By Dan Haring
2013 already? Almost February already? Holy cow. Well, happy new year everyone! I'm sorry for this being my first appearance here in a while. Work and writing and life have been pretty busy lately. We have about seven weeks to finish up the movie Epic, which is what I'm currently working on. I'm really excited about it, and you can check out the trailer here.
As far as writing is concerned, I'm just finishing up a pretty major revision on my MG fantasy book. It feels like I've been revising this book forever and I'm pretty sick of the process, but I have to admit it keeps getting better. So I'm definitely glad I did it, it just wasn't tons of fun. But that's the life, right? So hopefully this will be the version my agent feels is ready to go out into the world. Fingers crossed!
At the beginning of the year, you know, exactly four weeks ago, I did a quick check to see how I did on my 2012 revisions. Overall I did all right. Still didn't hit some things I really wanted to, but if felt like I put up a pretty good fight.
So I'm sitting at the (almost) beginning of another year, and I'm trying to come up with new goals for this year. I don't know if it's a copout or not, but I'm thinking about just keeping the goals I didn't hit from last year.
Honestly, right now I'm pretty happy with life. I have an amazing family, great job, and I'm able to write and do side projects. There's always room for growth and progress, and I want to keep striving for those. But right now I really just want to enjoy life, enjoy each day for what it is. I want to enjoy the little moments and not always be hoping and wishing and waiting for things.
Because hey, I'm alive for another day, and that's pretty cool. All the best to you and yours this coming year!
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Monday, January 28, 2013
Friday, October 26, 2012
Is Cutting More Important than Adding?
By Jordan Dane
@JordanDane
Today I have a guest post from Sechin Tower, author of Mad Science Institute (MSI), a highly unusual yet thoroughly entertaining young adult suspense novel. I met Sechin on Twitter. Once I saw that he was a game developer, I asked for his help to develop my next proposal, a near future YA techno thriller that involves gaming and he helped me fine tune my game world. I also downloaded his book and found a real gem. Since he’s a teacher, he incorporates science into the plot to make learning fun for young readers. I absolutely fell in love with his YA voice and his characters and am looking forward to his next book. Below is a summary of Mad Science Institute.
Sophia "Soap" Lazarcheck is a girl genius with a knack for making robots-and for making robots explode. After her talents earn her admission into a secretive university institute, she is swiftly drawn into a conspiracy more than a century in the making. Soap is pitted against murderous thugs, experimental weaponry, lizard monsters, and a nefarious doomsday device that can bring civilization to a sudden and very messy end.
Welcome, Sechin!
I had a professor who insisted that the best way to write a two-page paper was to write a 10 page paper, throw it all away, and then hand in pages 11 and 12. When I tell the same thing to my students, they don’t buy it. I can’t blame them: I didn’t really buy it either, not until I started writing novels.
My professor’s point was that not all pages are created equal. Of course it takes more effort to write 10 or 12 bad pages than two bad pages, and maybe even more than two mediocre pages. But good pages require time and effort, as well as research, experimentation, structuring, restructuring, and a nearly endless amount of general fussing. At the very least, good pages require two steps: adding and cutting.
I teach two discrete groups of students and I’ve found that each needs this advice for different reasons. One of my student groups consists of the crème-de-la-crème of our school’s scholars, students who take the most challenging courses, maintain the highest GPAs, and participate in every extracurricular activity that might sparkle on their college applications. My other group consists of at-risk kids in an alternative school program. Many of these students are extremely intelligent, but for a dizzying array of reasons none of them has had much success in school.
The advanced students always want to build up their writing until it overflows. They do the research, they know the issues, they have the facts, and they want to pile it all in without any thought to purpose or readability. The bigger the better: if the assignment calls for two pages, then they assume 10 ought to get a better grade. If they run out of things to say, they resort to inflated words and ponderous sentences. Their writing often becomes a cluttered, colorless hallway that never leads anywhere.
My alternative high-schoolers, on the other hand, bring a great deal of passion about anything they see as relevant to their lives. They are lively, colorful, and outspoken, but even on their favorite topics their writing is terse. For them, it’s about getting to the point. Why wade through the muck of evidence and logic when you can gallop right to the exciting conclusion? Why bother explaining anything if you feel like you already understand it?
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I built a composite of these two groups when I wrote Mad Science Institute. I started by combining all the drive and technical know-how of the advanced students with the vitality and quirkiness of the alternative school kids. I crammed a lot into each character and just as much into the plot and setting, but in the cutting phase I eliminated everything that failed to accelerate the story or develop the characters. It meant cutting some perfectly good ideas, but that was okay: true to the mad science theme, I knew I could stitch them together and give them a new life whenever I was ready. Right then, all that mattered was pruning back and boiling down until the book became balanced and lean.
Being a teacher helped me write a better novel, and writing a novel helped me become a better teacher. I’m not trying to teach my students to become novelists—I wouldn’t push it on them any more than a P.E. teacher would urge all of his students to aim for NFL careers—but what works for crafting a novel applies to essays, letters, and other forms of writing as well. By the end of each year, I’m gratified to see that those students who tended to add too much have learned to accomplish more with fewer words, and the ones who want to start too small learn that they need to build up before they can trim down.
Despite what some students claim, the art of writing is nothing that can be mastered with a mere 16 or 17 years of practice. If I’m any better at it than a student, it isn’t because of what I’ve written but because of what I’ve un-written. Deleting the thousands of pages of rough drafts and practice novels was the only way I could learn what should stay and what just gets in the way, and by the time my students delete that many pages they’ll be better writers than I am.
It seems to me that what you cut is as important as what you add, but maybe that’s just my process. I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter.
What is your process? Are you a cutter or adder when it comes to editing?
Sechin’s website & twitter
@JordanDane
Today I have a guest post from Sechin Tower, author of Mad Science Institute (MSI), a highly unusual yet thoroughly entertaining young adult suspense novel. I met Sechin on Twitter. Once I saw that he was a game developer, I asked for his help to develop my next proposal, a near future YA techno thriller that involves gaming and he helped me fine tune my game world. I also downloaded his book and found a real gem. Since he’s a teacher, he incorporates science into the plot to make learning fun for young readers. I absolutely fell in love with his YA voice and his characters and am looking forward to his next book. Below is a summary of Mad Science Institute.
Sophia "Soap" Lazarcheck is a girl genius with a knack for making robots-and for making robots explode. After her talents earn her admission into a secretive university institute, she is swiftly drawn into a conspiracy more than a century in the making. Soap is pitted against murderous thugs, experimental weaponry, lizard monsters, and a nefarious doomsday device that can bring civilization to a sudden and very messy end.
Welcome, Sechin!
My professor’s point was that not all pages are created equal. Of course it takes more effort to write 10 or 12 bad pages than two bad pages, and maybe even more than two mediocre pages. But good pages require time and effort, as well as research, experimentation, structuring, restructuring, and a nearly endless amount of general fussing. At the very least, good pages require two steps: adding and cutting.
I teach two discrete groups of students and I’ve found that each needs this advice for different reasons. One of my student groups consists of the crème-de-la-crème of our school’s scholars, students who take the most challenging courses, maintain the highest GPAs, and participate in every extracurricular activity that might sparkle on their college applications. My other group consists of at-risk kids in an alternative school program. Many of these students are extremely intelligent, but for a dizzying array of reasons none of them has had much success in school.
The advanced students always want to build up their writing until it overflows. They do the research, they know the issues, they have the facts, and they want to pile it all in without any thought to purpose or readability. The bigger the better: if the assignment calls for two pages, then they assume 10 ought to get a better grade. If they run out of things to say, they resort to inflated words and ponderous sentences. Their writing often becomes a cluttered, colorless hallway that never leads anywhere.
My alternative high-schoolers, on the other hand, bring a great deal of passion about anything they see as relevant to their lives. They are lively, colorful, and outspoken, but even on their favorite topics their writing is terse. For them, it’s about getting to the point. Why wade through the muck of evidence and logic when you can gallop right to the exciting conclusion? Why bother explaining anything if you feel like you already understand it?
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I built a composite of these two groups when I wrote Mad Science Institute. I started by combining all the drive and technical know-how of the advanced students with the vitality and quirkiness of the alternative school kids. I crammed a lot into each character and just as much into the plot and setting, but in the cutting phase I eliminated everything that failed to accelerate the story or develop the characters. It meant cutting some perfectly good ideas, but that was okay: true to the mad science theme, I knew I could stitch them together and give them a new life whenever I was ready. Right then, all that mattered was pruning back and boiling down until the book became balanced and lean.
Being a teacher helped me write a better novel, and writing a novel helped me become a better teacher. I’m not trying to teach my students to become novelists—I wouldn’t push it on them any more than a P.E. teacher would urge all of his students to aim for NFL careers—but what works for crafting a novel applies to essays, letters, and other forms of writing as well. By the end of each year, I’m gratified to see that those students who tended to add too much have learned to accomplish more with fewer words, and the ones who want to start too small learn that they need to build up before they can trim down.
Despite what some students claim, the art of writing is nothing that can be mastered with a mere 16 or 17 years of practice. If I’m any better at it than a student, it isn’t because of what I’ve written but because of what I’ve un-written. Deleting the thousands of pages of rough drafts and practice novels was the only way I could learn what should stay and what just gets in the way, and by the time my students delete that many pages they’ll be better writers than I am.
It seems to me that what you cut is as important as what you add, but maybe that’s just my process. I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter.
What is your process? Are you a cutter or adder when it comes to editing?
Sechin’s website & twitter
Monday, October 15, 2012
When Story Comes Together
This will be short and sweet, just a nice little bon mot I want to share. This may not seem like much either, but trust me: the moment itself was huge.
Earlier this week, my Egmont USA editor, Greg Ferguson, and I were going over his comments on MONSTERS, the last book in the ASHES trilogy, and we'd been on the phone a good hour and a half before finally getting around to talking about the last scene and sequence. Greg asked a great question about how I wanted people to feel when all was said and done; I told him; and then he mentioned that, well, he thought that was true and the tone was nearly there, but he really suggested that we needed to look at this one sentence about three, four paragraphs from the very end. I was a little puzzled because it seemed like a perfectly fine line to me. But then he read the line out loud a couple times, and it was very strange . . . but hearing it come out of someone else's mouth really was a lightbulb moment. I realized then that he was onto something; there was something not quite right about the sentence, although I was darned if I knew what it was.
So we played around with the sentence, pulling it apart, looking at all the words. I wish I could say that I figured it out first, but it was Greg who said, "Well, what if we get rid of the word but? Change it from a conditional to an affirmation, something positive." So he did just that, read the sentence back--and damn, if that one little word wasn't the make-or-break moment. Simply brilliant.
Why do I even dwell on this? Why is it worth tucking away as one of those fabulously collaborative moments that, all too often, we don't let ourselves experience? Because: sometimes I think writers can get proprietary, losing sight of the huge contribution a very good editor can make toward shaping a manuscript. I know a ton of writers who get all torqued when editors come at them with revisions or comments. I've already admitted that, yes, the first edit letter I ever got from Greg made me collapse into a weeping puddle of goo because it was so detailed, I thought the guy truly hated what I'd written. It took my husband to observe that, you know, the guy loved the series or he wouldn't have bought it; and another pro writer friend to point out that an editor who invested this much into producing such detailed notes and questions was a) rare and b) someone from whom I could learn a great deal.
If there's one thing I've repeated over and over again and in many different venues, it's this: not every word deserves to live. A writer has to be ruthless when it comes to editing out extraneous stuff, and I'm pretty good when it come to throttling up my weed-whacker. Normally, I'll kill about 15-20% of a final manuscript. I'd like to think that I catch every errant word, but of course, I don't. No one does. But I guess I'm fixated on that single moment as a terrific example of what working with a gifted editor can be: not dictatorial but collaborative. An editor like Greg is not only going through a manuscript with a flea comb; he's not only interested in pacing. He's interested in how a book will make people feel. He's invested in clarity. We agonized over one bloody line because we both wanted the message to come across in a very particular way. This wasn't about killing a word; it was about reinforcing an emotion.
Now, am I saying that we let editors rewrite our work? No. Do we always agree? Of course not. Yes, we spin the stories. Yes, sometimes it can feel as if the comments are nits and silly; I can always tell when Greg's getting punchy from the tone of a question, and we're comfortable enough with one another now that I can kid him about it, too.
So, yeah, stick to your guns; defend your work because, when push comes to shove, no one cares as much about your book as you. But always remember, guys: The best editors are, first and foremost, tremendous readers, people who want to be swept away into that perfect moment when story comes together and language does not fail.
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