Boarders writing a Novel Part 12.

[Magnar of Skagos]

Thank you so much everyone for the answers! I'll keep going then without editing, maybe it is for the best since as you guys said having the complete story in front of you makes the editing kind of easier since you then know what no longer fits into the story. When the first draft is finished, I can sit down much more relaxed and just enjoy editing and fixing the story up, so that is probably the way to go for me.

No problem! I have found that when you completely finish the first draft, you know to an extent what the climax is going to be, how the characters are going to end up, etc. And knowing this really allows you to go ahead an sneak in little hints and foreshadowing into your story.

Yes, I totally agree on this point, the reason for why I have been so worried is that I thought I was using the "wrong" method, if there even is a wrong or right method which of course there isn't but I thought I was doing it in maybe not the most optimal way. Anyway, I agree fully and feel much more calmer now that I have heard some of you guys' feedback haha, so I'm gonna write it in its entirety and then start the editing, which really seems like the right way to go since as you say it is two very different mindsets. Thanks again! It's nice to have this little thread of aspiring writers to talk to.

So, another topic I think is interesting, although I don't need advice on this but I thought it would be fun to hear about how you guys do it. Anyway, my question is; How do your writing schedule usually look? I try to fit in an hour a day for writing, and in this hour I have no goals when it comes to word count or page numbers, I just write and see how far it takes me in an hour. I know that authors like for example Stephen King have a daily quota (if that is the right word, I think you know what I mean), but when I tried to have those kind of goals I just ended up thinking all the time while writing how far I had left until I had reached my goal. So, nowadays I just go in thinking that I'm going to sit down for an hour, and if only three lines come out of it then so be it. It's the only way that works for me :)

The fantasy writer Steven Erikson, responsible for the Malazan Book of the Fallen said that he sits down to write for 4 hours every day, and that whether he gets 10 words or 10 pages out of it, he just does his time and then steps away from the keyboard.

When i was working on my first draft (I was in my 5th and final year of high school) I had a goal of roughly 3,500 words a day, and it took from about this time to Christmas to finish it. Now that I am in college I have found it really difficult to manage that task, so whenever I have free time (weekends) I try to get a lot of writing done. Currently I am in the revision stage, and have found that I'm rewriting a hell of a lot of stuff I'd wrote before. I am also reworking a lot of the characters and plot points, and trying to really flesh out my world. This has all taken a toll on my daily word count, but I have twice as long a summer as I did in highschool and I will have a lot of time to work.

[henderson]

I published Crepier, third novella in the Nambroc Sequence, yesterday.

[iiandyiiii]

Congrats, henderson! Good luck on sales.

[Neumond]

I hope your book takes off henderson :).

I´m editing the first 150 pages now. It´s my first time.

20 pages in and I really love the process. Didn´t expect that at all :cool4: .

[Kyoshi]

I published Crepier, third novella in the Nambroc Sequence, yesterday.

Congratulations! Hope the sales rocket and you get good reviews.

[henderson]

iiandyiiii and Kyoshi -- Thank you very much for the kind words.

Neumond -- Appreciate the sentiment. I did not like editing until I realized that it was an opportunity to refine the story and to add touches like foreshadowing and character nuances.

[iiandyiiii]

Currently working on my third novel -- first two were fantasy (second was fantasy-satire), and this one will be sci-fi, with a bit of murder mystery and thriller thrown in. Something like "A huge colony ship is the first to leave our solar system on a decades-long journey, and three years into the trip, people start dying. A killer is onboard, and it's up to [character name] to stop them before it's too late!"

[Neumond]

Neumond -- Appreciate the sentiment. I did not like editing until I realized that it was an opportunity to refine the story and to add touches like foreshadowing and character nuances.

Thanks henderson. I surpisingly liked it from the start.

I´m not adding much at the moment. Perhaps I´m going over board with the cutting... I´ve just reduced 36 pages to 27. At least the next editing round will be faster :drunk: .

At all: If you already edited a novel. What were the most important things you changed/edited? Were there things you "regretted"?

iiyandiiii: Sounds good to me. I`d probably read it :).

[Zoë Sumra]

Thanks henderson. I surpisingly liked it from the start.

I´m not adding much at the moment. Perhaps I´m going over board with the cutting... I´ve just reduced 36 pages to 27. At least the next editing round will be faster :drunk: .

At all: If you already edited a novel. What were the most important things you changed/edited? Were there things you "regretted"?

Your second draft, post first edit, should be about ten percent shorter than your first draft. You're on the right track if you're cutting. Adding little touches like henderson mentions can be one function of editing but a primary function, to me, is getting rid of stuff I shouldn't have put on the page in the first place.

The edit process partly rests on working out what you, as a writer, do less than optimally and fixing it. Making the same mistake over and over isn't great but isn't a big problem either, providing you look out for it and fix it. My big one is having characters discuss what they're about to do (usually towards the end of a chapter - they discuss the next chapter's planned action). Part of my structural edit is going through and taking out those conversations. They're useful for me in the first draft for concentrating the mind on where the characters are going to go next, much in the vein of the mystery writer who always writes an extra chapter towards the end of the first draft where the detective works out whodunnit, but they don't need to stay there.

I edit at least twice, because I can't adequately concentrate on structure and content at the same time - I'll fix a few content errors in my structural edit but won't look for them that hard. In the content edit, I go through every sentence for, e.g., redundancies, unwanted rhyming, elegance, grammar/punctuation... it's a long list.

[Neumond]

Thank you Eloisa. That was exactly the kind of response I hoped for :).

Your second draft, post first edit, should be about ten percent shorter than your first draft. You're on the right track if you're cutting. Adding little touches like henderson mentions can be one function of editing but a primary function, to me, is getting rid of stuff I shouldn't have put on the page in the first place.

Love the last sentence :). I hope you are right and I don´t lose the track along the way.

The edit process partly rests on working out what you, as a writer, do less than optimally and fixing it. Making the same mistake over and over isn't great but isn't a big problem either, providing you look out for it and fix it. My big one is having characters discuss what they're about to do (usually towards the end of a chapter - they discuss the next chapter's planned action). Part of my structural edit is going through and taking out those conversations. They're useful for me in the first draft for concentrating the mind on where the characters are going to go next, much in the vein of the mystery writer who always writes an extra chapter towards the end of the first draft where the detective works out whodunnit, but they don't need to stay there.

Thank you! It´s so obvious but I never would have put it in such clear words.

Luckily I did this already to some extent.

I´ve already learned, that I like "scene-bridges". Just cut out two whole pages, that only told how a character went from point A to B. Of course I had to describe what the character sees, smells, hears,... I mean, that´s what we´re all interested in. :bang:

I´m hitting page 50 of the first draft now and most of my cutting was due to world-building and inner monologue. The "extra" chapter to work out the plot was my world building. The first thing I knew of my novel was, how the world looks after everything is said and done. It´s fitting that I go overboard with it. Even if it disrupts a fight in a fast paced action scene...

:fencing: Time out! My character has to think in length about the names, politics and structures of these districts.

I edit at least twice, because I can't adequately concentrate on structure and content at the same time - I'll fix a few content errors in my structural edit but won't look for them that hard. In the content edit, I go through every sentence for, e.g., redundancies, unwanted rhyming, elegance, grammar/punctuation... it's a long list.

It will probably need much more than two edits. At the moment it´s fun. I feel like a stone mace, freeing the true form of a rock.

[Zoë Sumra]

It will probably need much more than two edits. At the moment it´s fun. I feel like a stone mace, freeing the true form of a rock.

If you have fun with the edit process, you'll produce a good result at the end, so hurray all around. (I average six edits of which at least one is traditional print-out with red pen and another two, towards the end of the process, are reading on my Kindle: make sure that you look at the story - physically look at it - in a different way from your norm, at least once. Change the font, print it out, whatever. It reduces your tendency to keep reading over the same mistakes. I was on my fifth or sixth edit of Sailor to a Siren, my first Kindle edit, when I noticed a sentence that had spent two years missing its intended verb.)

[Neumond]

If you have fun with the edit process, you'll produce a good result at the end, so hurray all around. (I average six edits of which at least one is traditional print-out with red pen and another two, towards the end of the process, are reading on my Kindle: make sure that you look at the story - physically look at it - in a different way from your norm, at least once. Change the font, print it out, whatever. It reduces your tendency to keep reading over the same mistakes. I was on my fifth or sixth edit of Sailor to a Siren, my first Kindle edit, when I noticed a sentence that had spent two years missing its intended verb.)

Thank you Eloisa :). I really hope I´ll get a good result.

You are so right about looking at it in different medias. I printed out the first 150 pages and it really helped getting some distance between me and my draft.

I found a weird description of rust swirling in the air, which sounded extremely inappropriate. I don´t get how I missed that on the screen...

Putting it on the Kindle sounds like a great idea. I´ll try that later on. :)

( I don´t want to think about language now. This will be a mammoth task :blushing: .)

[Myrddin]

I saw this quote from James Marsters about how Joss Weadon got his writers to write above and beyond they're usual work.

"Joss asked the writers to come up with their worst day, the day they regret, the day that keeps them up at night, the day that they hurt somebody without a good reason, or the day they were publicly humiliated."And then slap fangs on top of that, and tell the world about their pain. And this was every single time."

"I would say, 'What a great script. 'And they would look at me sheepishly, and say, 'Do you realize what we've written?' They were being very brave every single week," he said.

"It's basically Buffy having one bad day after another, trying to grow up, trying to become an adult. So he was asking for the real stuff from those writers, like, 'Don't just be interesting, tell me something you do not want to tell me.'"

Sounds like a great strategy, if painful.

[Neumond]

(...)

Sounds like a great strategy, if painful.

Sounds very good. I think most writer will probably do that on their own. (And I still come back for more :drunk: )

I´m polishing the first scene now. I want to ask my better half, if what I wrote there makes any sense to him. And what he thinks of the writing...

(That´s a really scary thought actually. I´m so nervous... :frown5: )

[Myrddin]

Sounds very good. I think most writer will probably do that on their own. (And I still come back for more :drunk: )

Agreed.

But for me the challenge is to dig deeper than is comfortable. There are some pains, experiences, etc that I don't mind picking open to share through fiction. Others, less so. We all have things we're really ashamed of (usually stupid stuff in reality). The hard part is putting those shameful experiences (the real regrets) into a character because of a fear that someone will realize where the idea came from. The writer's past. My past.

The real success of Weadon's writing room was that he pushed his writers out of their comfort zones and continued to push until they were truly exposed.

Much of my writing is based on the time I spent traveling alone around Europe between high school and college. The adventures and failures. The weird feeling returning home to find that it is both the same and different, because I had changed. No one understood what I had gone through, even the good. Few could relate.

What I haven't delved too much in my writing is my failures in life, personal, professional, emotional, all of it. This quote about Weadon's writer's room challenges me to do that.

[SpaceChampion]

Interesting post on why prologues are usually unnecessary and typically undermine a story. Using subtext instead gives your story weight.

[First of My Name]

Interesting post on why prologues are usually unnecessary and typically undermine a story. Using subtext instead gives your story weight.

I'm unsure whether my prologue is worth keeping, because I'm rather fond of it but the article has some good points.

Would anyone be willing to proofread it? It's only five pages or so.

[Corvinus85]

I'm unsure whether my prologue is worth keeping, because I'm rather fond of it but the article has some good points.

Would anyone be willing to proofread it? It's only five pages or so.

I'll give it a go.

[Corvinus85]

Interesting post on why prologues are usually unnecessary and typically undermine a story. Using subtext instead gives your story weight.

I just started writing a novel today (fan fic, but I am doing it damn it) and when I opened the file, I saw I had already written the title of the book plus the sub-title of "Prologue". I quickly erased that when I realized that what I was planning to write wouldn't fit in a proper prologue.

[First of My Name]

I'll give it a go.

Thanks :) I'll PM it to you soon.