2017 NaNoWriMo StoryBundle

On Editing

Editing is essential. Whether you do it as you write the story and loop back through prior chapters to smooth them out or whether you wait until you have a first draft in hand, you need to edit. (Especially as you get older. I seem to be dropping more words as I type these days than I used to, so at least one pass is needed just to see that that word I thought I’d included didn’t actually make it to the page.)

My own personal editing process involves a fairly substantial second draft on any novel. Two of the seven I’ve completed required a gutting and rewriting of 90% of the novel. The others required a more normal for me pass where I added description so readers could actually picture the scene and so dialogue scenes could actually include more than just the words that were said.

After that I do passes to deepen the point of view by removing filtering words (saw, heard, felt, thought, etc.) and also look for my own personal bugaboos (further/farther, lay/lie, etc.)

I also run spellcheck. It’s pretty much the only way I know to make sure that a character name stays the same name throughout the entire book. (I write each name down the first time spellcheck flags it and then tell spellcheck to ignore that word. If it crops up again and it isn’t in a possessive form or plural form, then I know I have a spelling error to address.)

I’m lucky that I spent a good fifteen years of my professional life writing reports for people with extensive vocabularies and an eye for the littlest mistake. They sit in the back of my mind as I write pointing out the proper usage of words like affect vs. effect so I don’t have to go back for most of those.

But, if you haven’t had that kind of “wonderful” training (we once spent an hour and a half in a business meeting debating whether you use its or their when referencing the compliance department), it’s helpful to read a few resources that point out to you what you may not know yet.

And one of those happens to be in the NaNoWriMo StoryBundle (which is only available for two more days and which you knew I had to mention at least one more time, right?). It’s called Blood From Your Own Pen by Sam Knight and it’s full of good advice. There are some points I disagree on because that’s just the type of person I am, but overall I think it’s a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about formatting or editing. And, of course, me being the chatty type I am, I also liked the style it was written in.

It’s part of the base package for the StoryBundle, so you could get it and three other books for just $5! But you have to act now. (And, really, if you’re going to buy the bundle why not upgrade to the full bundle? Just sayin’.)

Time to NaNo

And I have to say that Patricia C. Wrede’s post for the day, Looking for Perfection, is a must-read for any writer really, but especially anyone doing NaNo who isn’t quite sure of the ground under their feet.

Remember, with writing, there are no wasted words or bad directions, there’s just learning what works and what doesn’t and constantly improving one little step at a time.

(And, since it is the start of NaNo and you just knew I had to do it, a little reminder that the NaNoWriMo StoryBundle is still available and full of lots of wonderful writerly advice, some that will work for you and some that might not, but all of it worth considering.)

On Collaboration

I’ll admit it, I don’t always play well with others. But when I was working in a corporate environment, I pretty much had to. A lot of the work I did involved coordinating my efforts with others and then writing up reports on what we’d found. Sometimes those reports were a hundred pages long and involved five or six people reading through and making sure that the terminology was correct and that we all agreed on the presentation of the facts.

So when I started writing I was glad to play in my own little sandbox. But there have been times I’ve been tempted to collaborate with a fellow writer. I have one writer friend who has brilliant off-the-wall ideas that I could never match. But I do better than they do with continuity and character development. So at one point I thought it might be good for us to combine those two strengths to write something together.

(We never did, but it was something I thought about.)

One of my hesitations though–other than the fact that I tend to prefer my own solutions to problems–was the legal aspect of it. You can’t just say, “Hey, let’s write a novel together.” You have to think about who owns the copyright, how much you’ll each earn from it, what happens if one of you doesn’t want to continue, etc.

There was just too much that could go wrong and that I couldn’t foresee for me to be comfortable entering into a collaboration like that.

And how do you work together? Who writes the first draft? Who makes edits?

There were just too many moving parts to it for me to be comfortable doing it.

But it turns out that one of the books in the NaNo Bundle (and only in the Nano Bundle at this point) is Writing as a Team Sport by Kevin J. Anderson.

(You might’ve heard of him. He’s the guy who’s co-written all those Dune books. And many more besides. Been on the bestseller lists multiple times. Sold millions of copies of his books. Just an average Joe, really.)

In that book, not only does he talk about different possible approaches to collaborating and outline some of the pros and cons of doing so, he also includes at the end a sample legal agreement that you can use.

That agreement alone is worth the price of the bundle. For example, it would’ve never occurred to me to include an indemnification clause in a collaboration contract even though it makes total sense to do so now that I think about it. Or to mention plagiarism, for that matter.

The book didn’t convince me to rush out and start collaborating with other authors, but I do feel much more confident in my ability to do so successfully and in a way that protects both me and any potential co-author.

So if you’ve collaborated in the past or you’re thinking about it now, buy the bundle, read the book. It’s a tremendous resource that you should definitely check out and that will probably save you a lot of heartache or drama down the road.

(And, not covered by this book, but shared by another author recently: Be careful if you decide to collaborate with someone you’re dating but not in a long-term relationship with. Keven and his wife and DWS and KKR have both successfully collaborated and stayed married for decades, but imagine collaborating on a book with someone you then break up with.)