word craft

Finished revising Chapter 21!

July 26, 2019 by Val Neil

7/26/2019

I made it work! That sounds terrible to say, like if I had to “make” it work, then it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But damnit, writing is pretty much nonstop making things work. As much as I hate editing, there’s a real beauty to it when you see how the story evolves and gets better. Like “hello good story! I knew you were in there somewhere!” Polish that turd, people.

I had to go back to Ch 20 and add a couple of paragraphs to head off the “Medea’s reading his mind” issue. Now Nikolai at least has the tools to block her. Although she did leave those tools where he can find them, so who’s to say how effective they are?

Approaching the midpoint in my revisions. I’m definitely considering moving the Predator/Prey chapters to book 2. When I wrote the sequence I had writer’s block, and I used the old trick “have your protagonist get attacked by monkeys/ninjas.” In my case, Nikolai gets jumped by witch hunters. It’s a fun sequence that shows his darker side as he has no real reason to hold back. The scene did indeed help me get over the block and provided a great segue for bullet training (which has since been punted to book 2).

The problem is it doesn’t fit the throughline for book 1, and would actually fit the story for book 2 a lot better. When I started writing this series I had a general idea of how many books it would take and what would be in each. But I hadn’t yet written a novel. I worried about having enough content for book one. As I started writing, I realized that book 1 had content for like three books. When all is said and done, my projected 8-book series may end up being longer. I hope I can streamline my writing/editing process over the next few years so I can get them out at a decent rate.

ABC: Always Be Crafting

July 22, 2019 by Val Neil

If you’re unfamiliar with ABC (Always be Closing), it’s a reference to Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin can enlighten you here, but it will probably make some of you cry.

I’m in the middle of rewrites. I think we can all agree that editing is a slog, but I’m doing a developmental edit on myself which has been particularly painful. I had to gut chapters 10-18 and pretty much write them again from scratch.

I was looking forward to the next section of my book, which is pretty solid plot-wise and follows my new throughline nicely. I’d only have to do minor tweaks to sentence structure and stuff. Piece of cake. Right?

And then I see the first line of this chapter, followed by the cringe-inducing “he protested” as a dialogue tag. Ugh. I looked at the snapshots and saw why–this chapter hasn’t been touched since mid February, and it’s now mid-July.

ABC

How much better could I have gotten at writing since February? Better enough to recognize my failings in this opening. This much better:

ABC2

Now there are probably typos in there because it’s a first draft rewrite, but the writing itself is much better.

As a writer, you should always be working to improve your craft. So how does one do this? Read great books, read craft books by successful authors, read editing books, follow blogs on writing/editing, and follow YouTubers (take this last one with a grain of salt as a lot of them are newbies).

Critique partners are incredibly helpful, but only if they know what they’re talking about (I’ve had at least one who was recommending grammar “corrections” that were flat-out wrong). Try to find partners who point out different things. Some are great at tightening up your writing but cutting out redundancies. Others will let you know when you’ve got talking heads or white room syndrome (two of my issues). One of mine is all about strong verbs in place of “small, choppy sentences.”

Don’t be afraid of criticism! It’s better to hear this stuff from other writers than it is from your readers after you publish. If you get your manuscript edited prior to release, which you should, it will help minimize the cost because they won’t have as many issues to fix.

When do you have time to do all this research? I’ve found that some times I’m just less productive on the writing end. I’m sick, or it’s been a long day (I’m way better at writing in the mornings), or there are just too many interruptions to focus. Those are perfect times to read up or watch videos on craft. It’s a relaxing activity but you’ll still feel productive.

Overcoming Writer’s Block

July 15, 2019 by Val Neil

Getting stuck is usually a symptom of a larger problem–your story isn’t working.

Reasons You Might Get Stuck

1. You’re bored with the scene. If you’re bored writing, your reader will get bored reading. Maybe the scene lacks tension, or maybe it’s just not going where it needs to.

2. You’ve written yourself into a corner.

3. The plot is going someplace it shouldn’t.

4. There are other stressors going on in your life that are preventing you from focusing on writing. Self-care and mental health are important! That said, it’s usually one of the first three reasons.

Solutions

You don’t have to try all of these. Usually one will work. It all depends on how you’re stuck.

1. First off, save a copy of your work. Make a “cut” folder or however you want to organize it, and throw all trimmed stuff there. It’s a lot easier to cut/change things when you know you can go back to it if you need to (though you won’t, because if it was working you wouldn’t be stuck).

2. Go back to an earlier point in the manuscript. It could be one scene back or a few chapters. Find the last place where the story was last flowing easily and look for forks in the road, decisions the characters made, reactions they had, then try something completely different. This is the one most likely to work.

3. Shit on your protagonist. Your main character needs conflict. If things are dragging, they may have it too easy. Give them a problem to solve. Make things go horribly wrong.

4. Have your character attacked by monkeys. Or ninjas. Or aliens. You might not be able to use the scene in your novel, but it will get you writing something interesting and chances are you can use a variation of the scene somewhere down the line (so save it).

5. Try writing the scene from a different character’s point of view. Even if you think you know how each character would react, getting into their POV will likely give you some new insight. Combining this with #2 also helps.

I hope you found these tips useful.

Editing with Natural Reader

July 9, 2019 by Val Neil

Natural Reader is a tool I recently heard about from Heart Breathings and it’s revolutionized my editing process.

How it works:

You paste your text into a box and an AI reads it out.

“But I can just read it out loud myself, or have my critique partners do it!”

Wrong. Human brains love to read what should be there, rather than what is there. It’s why stuff like this exists:

Unlike a human, the computer it reads everything just as it is. It makes for a very impartial read.

Stuff you’ll catch:

double words
missing words
stupid typos like bisque instead of brisk 🤦‍♀️
REDUNDANCIES (You know that stuff your critique partners told you to cut, but you just don’t want to let go of? That shit. You can now hear how repetitive it sounds.)
FLOW
identical sounds
multiple uses of the same word

It’s also really nice to hear your work out loud. Editing is rough. I’m on my first novel, so I’ve definitely had a lot of bad days where I doubt myself and wonder if I can make it work, so it’s very validating to hear my story out loud and have it sound good.

How much does it cost?

Free: Two voice options, plus 20 min/day of premium voices

Premium: $10/month or $60/year. Access to all premium voices.

Not gonna lie, the free voices suck and there’s only two of them. They don’t inflect well and sound very robotic. You do get 20 minutes a day to access premium voices, which are exponentially better and come in a variety of flavors.

The website defaults to premium voices, then reverts to the free voices after twenty minutes. It can be quite jarring to go from premium voices to free, so keep that in mind if you don’t plan to pay. I paid just to get access to Peter back and to see how often I’d use the program. Now that I can see how often I’m using it I’ll probably do the annual option.

After editing each chapter I run it through Natural Reader, make my fixes, then download an MP3. This gives me another option for beta readers, as they can listen to my book on the go. Please note that you can’t use the MP3s for commercial use unless you pay for their Commercial plan, which costs a lot more than Premium.

Hiccups:

Some of the voices will trip over certain words, but you can tell them how to pronounce the words differently, though this may be a premium-only feature.
Voices act slightly different for things like em dashes. My preferred voice, Peter, is terrible at them, so I have to switch to commas for the reader.
If you past a much longer block of text, sometimes it will paste weird and you’ll get a block of words where the spaces between have been removed. likethisrighthere

Despite the hiccups, I can’t recommend Natural Reader enough.

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