Encouraging words

There is an echo chamber in my brain that reverberates with every rejection and harsh critique about my writing. But there is a better place too. It is padded with encouraging words, each as soft as a down feather. Sometimes I forget this place exists. It's pure joy when I discover it again.

Then I remember the time:

my dad liked a story I told him, and asked me to write it down.

A friend spent an hour transcribing my haiku at the beach.

My English teacher read my story aloud to the class.

I won an award for my poetry.

My cousin Leon didn't want to go to dinner because he was engrossed in my unpublished MG girl novel.

Everyone laughed in the right places when I read my pages at a critique group meeting.

I would write no matter what, but moments like these give me a boost. Every writer has them. Would anyone like to share?

Submitting Pains

I toyed around with a few titles for this post. All of them involved words like agony and torture, and most of them sounded vaguely sadomasochist.

Writers avoid submitting for one big reason. That reason is rejection.

On the bright side ... I know of at least TWO published writers who never amassed a stack of rejections along the way.  (I try very hard not to hate them for it.) I personally file my rejections for each project separately so as never to create a stack.

And now that I went from rejection to acceptance, I'm feeling a lot better about all those Dear Writer letters.

I think of them as a badge of courage. Some writers go as far as plastering their walls with them. I'm not quite there yet, but I haven't burned them either. They are proof that I can take a risk.

Which is something writers have to do all the time.

 

attitude

My main character, Roz Peterson, has attitude...maybe too much attitude. I worship her of course. She's my creation. And I envy her courage.

But what about my readers? What if Roz calls her rival a fly-bitten flax-wench (a shabby prostitute)? Are you so turned off that you put down the book? Or do you laugh?

One bit of feedback I received on earlier drafts went like this: you have broken the number one rule of children's writing by having an unlikable main character.

Except teens aren't children. They see that the world is complex. That individuals are a mixture of good and bad.

But are you readers willing to read on if you don't like the main character at the outset? What if you start to like her more as the book progresses?

I need answers.

In the meantime, I have revised My Invented Life to emphasize Roz's good qualities that run interference when she contemplates doing a bad thing.

What do you think?

Revisions on the brain

Last night I finished my revisions for my editor. (Which explains why I haven't posted for two weeks-gah!) My Invented Life will go into copy-edits after that. Woohoo!

Since I have a severe case of revisions on the brain, I'm going to talk revisions.

Most writers can pound out the first draft of a novel in a few weeks to a year. That range sounds large, but the real separation occurs during the revision stage.

The futzers and dawdlers (I'm one) can draw out revisions for several years. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (she says justifying her bad habit).

There are several approaches to revisions, and I will describe the one I like best. Don't try to make all the changes at once. Instead change one aspect of the story with each pass.

For example:

spiff up the quirks of a single character

tighten dialog

weed out passive voice

readjust one element of plot

add in a repeating joke

I know several authors who write 20 - 50 drafts that way. (Don't panic. You're first draft is nearly perfect, so it will only take you three drafts.)

Personal example:

I decided to look at the "bad" words in My Invented Life to see if they were needed and effective. The novel is set during the rehearsal of a Shakespeare play, and that gave me the idea to use Elizabethan curses in places where I'd used boring old b**** and a****** before. That was fun.

Aside: 

You can visit a cool Elizabethan curse generator at http://trevorstone.org/curse/