet another read through and realized that it couldn’t be set during that time because of changes to the timeline occasioned by the new stories I’ve written and other changes to the timeline of the book itself.

How to solve? I’ve started keeping a list that consists of when each event happened and what it was. So if Lelani announced she was pregnant in early January, if she went into preterm labor in the sixth month, the baby would be born in June. If, if, if. Asking a series of If questions make the dominoes of the story fall into place with minimum disruption.

Starting Revision

So I’ve gotten feedback from a few of my readers and some of the same issues keep cropping up. So I am starting to add more material and take out other material as I revise this month. I still have several readers’ comments outstanding so I am not changing any existing storyline too drastically–just adding a new story arc I dreamed up on vacation and adding a fifth story to each arc to address another comment that I knew likely was going to be said anyway. So I have more to revise and draft.

Luckily some of the new scenes can still come out of the old draft and be suitable with just a few revisions. But I know I have several new ten-page scenes to draft soon as well and will start work on that with an eye to finish August first so I can make a switch with another author I admire very much; I’ll read her chapbook and she’ll read the revised story collection.

I am truly excited about what has been said so far. I really think I’ve found the moves to finally tell this story and maybe reach the audience I want to reach with it. Now I just have to let the comments buoy me along so I don’t freeze up again. Again, I have done a lot of thinking ahead of time on what I want to say and need to just write down what is in my mind.

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.

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.