A Nice Rambley Bit For My First Post of 2012 (I even talk about writing)

What?

It’s 2012 and nobody told me?

I was supposed to start preparing for the apocalypse. You know, stock up on canned food, Purell, and DVDs. Get my zombie survival kit together. Etc.

A hope everyone has had some happy holidayness in their lives. The great thing about Christmas is that it provides solid evidence of how the people in your family see you. As in: “Hey, these earrings are really weird. Just odd and strange and abnormal in every way. I bet Cacy'll love them!” Le sigh. It’s hard being the “artsty” one in the family. I'm not that weird, Mom. Really, I'm not.

But I do now boast a new favorite necklace:

(Made by this company.)

Freakin' awesome. And it matches this ring I got a few month ago:

(This guy also makes Lego jewelry.)

(Check him out.)

So sometimes they get it right. Even though, of course, Christmas is not about the presents. Is the lie we tell children.

In other topics, I finished the preliminary revision of my rewrite. (You know, when you go through and fix all the obviously bad stuff before you let anyone read it. There was this one scene in particular that was so bad that if it had been a published book I was reading I would have written the author an angry letter. Fortunately, no one shall ever have to see that scene EVER. Though I kinda want people to read it after they read the new and improved scene so that I can be like see, SEE what I saved you from…before I forced you to read it. Anyway…)

Tada!

Printed out for easy reading by people in my life who don’t like reading long stuff on the computer. (You gotta work those margins and font size to save some paper.)

I know there’s all kindsa fancy technological computery ways to breakdown the editing process, but this is how I revise when it comes to re-ordering half the scenes in the book:

First I type up a list of every scene in the manuscript and color-code them according to like characters or what part of the story it deals with or something. I don't know. I just like colors.

After cutting the list up, I re-order the scenes as needed.

Then tape 'em down to blank sheet of paper so I can easily refer to them when I go back to my computer to start moving things around in the actual document.

Who needs Scrivener? (Okay, I probably do. But it costs money, see. Plus, cutting stuff out and using tape is fun. Ask any four-year-old. Tape and scissors are the best things ever.)

The thing about finishing something and coming to the point where I’m waiting for other people to read it is that I’m left with a “What now?” feeling. What should I do with myself right now considering that if this were yesterday, I’d have been working on that thing I just finished.

I suppose I could read something. Maybe re-watch the fourth season of Buffy or all the episodes of “Life After People” I recorded. I should probably clean my mess of a room which I’m sure is a fitting reflection of my life in general. I could work on a blog post.

All of the above?

Well, I did all of the above. So what now?

In the bigger picture in which I’m always working on some writerly endeavor or another, what now?

Eh, I’ll figure it out.

But you know, going over my manuscript, setting is one of the changes I’m happiest with when it comes to all the decisions I made for the rewrite. Originally, I’d set the story in some made up middle of nowhere town. But for the re-write I thought, why don’t I bring them home. My hometown of Los Angeles, that is.

Because of this change, I’ve set some of my scenes in what I think are interesting parts of the city. I might not have thought to use some of these types of locations if I’d stuck with a made up town.

Which I guess means I'm not as creative as I lead people to think I am.

(The Venice Beach Canals is one of the interesting places in L.A. I do not use in my story.)

Besides, people talk trash about my city. Saying it’s a wasteland and the people are shallow (to which I respond, maybe that has something to do with the part of the city you hang around). But I love my sprawling town. According to popular music, it never rains here and we know how to party. And you can believe that because popular entertainment never lies to us. Ever.

(Now that I think about it, I didn't set any scenes in my book around water, which is kinda odd cause I love water-adjacent locales.)

So…that’s probably enough a ramblin’.

No, wait!

Doesn’t anybody finish their games on Droidwords? Or is it just nobody wants to finish the games they start with me? I’ve been waiting for my sister to make a move for like six months now! Some people!

Okay, now I’m done.

Have a Happy New Year anyone who made it to the bottom of this post. The rest of you…a plague upon your houses! (Not really, I give you permission to have happiness in your new year too.)

I’m a Maniac, Maniac in Word

And I’m cutting words like I’ve never cut them before!

I’m so incredibly excited that I’m on the verge of putting on that song from Flashdance really loud and dancing around the house to it.

Do you know how, at least on a Mac, your Word document’s word count appears at the bottom of the window? Do you know how after you’ve surpassed 100,000 words, that word count just ups and disappears?

Well, mine came back!

Before:

After:

Hello old friend!

Now when I send out my query letters, I can say that my word count is approx. 99,000 and it won’t even be like I’m rounding down from 99,999 (Not that I would ever really do that...*shifty eye, shifty eye*). It is honestly and truly well under 100,000. Mischief Managed! I think I deserve a cookie.

You know what? I’m buying myself a box of cookies.

Or maybe a bunch of cupcakes eating a bunch of cookies...

Big Picture, Little Picture

Word count. It’s one of those big little things, isn’t it? In the overall craft of writing, it’s not something that is emphasized; and with good reason what with all the plot, characterization, dialogue and etc to be mastered. But, from what I’ve read, for some agents word count can be a cause for query insta-rejection. I believe you should write as many words as is necessary to effectively tell your story, no more and no less. At the same time, I also believe that if you can do something to give an agent one less reason to reject you, why not give it a go? I mean, as long you’re revising your manuscript anyway.

I’ve worked hard to get my word count down. What was once 126,000 words, is now somewhere in the neighborhood of 103,000. Most of that was accomplished by big-picturing things. Is this scene really necessary or does it simply accomplish the same goals as this other, slightly better scene? Does this description of the setting really have to be seven-pages long? Did I really describe that character at length in two different places?

The best big picture piece of advice I came across this year, which helped me cut out a hugeormous chunk of words, came from Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel. In chapter eight, Maass talks about set up. Basically, he says get rid of it. I thought about it, looked at my first few chapters, and then had a revelation. By golly! The first fifty-sixty pages weren’t nothing but a bunch of set up. While there were important ideas that I’d have to work into other parts of the manuscript, those pages could go away and wouldn’t be missed. That was at least 15,000 words gone in one fell swoop!

That’s not to say that deleting one sentence or one word at a time can’t be effective. For me this is especially true when I’ve written something in first person and have gotten a little too comfortable with, like, the conversational tone, you know.

This past year I’ve come across a couple of different posts and forum threads about fillers words. (Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten where exactly I’d found them so while I remember the lessons, I can’t link you to their sources.)

Upon compiling my list of filler words, I did a search in my Word document based on that list just to see how many of each I used. Here were some of my biggest offenders:

Just: 453

Like: 627

That: 1,462! (To be fair there are a lot of times that using “that” is justified. *shifty eyes, shifty eyes*)

I then used the "find" function to locate each word individually and made the difficult decision on a case by case basis of whether or not my entire manuscript would fall apart if I let go of this one “just” or “like” or whichever word I happened to be considering.

Now, any time I’m re-reading my manuscript I have a list of words I try to keep an eye out for. I’ve added to the list specific things I’m particularly guilty of.

The Usual Suspects:

Seem

There were

They were

Well

Kind of

Like

Somehow

You know

I mean

Just

Okay

Managed

Kevin Spacey

I guess

Suddenly

That

Very

So

Really

Little

Even

Adverbs ending “ly”

“But” or “And” at the start of a sentence.

Additional suggested filler words that didn’t turn up a whole lot in my manuscript:

At all

Truly

Rather

Definitely

Certainly

Find out how many times you’ve used these words in your manuscript. This only goes to show what little words can do!

But here’s my favorite tip about cutting words that has helped me focus on the little picture. A while ago Janice Hardy posted a blog about cutting down your word count. Her suggested strategy was, “If you need to cut words, decide how many you need to cut, then divide that by the number of pages [in your manuscript].”

It’s such a simple and straightforward approach that I never in a million years would have though to do it. I decided to try this out in order to get my manuscript under the 100,000 mark. After all the cutting I’d already done, finding another 3,000 words to give their final notice felt like as big an undertaking as cutting 23,000 words. I did the math and it turns out I only need to get rid of seven or eight words per page. ONLY SEVEN OR EIGHT WORDS! How super doable is that? So super doable that I’ve been getting rid of way more words per page than my quota requires. Even on an end-of-chapter page that only had three or four lines total, I still found a handful of words I didn’t need. Think about it. Doesn't "he said" work just as well as, if not better than, "he told me"? Bam! Minus one word from your tally.

A personal tip: I started from the last page and worked backwards page by page. This puts things out of the flow of the narrative and allows me to be more objective on a line-by-line basis.

There’s a value to this practice that goes beyond cutting words. As I’ve been deciding which scenes, chapters, sentences and words can go, I couldn’t help but pay attention to and form a critical opinion on how all the different macro- and micro-pieces of my manuscript do or don’t work together. Making an effort to cut words not only gives me a more attractive word count, it forces me to look at the quality of my writing on two levels: Big picture and little picture.

What about you, my fellow writers? What have been your favorite writing/editing tips of 2010?