AP
As you right your first draft you may fumble through it, but when you revise/rewrite your work:

1. Do you have a play-by-play method for revising/polishing your work in order to reach the goal line?
2. Or, do instincts kick in and tell you when you have made a touchdown? In other words, how do you know when it's just right?




Kathleen Kaska

It’s Football Season? Already?

I guess you can tell I’m not a big football fan. But, I’ll give it my best shot in using some football jargon to describe how I complete my mysteries.

In writing my first draft, I can’t say I ever really fumble. As soon as I get my first sentence, I’m off and running. It’s just me and the plot, with my characters running along side. We’re having such fun; it looks as though we’ll take it all the way to the goal line. I see the words “The End” flash on the scoreboard. I’m sprinting like there’s no tomorrow. Then somewhere near the eighty-yard line, I’m I struck from behind. I hit the cold, hard ground; stunned; shocked; not sure of where I am. My characters stand around, shouting for me to get up, but I can’t. I simply stare at the scoreboard; the clock ticks away—seconds, minutes, hours, days—until I realize I have to start over and plan my strategy. I call time out, go back to page one, and start taking notes. I look for characters who shouldn’t be there, loose ends that need tying, plot points that need to be delete or expanded. And when I think I have it all figured out, my protagonist hikes me the ball. During those final twenty yards, I’m usually tackled several more times. Each time, it’s easier to get up and start over. When I’ve checked everything off my fix-it list, I stop on the ninety-nine yard line and turn around. The tacklers are gone; my characters are smiling; I step over the goal line and do a victory dance. And if that event happens during September, as it did with my latest mystery, I treat myself by watching (don’t hate me) as much baseball as possible.

Kathleen Kaska writes the Sydney Lockhart Mystery series and the Classic Triviography Mystery Series published by LL-Publications. Her Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock trivia books were finalists for the 2013 EPIC Award in nonfiction. Her nonfiction book, The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story, has been nominated for the George Perkins Marsh Award for environmental history.

www.kathleenkaska.com

www.kathleenkaskawrites.blogspot.com

AP:It is Football season. 
Get Ready to Fumble

As you write your first draft you may fumble through it, but when you revise/rewrite your work:

1. Do you have a play-by-play method for revising/polishing your work in order to reach the goal line?

2. Or, do instincts kick in and tell you when you have made a touchdown? In other words, how do you know when it's just right? 

Heidi Thomas
Fumbling through a first draft is an apropos analogy. Since I’m a “pantser,” I do have to feel my way through, sometimes missing altogether and some days running down the field for a touchdown. (I love those days!)

Since I was trained in journalism, I tend to write spare the first time through and then have to go back and “flesh out” the characters and storyline. I’ve come to realize, in a way, that is my outline. I am getting better about developing character and emotion with each book though.

I value the critique groups I’ve belonged to. The feedback I receive helps me to stay on course better and develop my characters more as I go along. Sometimes I will go back right away and do rewrites on that feedback, but most often I save most of it until I’m done with the first draft. Then I go back through the entire manuscript and make changes, based on my critique partners’ suggestions, maybe do some additional research and reading.

I think this method helps me, because I have had a little distance from the work, and can see it with a somewhat more objective, critical eye. Some writers it helps them get started writing again each day to do revisions first, but some get bogged down in the rewrites if they do them as they go along, especially if they are perfectionists. (“I HAVE to get the grammar and punctuation down right before I go on.” Or “This section of dialogue just doesn’t sound right.”) I like to tell beginning writers to just get in down on paper (or on the screen), you can and will go back and change it. My favorite quote about writing is from Hemingway: “There are no great writers, only great rewriters.”

Then, when I’ve finished that rewrite, I usually turn it over to a Beta reader to go through it again. I have a fellow writer who is great at looking at the “big picture” and doesn’t hesitate to tell me where I’ve strayed from the theme or fumbled with the direction the character is going.

After I’ve submitted the manuscript to my publisher, their editor goes through it and I may have to do another rewrite, at least on some portions of it.

Each writer has his/her own way of revision and you have to do what works best for you. This is my method and seems to be the “right” way for me.

Heidi M. Thomas


Visit her Website

Read Heidi's BLOG

COWGIRL DREAMS, (EPIC Award Winner)

FOLLOW THE DREAM, (WILLA Literary Award Winner)

AP 
1. Do you have a play-by-play method for revising/polishing your work in order to reach the goal line?

Terry Persun
A little of this, a little of that. I know what my weak points are, so I might start by double-checking a few things, like: Did I use ‘as if’ instead of ‘as though’? Did I misuse effect and affect? Did I absentmindedly put an ‘s’ on toward? How about then and than? That and which? They’re, their, and there? Your and you’re?

I start by reading what I have and if I see something like the above that I’ve done once or twice, I’ll jot it down and then go back through the whole manuscript with a “find and replace” attitude. After that, I also keep handy my physical detail sheets for each character so that I don’t mess up eye color or height or clothing. No one wants to see a character who wears only a t-shirt suddenly remove his jacket.

Now, down to the real polishing: I look for places where the story slows down, or where I can add depth to the character by adding a few words or a sentence. I look for dialog that sounds a bit off, or doesn’t quite sound like a character, or is actually not something a person would really say.

Polishing takes on different appearances for each novel. One novel I may want to get more and more depth into a character and I’m willing to lose a little action to do it. Where another novel, if it’s about the action, I might actually remove some “slow writing” so I can get back to the gunfire. It’s a personal thing. But it works for me.

AP
2. Or, do instincts kick in and tell you when you have made a touchdown? In other words, how do you know when it's just right?

Terry Persun 
I’ll paraphrase W. S. Merwin here. In a poem he wrote about his teacher John Berryman, Merwin explains how he asked Berryman a similar question: “How can I know my poetry is any good?” Berryman answered by saying, “You can’t. And if you have to know that you’re writing is good, then don’t write.”

I love that. It speaks to two things: the art of writing, and the mystery of writing.

The art of writing is like the art of music, painting, or even automobile design. It basically says that you don’t know what’s good because good is subjective, not objective. Stop worrying about it.

The mystery, to me, concerns that fact that I don’t even know where the words come from in the first place. Who knows what any of us are writing, really. So, how can we judge whether it’s good or not. In fact, how can anyone? We can notice whether grammar or punctuation is correct (most of the time), and if spelling is correct, but that’s about it.

But we must judge. And if so, we judge for ourselves. What I find beautiful, another person finds boring, and visa versa. Case in point: My novel Sweet Song was recently on the top 100 list (made it to #3) in Amazon’s (paid) historical fiction section. It was there for over a week. I received two new reviews of the book after a day or two. One review was a one-star review and the other was a five-star review. So, I looked up a few of my favorite authors and their books. Every one of them had reviews at both ends of the spectrum. There is no knowing what is good writing for someone else.

Here’s the truth: I want to reach my readers. They are their own people, but for some reason they like what I write. That’s who I’m after. So, to get back to this question, only I know, ultimately, what’s best for my work. If I let myself read the manuscript as an outsider (which most often means I’ve let the work sit for a few months so that I can come back to it fresh), then I’m the only one who can judge whether it’s good or not. Trust in your own abilities and you’ll eventually find your voice and your readers. And that’s what we all want anyway    


Terry Persun Website