How Bad Do You Want It?

It’s been about a month since my last post. Sorry about that, it’s been a busy past month. School’s started up again. So most of August since my last post was dedicated trying to finish summer homework and get my last few freedoms of summer in. It was the last summer I’ll ever have as a high school student, so I didn’t want to waste it.

Personally I don’t feel like it was wasted. I might not have accomplished as much as I was hoping to, for example I really would have liked to have finished my book revision. However, I did make some desperately needed changes and make it 2/3 through the book. I finished writing a major, soul destroying, three years in the making, total of 319,994 word fan fiction. My little sister and I developed a method of co-writing together. Margaret and I established the bare bones of a story we’d like to co-write together and maybe post here (Bare bones as in we have the basic development of two main characters and the world conception – more news will come when we ourselves know what’s going on. So it’s actually more like we have the bones, but no skeleton yet. Considering we were lucky to have a real conversation every two weeks this summer, I hope you can understand).

But school’s back, and along with it a regular schedule. I am taking a lot of hard classes this year, but I’m also a lot more determined to really focus on literary aspirations this year. If I am indeed going to have two books before twenty (TITLE DROP), I really need to get a move on, especially considering I turn 17 this month.

It also helps that this year in my AP English class we are required to submit a piece of writing every single Monday, though it doesn’t really matter what the writing is. And you can get a virtually unlimited amount of extra credit by submitting multiple pieces (as long as you complete all the other required assignments). So now, not only am I writing just because I’m a writer and that’s what I love to do, but now I can get school credit for it! Is that awesome or what?

You’re jealous, I know you are.

But enough catch up.

As I mentioned earlier in the post, I did not manage to finish my book revision by the end of summer. My new goal is that I want to have it ready to send out by my birthday. It’d definitely doable, but it might be hard, especially considering I’d like to keep my grades up and I also decided in my infinite wisdom that senior year would be a great time to all of a sudden get involved in a bunch of clubs and take all the hardest classes. Also, because I finished that giant story that I mentioned earlier, now my brain is free to go and come up with all of these other lovely, tempting story ideas that I want to write.

Last night I found myself done with my homework at 8:30, a rare occurrence – but I’m really trying to be better at getting homework done early this year for exactly the same reason that led me to working on my book instead of the most recent story that has captured my attending.

The most recent little temptress taking occupancy in my brain has been a short little fan fiction that would take a lot of explaining that wouldn't be relevant to this post. I’ve been writing it in between classes and sometimes in class when we’re done with whatever’s going on.

Last night I found myself with a few extra hours to work on my Monday Musing (the name of the assignment for English I mentioned), or in other words, time to write.

When I pulled up Microsoft Word, though, I had to make a decision about what to actually write. I could be productive and actually work on the story instead of letting it die a few scraps of paper in a notebook, or I could be even more productive and work on my book. Just as I was about to pull out the notebook I had been writing the story in, though, this thought occurred to me.

How bad do I really want this book?

I had two ways I was willing to spend my time, working on my book or working on a fan fiction. I wanted to work on the fan fiction. I wanted to write it instead of working on this blog post.

But I asked myself how bad I wanted my book. Did I want it more than I wanted to write that story?

The answer was yes, I did.

Just because I needed extra inspiration, I looked up a Youtube video. Eric Thomas’s “How Bad Do You Want It” speech set to “Time” from Inception and sports videos. The sports were kind of lost on me. Never been good at sports, and no real desire to be good at sports. But the message of the speech itself is really applicable to just about everything.

This is the first part of the speech:

“There was a young man who wanted to make a lot of money, and so he went to a guru. He told the guru he wanted to reach his level of greatness. And so the guru said: “If you want to be on the same level I’m on, I’ll meet you tomorrow at the beach.”

So the young man arrived at 4:00 a.m. He had on a suit, but he should have worn shorts. The old man grabbed his hand and said: “How bad do you want to be successful?” The young responded: “Badly.”

So the old man told the young man to walk out into the water. It was waist deep. The young man thought: “This old man is crazy.”

The young man said to himself: “I want to make money and this guy has me out here swimming. I didn’t ask to be a lifeguard. I want to make money.

Then the old man said: “Come out a little farther,” and the young man did so.

As the young man was up to his shoulders in water he again thought: “This old man is crazy! He’s making money, but he’s crazy.”

The old man said, “Come out a little farther.”

The young man obeyed, but wavered as if he might turn back.

So the old man said: “I thought you said you wanted to be successful?”

“I do,” said the student.

So the old man ordered the young man to come out even farther, and when he did he pushed the young man’s head under water and held it down. Although the young man fought, the old man would not let him up. Just before the young man passed out the old man raised his head above the surface and said: “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.”

I don’t know how many of you have asthma today, but if you ever had an asthma attack before and you’re S.O.B. — you’ve got shortness of breath — and you’re wheezing, the only thing you’re trying to do is get some air. You don’t care about no basketball game. You don’t care what’s on TV.  You don’t care about nobody calling you. You don’t care about a party. The only thing you care about when you’re trying to breathe is to get some fresh air. That’s it. And when you get to the point where all you want to do is be successful as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.

I am here to tell you Number #1, most of you say you want to be successful, but you don’t want it bad. You just kind of want it. You don’t want it badder than you want to party. You don’t want it as much as you want to be cool. Most of you don’t want success as much as you want to sleep. Some of you want sleep more than you want success. And I’m here to tell you today that if you want to be successful you got to be willing to give up sleep.

You have to be willing to work off of three hours of sleep, two hours of sleep. If you really want to be successful, some day you’re going to have to stay up three days in a row because if you go to sleep you might miss the opportunity to be successful. That’s how bad you got to want it.””

I am not telling you in anyways to ignore everything else in your life in order to write. No. I want to breathe a lot more than I want good grades in my classes, and I’m working on that as well as my book, but the point is that if we really want this, we can’t just bandy about.  We can’t just “kind of want it.”

We have to actually want it.

I’ve talked before on this blog that it’s hard. It is. I don’t even know a lot of things about what I’m doing. I’m just muddling through all of this myself. I do know that it’s hard though.

More than that, though, I do know that if I don’t want it bad, if I don’t really want it, if I don’t want it more than I want to write some other story or surf Facebook then it’s not going to happen.

If you don’t want it bad enough, you won’t work hard enough to get it.

The Youtube video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watchfeature=player_embedded&v=_T1KyRtOWOc

It does NOT have the full speech. But it does have epic music. 

Reblog: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses

I had some time today because I didn't have any homework, so I thought that I would take the opportunity to work on my novel. In doing so I decided to look up a favorite article of mine, and realized that I should probably share it with all of you! I love some of the ideas that it proposes.

Darcy Pattison's "The Incredible Shrunken Manuscript: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses". http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/31-FE3-NovelRevision.html

"Without reading a single word of your novel, I can tell you some of its strengths and weaknesses by using the “Shrunken Manuscript” technique. The technique was born accidentally several years ago, when a friend asked me to critique her manuscript. We were a bit short on money at the time and I didn’t want to print out a couple hundred pages to read. Instead, I single-spaced the manuscript, reduced the font and then printed it out.

What I saw amazed me. Chapters that covered ten pages were now encapsulated on just three pages. It was easier to see how Act I led into Act II. Instead of flipping through hundreds of pages to check a fact, I had only a couple dozen pages to go through.

I decided to be really radical. I eliminated all white space at the ends of chapters and reduced the font to only 6-point, or even 5-point, until I had an entire 50-60,000 word novel in less than 30 pages.

I’ve heard the complaints: you can’t read a manuscript at that font size. You don’t need to. .

How to Use the Shrunken Manuscript Technique

Here’s how the process works. Identify something you want to visualize about your manuscript. I often ask students to identify their five strongest chapters, with strongest defined in any way they think is helpful for their manuscript. Then, take a bright marker and put an X over the strongest chapters. Yellow markers don’t tend to work as well as blue or pink. Finally, lay the manuscript on the floor in three rows with about ten pages in each row.

Now, step back and observe.

For example, if you have two strong chapters at the beginning and three strong chapters at the end, you have the dreaded sagging middle problem. If you have two strong chapters in the middle and three at the end, then you must question the opening: perhaps you started the story too early. An absence of X-ed chapters toward the end means you need a better climax.

At first, students were skeptical that this Shrunken Manuscript technique worked. But they were working in groups, and within each group, writers had exchanged and read manuscripts. When I identified one story as having a sagging middle, I asked the writer’s group if that was true of the manuscript. They said yes.

So, what are the rules of the Shrunken Manuscript? Actually, everything is arbitrary, based on rules I made up as I worked with the technique.

1. 30 pages. For me, 30 pages are about all I can take in visually at a time. Manuscripts up to 60,000 words can be shrunken to 30 pages; sometimes you need to put the story into two columns, which shrinks it even more. For manuscripts over 60,000 words, divide the manuscript in half and repeat the exercise for each half.

2. Mark 5-6 items. In 30 pages, it works well to mark 5-6 successful chapters. You could do more or less, but then you start to fudge on your criteria for a strong chapter.

3. Make your own key. While I like to mark chapters with a marker, others use stickers, glitter, beads and more.

4. Mark anything you want. The technique is flexible and can be used to consider anything in your story. Here are some suggestions, but feel free to adapt as needed:

• How often do the protagonist and antagonist go head to head? The conflicts should be spread out consistently through the novel and it must definitely happen in the climax scene. 
• Where does a certain character appear and how much space is devoted to that character? Here, you wouldn’t mark entire chapters, but scenes in which the character appears. What’s useful here is that you can easily see proportions. If Character A only appears in short scenes, so only 10% of the story (or 3 pages total) features Character A, then A shouldn’t be the main character.
• Dialogue versus prose. Because dialogue is often short, it tends to leave open space on the shrunken manuscript, making it easy to gauge if you are prose heavy or dialogue heavy.
• Does your setting vary across the story? Use different colors to mark the different settings. Often, writers want a setting to recur, with the subsequent events in that setting contrasting or supporting the previous events. This allows you to pinpoint exactly when the settings occur in the story.

In other words, this technique is good at evaluating the big picture of a novel, the overall structure, pacing, interactions. (See complete instructions on Shrunken Manuscripts here.)

I wondered if there were other useful techniques for seeing the big picture, and this is what I found.

Spreadsheet Plotting

Scott Westerfield and Justine Larbalestier use an adaptation of a spreadsheet to track a novel’s plot. Larbalestier says, “A novel is a large document containing a whole world with a population that can range from one (boring navel-gazing novel about a man trapped inside a unicycle) to billions or more (space opera where the Empress of the universe destroys a whole planet and the reader follows the last day of each inhabitant of said planet). Keeping track of all of that is tricky.”

Basically, you can decide to track chapters or scenes. Then for each scene/chapter, you fill in columns that ask Characters Present, Goal of Scene/Chapter, Setting, Timeline, Action v. Sitting Around, Word Count, and virtually anything else you want to chart. Depending on how obsessive you are, you can play with the spreadsheet software and do things such as highlight character names in different colors. Be sure to use consistent terminology, such as always calling a place “the picnic area,” and not changing it to “the park.” If you stay consistent, then you can use the spreadsheets sorting capability, letting you see at a glance how many scenes/chapters take place at the picnic area.

Both the spreadsheet plotting and the Shrunken Manuscript Technique are useful for revising a long novel because you can see different items at a glance. But they aren’t the same.

Shrunken Manuscripts can show you proportions at a glance, for example, how much space is devoted to Character A. You can find out the same information in spreadsheet plotting, but you must add up numbers: it’s not visual. With Shrunken Manuscripts, it’s also easy to mark multiple issues at one time by using different colors or other keys.

Spreadsheet plotting allows you to scan the actual content of chapters just by glancing down a column.  If you have one column for the emotional impact of a scene/chapter—perhaps assigning a 1-5 for emotional content—you can easily identify how the emotional arc is progressing. So, either content or progressions (plot, narrative arc, character arc, or emotional arc) are easier with spreadsheets.

From Shrinking to Exploding

On the other hand, when Kirby Larson, winner of the Newberry Honor medal (given to the most distinguished book published in children’s literature that year) for Hattie Big Sky, hit a wall in her writing, she took it to heart.

With the help of her friend and co-author, Mary Nethery, she taped large sheets of paper around the walls of her office. Then around the room, she wrote the major plot lines and started working with them. After two days of working BIG, she had her plot and working outline for revision done.

Working big or small, changing the manuscript’s size helps an author see the story better.

Characters

We’ve talked about techniques for seeing the overall shape of a story. What about techniques for seeing different aspects of the story? Here’s one for characters. Everyone knows that characters should run a story and that interesting characters make for interesting stories. But did you put an interesting character in your novel right from the start?

Read the first five pages of your story. Done? Stop!

Turn over page five and write down everything you know about the main character from those first five pages.

Does your list look something like this?

• 20 years old
• secretary
• likes red nail polish

If that’s all you know after five pages, you’re in trouble! By the end of five pages, readers should know much more about your main character, or they are likely to abandon the story. By page five, I like to be able to list at least a dozen unique characteristics, bits of trivia about the character, likes or dislikes, life issues, fears, etc. Do you give the reader a hint about the character’s inner life, not just a physical description? Do you give the reader a view of the setting through your character’s eyes?

By the end of page five, the reader should be hooked—by your characters.

Suggestion: Repeat the evaluation for a section near the middle of the book. Maybe you need to throw out the first couple chapters because you were learning who your characters are. If the results are just as dry and sterile though, you’ll definitely want to study characterization.

Dialogue

The difficult thing about dialogue is that it simulates speech, it begs for the ear. One way to test your dialogue is to pick a section of your novel with lots of dialogue. Remove the actions, thoughts, and speech tags, rewriting it as a play or script. Then, ask a couple friends to read it aloud. If you have the capability, either audiotape or videotape this reading.

Here’s an example from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, Chapter 9, with all speech tags and actions removed:

Grace: Oh, there you are. Come, dear, let’s go to your room and I’ll fix your hair.
Grace: Have you eaten?
Turtle: Mrs. Baumbach made me a dinner.
Grace: Your poor father’s probably starving; he’s been so busy on the phone, changing appointments and all.
Turtle: Daddy’s eating in the coffee shop; I just saw him there.
Grace: I think you should wear your party dress tonight; you look so pretty in pink.
Grace: You know, sweetheart, I’m rather hurt that you won’t tell your own mother about your clues.
Turtle: My lips are sealed.
Grace: Just one eensy-beensy clue?
Turtle: N-n-n.

Notice first, that Turtle doesn’t answer each time Grace, her mother, speaks. Dialogue isn’t just about the words used, but about the interchange between characters and that can involve silences.

Listen to the recording and evaluate the dialogue: Are the intonations natural, not forced? We don’t need explicit transitions like repetitions or explanations; instead, the intonation provides the coherence needed. Grace sounds overly cheerful as she tries to placate her daughter and worm the clues to the story’s mystery from her. Turtle sounds straightforward, until she realizes her mother’s intention and then resorts to monosyllables. Grace is characterized as a person who will flatter and be kind to get what she wants. Turtle is characterized as a perceptive person who sees under the surface to her mother’s intent. Short sentences are fine. Though none are used in this selection, even sentence fragments can be used effectively in dialogue, if the intonation patterns are right.

Another quick exercise is to cut-and-paste one character’s dialogue into a separate file. Read through it for consistency, making sure the character sounds like the same character throughout. You can tell this is Character X, not Character A. Or, without identifying the character, ask someone who has read your novel to identify the character who is speaking. If they guess the wrong character, you’ll want to look at that character’s dialogue closely in the next revision.

Scenes

Finally, a quick check of your scenes is a good place to start evaluating your novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Scenes are contained units of action with a beginning, a middle and end. Sometimes, one scene takes up a chapter and other times, several scenes combine to create a chapter. Scenes open with some sort of conflict, which gives characters a goal for the scene. The middle complications intensify the conflict and the ending usually features a disaster, somehow making the situation worse for the character. Scenes usually include four elements: action, dialogue, narrative and interior thoughts.

Did you write in scenes? To find out take out a chapter of your novel and put a box around the scenes. Yes, take out a bright marker or pen and mark up the chapter, boxing every scene.

For example, in Lizzie Bright and Buckminster’s Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt, Chapter 3 has these scenes:

• Turner’s father, the minister, punishes him for several misdeeds. (2 pages)
• Turner suffers in his room from the summer heat. (Half page)
• Turner survives supper without a misstep. (One page)
• Turner watches the sunset and almost likes Maine. (Half page)
• Turner seeks a place where he “can breathe”; he goes to the seashore. (2 pages)
• Turner meets Lizzie Bright, who teaches him how to bat Maine-style. (6 pages)
• At supper, Turner is lectured by his father, until his mother steps in and stops it. (2 pages)
• Turner heads to the hay meadow to play baseball, but a rainstorm stops the game. (1 page)

Several short scenes build up to the longest scene in which Turner meets Lizzie Bright, a black girl, and they become instant friends, something that will cause trouble throughout the rest of the story. Notice that Turner is at the center of each scene and each scene contains conflict, both big and small. For example, when Turner meets Lizzie Bright, he is throwing stones. She calls to him and in his surprise, his last stone is thrown overhead and comes down and hits his nose. It bleeds and his bloody shirt will get him in more trouble with the minister. In his pain, Turner refuses to answer Lizzie Bright’s questions, so she thinks he is an idiot. Besides the overall problem of not liking Maine and befriending the wrong person, Turner has smaller conflicts within the scene itself.

Could you divide your manuscript into scenes? If not, don’t panic. You’ve just discovered something about your style of writing. Many writers take a more meandering route toward a novel; however, those who write in scenes tend to write stories that are more focused, more tension-filled, more emotional. I’d recommend you at least try writing in scenes and see if it fits your style and your story. A good place to begin is Sandra Scofield’s, The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer.

The point of these exercises is to change the context for the story, from large to small, something that will make you, the author, see the story differently. Writers are too close to their own work to see the shape, to understand when and where to revise. But these methods of looking at your novel’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a starting place for your revisions."

Save Everything

Confession: I am a packrat.

Not bad enough that I need to see a specialist or anything, I promise. But I have problems throwing things away. I really do. I have written copies of stuff I wrote when I was 12 and typed copies of stuff when I wrote when I was 7. And don’t get me started on creative supplies. I have shoeboxes upon shoeboxes full of fabric and ribbon and string and beads and other random artsy stuff.

But the one thing that I packrat the most is files.

I save everything.

Don’t confuse that with I save all the time, no, I have had more than my share of not having saved and then your battery getting knocked out and losing everything. But I save almost everything I’ve ever written, even if I don’t like it. I’ve saved pretty much every piece of writing that Margaret’s shared with me.

I save scraps, ideas, projects that I want to work on, stuff I intend on never looking at again, first drafts, second drafts, diagrams that I’ve made of family trees and appearances, timelines… I save a lot of files. And I’m also slightly OCD about keeping them organized. I have lots of folders. As opposed to Margaret who just saves everything in one folder and Searches for a file when she wants it.

However, despite the fact that her computer is a mess file wise, our organization in terms of our novels and its various drafts are quite similar.

Moral of the story is save every draft you make.

One of the interesting things that you’ll find when you look at enough articles and books about editing/revising your novel, is that almost every one of them will say something about saving your drafts as you go along. The one that I have on hand is an excerpt from Gail Carson Lavine’s, author of one of my absolute favorite children’s books of all time Ella Enchanted among other children’s books, Writing Magic:

“I, too, save everything I write, so in the computer file for each of my books or short stories I keep a document titled “Extra” and I park my peerless but useless prose there. Extra is my treasure lode. I can mind it, and so can biographers!

Here’s a strategy I use in writing a first draft or in revising when I take my story down a path I’m not sure of and I don’t want to lose what I already have.

On my computer I save my story in its old version. Say I save it as “elves 1”. Then I save it again as “elves 2”. I go to the spot where my alteration begins and start writing. If all goes well, I won’t need the old version but if my new idea fizzles I haven’t lost anything. By the time I’ve finished writing and revising a book, I may be up to “elves 50”!”

I do something similar, though I just have everything to do with my book under the folder “Beguiled” and my successive drafts are Master, Master 2, Master 3. That’s the one I’m working on right now.

Every time I need to make a major change, and I’m going to continue working on the vein for a while, I create a new draft. That way I can organize my drafts by the major changes. Master was the first draft. Master 2 was just general edits (editing, not revising () Shame on me.) Master 3 I removed the entire first eight chapters of my novel because it was more or less all backstory. Once I feel comfortable enough with the beginning without those chapters and how the backstory is spread throughout the chapter I plan on making a Master 4 and giving my antagonist a serious revamp.

Separating drafts by tasks helps me to just keep things straight in my head. It also helps me focus on one task at a hand, which no matter how good you might be at multi-tasking, has been scientifically proven to be the best way to do work.

That doesn’t have to be the way you do it. Like just about everything on this blog, what’s important is figuring out what works for you. That works for me. But you really should save different drafts. It helps you to see how you’re progressing. Sometimes you’ll do something to change it and not like it and if you saved over the original or earlier drafts you can’t go back. Or sometimes you find ideas in your earlier drafts. That’s happened to me more than enough times.

Or if there’s something you liked that you had to get rid of later because it just didn’t work, if you have it saved you can use it for later.

And while we’re on the topic I would also tell you to not just save drafts, but get in the habit of saving everything. Those random scraps that you think of can be seriously useful one day. They can turn into a lot more than you think they might. And the great thing about computers is that it’s not that big of a deal to save them.

When it turns into a three inch thick pile of paper in the drawer of your bedside table and you’re supposed to be moving though…

The Difference Between Editing and Revising

Okay so maybe this post was inspired by the assignment I'm supposed to have due on Monday and maybe I'm using this post as an excuse to not do that assignment... but... I'm posting something. That's good right?

Note to self: make a post on procrastination.

I'll do that next week.

*base drums and a cymbal*

Anyways.

This is a concept that a lot of people in my AP English class can't really seem to grasp. There is a difference between revising and editing. A lot of the time people, myself included, tend to use the two words interchangeably. I've told you all plenty of times that I'm editing my novel, but I'm really revising it (though there is a fair share of plain editing).

Editing usually entails going through and fixing spelling mistakes and grammar and awkward sentence structures. A lot of time when people think about first and second drafts and the like, that's the first thing they think of. That's pretty much all I did to my essays in 8th grade. And that's fine for an 8th grader turning in an essay for English class. That's not all right for someone submitting a novel.

Your first draft sucks.

My first draft sucks.

Margaret's first draft sucked.

It's safe to assume that every book you've ever read's first draft sucked.

Like a Dyson vacuum.

According to Google's automatic definitions, to revise means to "reconsider and alter (something) in the light of further evidence".

Second drafts are for changes. Real changes. You're supposed to reconsider and alter. Not just the spelling or the sentence structure. It calls for rewriting a lot of stuff. Getting rid of entire characters, adding entire characters, rewriting the first three chapters eight times, considering whether or not you're going to keep chapter 4, 7, and 13.

Just so far in my second draft, I cut out about 8 chapters of background information, added a minor character, changed the outcome of a pretty big scene, I'm trying to figure out how to seriously alter a couple of the other minor character's roles, expanding the first two chapters into more like four or five, changing the end... that's revising. And that's not even the end. Who knows what stuff I'm going to change for the third or fourth revisions? And then after that, who knows what my editors going to ask me to/suggest/help me work on changing?

Don't even get my started on the revisions Margaret's doing. She's more on like her 30th revision, but the prologue's changed who knows how many times, she's added a bad guy, her second main character's role has changed COMPLETELY, the situation surrounding her character's involvement in the plot has changed, the end has changed completely... It's ridiculously different.

Now, does this mean your other drafts have to be unrecognizable from you first, well, no. It still the same story, you should be able to tell that one is the product of the other, but should it be significantly better?

A resounding yes.

And you can always make more edits! Your book isn’t set in stone until it’s published (and even then there are editions where you can mess with stuff).

Whether you need to pay extremely, extremely close attention to editing is another post. Usually most people will say you should definitely make sure that it’s decent. No one wants to read a manuscript that’s riddled with errors. It automatically makes them less inclined to like what you’re writing. But it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect.

Your first priority is revising though. Just about anyone with a solid grasp of the English language (and spell check) can produce a literary work that is edited and correct. Only writers worth their salt can produce a literary work with balanced pace and strong characters and gripping actions ect.

Moral of the story: Revise, don’t edit.

Fun example:

"'Never again', said the blackbird." First draft.

"Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore,'" Final draft.