RTW: How I Revise

Road Trip Wednesday is a blog carnival, where YA Highway’s contributors and readers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s take on the topic.

This Week's Topic is: For many, December is a post-NaNoWriMo revision haze! How do you approach revising? Any tips or tricks or resources you can share?

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I hate revisions. (Remember that time I so artistically illustrated how I feel about them? Still do.) 

It’s not that I don’t love what they do for my book (that is, make it infinitely better than it was before). And it’s not that I’m necessarily terrible at revising. But revising is hard. I mean, 2,786 divided by 9,087 in your head kind of hard. (And if that’s not hard for you, have you considered taking a stab at time travel?)

Most of the time I stare at my story knowing what to do to make it better but not understanding how I’ll ever be able to accomplish that. My solution: Start big, work in batches, and take breaks between revisions.

There’s a good chance I’ll blog in more detail about my revision process in the future,* so for now, here’s the abridged version:

1. Read it. After taking some time off, I’ll go back and read the whole book, making notes as I go but not spending too much time on it. Mostly I want to get a feel for the book as a whole, as a reader would see it.

2. Tackle the big issues. There’s no point in doing line edits until larger revisions are done since chunks may be cut. So I first spend time on the biggies: pacing, plot, character development, setting, yada yada yada.

3. Brainstorm. Because fixes for big-picture problems never reveal themselves to me in dreams and/or drug-induced stupors, I need to brainstorm how I’ll spin my crap of a story into gold. Or at least steel with a believable gold paint job.

4. Revise in sections. When I consider revising an entire manuscript I get the sudden urge to hurl myself off of a tall building. Hence my love for working in small batches. I work my way through the problems from those that will create the most changes throughout to the one that will create the least. Scrivener is great for this because I can add all of my notes in the sidebar then create a document full of the big problems I’ll need to fix. I can keep my list of issues or my brainstormed list of fixes in one window while I revise in the other. 

5. Start big, end small. Once I’ve finished revising based on big-picture issues (synonym: rewriting), I’ll take on smaller problems that may be specific to a scene or chapter. Here still, I’ll work in small batches, tackling one chapter at a time. It makes a huge set of revision notes seem much more manageable. And it makes leaping from tall buildings in a single bound sound less tempting.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat. You know, until my manuscript is looking as shiny as Pantene-commercial hair. Eventually, once the story is in good shape, I’ll tackle line edits. 

What are your revision tips?

*Some time before 2015, definitely. 

RTW: Literary Aspirations

Road Trip Wednesday is a blog carnival, where YA Highway’s contributors and readers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s take on the topic.

This week’s prompt was: What do you hope to be writing in one year? Three? Five?

Let’s be honest for a minute. The following are more along the lines of “I hope that in a year I’ll be swimming in money à la ScroogeMcDuck while watching my pet polar bear cub frolic in my infinity pool” than “I hope that I’ll still have my job and enjoy watching videos like this.” Which is to say, completely unrealistic.

That’s part of the fun, right? So, with that in mind, here are my literary hopes and dreams:

One year: I hope I’ll be writing a second book as I simultaneously work with my editor to edit the first.  (Because of course by then my current WIP will not only have gotten an agent but also a publishing contract.)

Three years: I’ll be writing a blog post to tell you guys that yet another book has hit the New York Times bestseller list and that J.K. Rowling called my latest novel “brilliant.”

Five years: I’ll be polishing my speech for my joint wins of the Newbery and Printz awards. How will I ever differentiate my talks enough that guests who attend both won’t be bored?

Realistically? I just really hope I’m not STILL WRITING THE SAME BOOK AS I HAVE BEEN FOR 12 EONS.

What are your one-, three-, and five-year writing dreams?

P.S. A giant huge monstrous congratulations to Rebecca Behrens whose book just sold! Read the announcement on her blog. 

Required Reading

Road Trip Wednesday is a blog carnival, where YA Highway’s contributors and readers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s take on the topic.

This week’s prompt was: What’s your favorite book that you had to read for a class?*

Required reading in school gets a bad name because for some kids reading anything by mandate guarantees a book’s suckiness. And don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of books I wasn’t thrilled to read in school—like, say, the snoozefest that is Walden—but mostly we’re asked to read certain books because they rocked when they were written, they rock now, and they’ll continue to rock until the world ends or zombies eat humanity, whichever comes first.

Because of that, I can’t pick just one book I loved. There are way, way too many to count. And this is clearly not all of them, just the ones I could remember right away.** Cue the montage:

 

 

I loved these books so much that just writing this post makes me want to read them all over again.

What are some of your favorite books of those you had to read for school?

*Yep, I realize I’m super late to this party. It’s fashionable, right?

**There’s a chance I just added some that weren’t school books but that I read during that time. I’m pretty sure most were required reading, though.

RTW: The Story Love List

Road Trip Wednesday is a blog carnival, where YA Highway’s contributors and readers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s take on the topic.

This week’s prompt was: Inspired by Stephanie Perkins’ poston Natalie Whipple’s blog, what is your novel’s “Love List”?

According to The Great and Powerful Ms. Perkins, here’s the function of a love list:

Whenever I begin a new project, I also begin a list called “What I Love About This Story.” I start by writing down those first ideas that sparked the fires of my mind, and then I add more ideas to it as I discover them during my push through early drafts.

With that in mind, here are a few things I love about my story:

A boy with an accent

Grief

Air that smells like chocolate

Memory loss

Buzzed hair

Overcoming disability

Candy necklace

Electroshock therapy

Childhood friends

Cliffs overlooking a lake

Guilt

Red plastic glasses

Creepy hospital

Sacrifice

Stargazing

And because I basically have a love list in my mind, where I store parts of scenes, I thought it’d be fun to give you love lists from two different perspectives, too. So the first is what I love about my story in songs that capture a moment, a scene, a chapter, or the whole book. I’ve added keywords from above if they pertain to this musical love list.

Overcoming disability, memory loss:

Grief, guilt:

Creepy hospital:

Creepy hospital, sacrifice:

The second is a visual love list, with any word tags from above.

A boy with an accent, buzzed hair:

Stargazing, cliffs overlooking a lake

Creepy hospital

What’s on your love list?