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Editor’s Notes: Boot Camp Inspiration
BY MEGAN OLIPHANT
Maybe I should have written this blog post BEFORE the Orson Scott Card Literary Boot Camp, because my mind is so full of all the information, it will take several days for it all to gel into something coherent in my mind. So much good information. But right now, my brain is a little bit mushy, more than usual.
I’ve been to writer’s conferences before, taken individual classes, listened to agents and authors tell me everything from how to write queries to basic novel structure. But I’ve never experienced anything like this before. Six days of my whole brain function taken up with learning and writing and learning some more.
I have to say, though, it was worth every penny, every tear shed, every second of staring at the computer screen thinking “I’m so tired, I can’t type another word.” (Okay, I didn’t really cry, but I did think several times that I couldn’t possibly put two more words together. And I did think about crying.)
The tools I came away with will be priceless for my writing. It was a whole new way to look at how to write, how to rewrite, and whether I should edit or start all over. That seems dramatic, I know, but having listened to him teach about it all week, it is clear to me what the difference is.
According to OSC, there is only a first draft. Doing a “second draft” is the way to kill the heart of your story. If you are having problems or writer’s block, it’s because your subconscious is trying desperately to tell you that something isn’t working, that you need to stop and figure it out. It usually resolves by adding more to the story, like a new character. But where writers go wrong is when they get that far, figuring out what needs to be fixed, instead of starting from the beginning and writing fresh, they try to go back and insert the addition piecemeal, like trying to weave a ribbon into a braid when the braid is already done and tied off.
Does that mean we don’t edit? Of course not. There will always be a need for that. But editing is for clarity, not drafting your novel to death.
This was so mind blowing to me. I’m thrilled to be able to start afresh on some of these stories I have that have stalled. I can’t worry about the perfect prose or the great scene I’ve already written. It’s about taking all that old information and rewriting from the beginning, but now those scenes and characters will be fuller, richer, more real.
And that is what will suck our readers in and make them want to take up residence in the universes we create.
Megan Oliphant has studied creative writing since college, taking classes from the founder of LTUE, Marion K. “Doc” Smith at BYU and attended Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp in late June. Her primary interests are in fantasy, ranging from dark urban to high epic, but she’s a sucker for a good mystery that she can’t guess the ending to before she gets there. She divides her time between reading, writing, and “familying” with her husband and five children in North Carolina.
Megan joined The X Team in May of 2014. Her first project, Accidental Apprentice, by Anika Arrington, is slated for release in September of 2014. She is project lead on Darkness Rising, a young adult fantasy by Elizabeth Lunyou, slated for release in 2015.
Editor’s Notes: Making Beautiful Music Together
BY KRISTINA HARRIS
I’ve been playing the violin for over twenty years. As someone who is comfortable with my instrument, and music in general, I can hear musical pitch pretty well and can tune any violin quite easily using just one note from a piano: the sound of an A. Often, I don’t even need that.
I actually own more than one violin. There is incredible beauty in the variety of sounds created by the different styles that can be found. For instance, my first ever instrument, which I still own, is a copy of a Stradivarius, and belts out a wonderful concert-hall richness.
My second violin was found at an auction in a small town; I bought it for twenty dollars. Nobody there understood the treasure they had, thinking it to be a broken piece of junk. It merely needed to be restrung and was actually made by a master named Jacob Stainer. The sound it makes is much softer and sweeter than my first. Yet, they are both violins.
So how does this relate to writing and editing?
Each story that we read comes from the same source: an author. But, just like my violins, each author has a different voice. One voice might be more suited to a certain style or genre than another, just as my Stainer is more suited to certain styles of music, and my Strad to others. Editing is not about the desire to fit that voice into some sort of technical, grammar-book box, but rather to help a writer preserve the best parts of their voice, while also helping their story be highly developed and look as professional as possible.
Being an editor is much like being a musician: you don’t go into a manuscript, stomping around, determined to make everything one note, looking all the same. If that’s the kind of editing job for you, look into technical writing.
Just as when a musician reads a musical piece, an editor must get a feel for a story to understand what the author is trying to convey. The goal is to help the author polish it up so that when the reader is forced to put it down—to go to work, or sleep, or visit the store—he or she still has it stuck in their head, like a well-known melody. (Beethoven’s 5th, anyone?)
That is how editors and authors work together to make beautiful music.
Kristina has made reading and writing a focal point in her life. No matter how busy her life is, she has always found relaxation in books and editing. She started her published career in her high school newspaper by submitting short stories.
Now, she has edited three published works: two adult novels and one children’s book, and has written and edited for numerous national specialty magazines. She also holds a degree in business administration, has been a model for a nationally recognized talent agency, and leads the way in her household, managing a husband, three sons, two dogs, two cats, a guinea pig, and a lizard!
Kristina’s first X project is the fall paranormal anthology, slated for release in September 2014.
Inside Marketing: All Aboard!
BY BUNNY MINER
Blogging and Your Author’s Platform
Ok, sound off about how you did with your challenge from my last blog. (crickets chirping). Come on, you can do it. Put yourself out there and add something in the comments after this post on how starting your blog, regulating when you post on your blog or looking for similar blogs to comment on has worked for you this past month.
I’ll admit right here in the actual blog post that I’m not great at keeping up on my own author blog and guess what. I don’t really have any followers! Now I have a friend who posts regularly and she’s fun and quirky and you really never know what she’s going to blog about because she’s a bit scatter-brained and gets easily sidetracked (Squirrel!). But it works for her! People check back regularly to find out what actually comes out of her keyboard and onto the blog.
That being said, it’s a really well done blog. She puts time and thought into it, but her ideas come from everywhere. She’s also eclectic in her writing so she’s able to pull in readers from many different genres.
So what does this have to do with your author platform? Well, here’s the thing. Your author platform is all up to you. Nobody’s going to put in the time to research or the work to make it happen. Being an author is hard work. Don’t want to discourage anyone, but your job doesn’t begin when the book is published or end there. It’s really a mid-point for you. You need to build a following before you publish your book and you need to nurture those relationships afterwards.
Here’s everything you need to know about an author’s platform: . . . Ok, not really but kind of some of it, anyway.
A platform is something you stand on; an idea you work around but not something physical like a train platform. With the Platform 9¾ in mind, though, this is more of an author’s platform. Who doesn’t know what this refers to? J.K. Rowling hasn’t created just an author platform, she’s created a complete movement! So, millions of people around the world know who J.K. Rowling is and who Harry Potter is. Here’s some of what she did right:
She created Visibility. People know who she is, they’re aware of her work and where to find it. She knows how many people see her work. She’s part of the communities that would read her book and she influences those people in those communities.
Then she became an Authority. She built credibility and became the queen of middle grade fantasy. She was able to show she had Proven reach. It’s not enough to say you have visibility, you have to show where you make an impact and give proof.
Some ways you can do this is by showing the size of your email newsletter list or website traffic. Also, and here’s the blog thing again, if you get a lot of comments on your blog, that shows your proven reach as well. So help out others: comment on their blogs and invite people to comment on yours!
Finally, J.K. knew her Targetaudience. You absolutely need to be known and visible to the people who are going to buy your books. Posting and commenting on blogs that have romance followers, won’t help you sell your children’s book.
So research the blogs you comment or guest post on if you want them to buy your books. If you just like romance and want to comment, of course you should, but know that isn’t going to build your platform.
Having the above four bases covered with help you build your platform. But blogging isn’t the only way to build your platform. It’s only part of the puzzle. Next time I’ll talk about other things you can do to build your platform.
Until then, though, here’s another challenge for you! I want you to pin down your target audience so you know when and where to do those other things (gain visibility, become an authority and being able to prove your reach).
Cyber-see ya, next time!
Bunny
Bunny Miner joined Xchyler Publishing in May 2014. As our point of contact for bloggers and reviewers, she spends much time on the web looking for her next victims…er, um, assistants.
Bloggers and reviewers are an integral part of our marketing team and is very grateful to them for all the work they do on behalf of our authors. If you’d be interested in being a blogger or reviewer for Xchyler Publishing, please contact Bunny at BunnyMiner@XchylerPublishing.com.
Editor’s Notes: The Lowly Proofreader
BY RIE SHERIDAN ROSE
I’m Just a Proofreader . . . Nobody Loves Me . . .
Okay, maybe that paraphrase of Bohemian Rhapsody is a little silly, but when it comes to the world of editing, the function is often overlooked, and it shouldn’t be.
After all the editing of the content for logic holes; after the line edit to make sure the logic holes were all plugged; it comes down to a proofreader checking the spelling, punctuation, and giving a final look to the manuscript. Of course, when it is turned in after proofreading, it might not be as final as originally expected.
You would be surprised how often a missed word or punctuation character slips by several readers. Or perhaps you wouldn’t.
Even when reading a hardback from one of the major publishers, it is amazing how many times a reader stumbles over a misspelled word or something else that a good proofreading should have caught.
When a piece comes into the publishing house, it is expected that the author will have made it as perfect as they possibly can in their own eyes. No matter how hard you try as a writer (and this is my official day job, so I know how hard you try,) you don’t see everything. For one thing, you have lived with the manuscript for a very long time, usually, and your mind can play tricks on you—often filling in gaps automatically as you read something for the thousandth time.
A proofreader is looking specifically for the types of mistakes that will irritate a reader most when they expect a polished final product. They comb the edited manuscript word by word to make sure that every word is spelled correctly, that all punctuation is in place, and that no words have been left out. (And—at least in my case—give their opinion on how the book reads to a reader. This may not be typical proofreading, but I am still learning.)
Not all publishing companies have a specific editor in charge of proofing. Xchyler has several. It is a function whose importance cannot be over-emphasized. Proofreading can give a book one more level of polish toward becoming a gem.
Rie writes, edits, and proofs for The X from her home in Austin, Texas. A prolific writer, her short story, “Seven-year Itch,” is featured in Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology. Her first project for The X, The Mage and the Magpie by M.K. Wiseman, is slated for release in August, 2014.
Editor’s Notes: Ramping Up The Tension
BY JESSICA SHEN
While plot and character and setting are all well and good (I mean, I GUESS those components are important…) what will really keep your reader up to ungodly hours of the night flipping pages is tension. Tension, conflict, peril—these all compel us to keep reading to find out what happens next. You could have a great plot and fascinating characters, but if you don’t have tension, you’ve got a bland story that hasn’t got a hope in hell of keeping anyone’s attention.
So, how do you introduce tension into your story? Assuming you’ve already nailed down your characters and your plot (I can’t do all the work for you, right?), here are a few things to think about:
- Make things hard for your characters. We like to see them struggle—that’s what makes a good story! Would we all love Harry Potter as much if all he had to do to defeat Voldy was look up his address in the phone book and avada kedavra him in his sleep? Okay, that’s a bit extreme, but how much less compelling would it have been if he hadn’t struggled in school, or fought with Ron and Hermione, or had any of the hundreds of small difficulties he went through? If your character is riding a bike for the first time, don’t give him a natural talent for bike riding. If she has to mix up a potion, make her a terrible cook.
- Use examples from other media and/or everyday life as source material. One of the most effective pieces of advice I’ve given was to an author who had written a battle scene. It was a decent battle scene, but it was missing that extra bit of oomph. I told him to watch the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan, then to go back and rewrite the scene.
If you haven’t seen the movie before, here’s what happens: Tom Hanks lands at Omaha Beach in the beginning of the Invasion of Normandy. It’s horribly chaotic and messy and gory. At one point, he loses his hearing from a grenade blast, and—here’s the clincher—our hearing gets knocked out as well. The audience is thrown headlong into the action. It’s a phenomenal representation of the horrors of wartime, and a cinematic masterpiece, and the author came back with fantastically nuanced and powerful scene that blew my socks off.
If you’re having a hard time with a particular scene, look to another source that does well what you’re trying to do. I’m not saying that you should copy it, but hopefully it can give you some good perspective and inspiration. (By the way, the author was Ben Ireland, and the scene is from Kingdom City: Resurrection. Go buy it today! How else will you know what I’m talking about?)
Now, for some more technical advice:
- Passive voice. Try not to use it. It’s inevitable that you will, but try to keep the ratio of passive verbs to active verbs around 1:4. Passive voice sits primly with her hands crossed across her lap. Active voice climbs trees and shakes leaves down on unsuspecting passersby. The problem of passive voice is that it so often is the default. Do a search and replace for passive verbs and try switching them to active verbs. It may not seem like much, but over the course of a paragraph, a page, a chapter, you’ll find that the text is lighter, bouncier, stronger, more alive.
- Dynamic language. Use it. Why say something is bad, when you can say it’s terrible, awful, heart-rending, or horrifying? I’m not saying you need to replace all your $0.02 words with $0.25 words, but don’t be afraid to be bold. You can always turn down the drama if it’s too much.
- On that note, don’t use the same words to describe something boring and something exciting. Let’s say we’ve got two pictures: one of a girl (perhaps her name is Passive Voice) staring at a wall, and the other of another girl (Active Voice) hiding behind a tree while a bear approaches. You could say that both girls are still, or unmoving, but why not say that A.V. is, for example, paralyzed in fear? Our minds are powerful things, and make connections where there might not be any—so when you use the same words to describe two very different things, especially over and over again, we begin to associate one with another.
- Vary your sentence structure. Use literary devices. Keep things interesting for your reader, both in content as well as visually.
One last thing to keep in mind about tension: it should always be increasing. Yes, it will fluctuate up and down throughout the story, but the general trend should always be upward as you build up to the climax.
As you flesh out your characters and add those twists and turns to your plot, don’t forget that while the components that make up tension can often be small and unseen, they in some ways will be the most important part of your story. Tension determines whether your book gets put down at bedtime, or accompanies your reader in long into the night.
Jessica Shen lives, works, and edits from her home in northern California. Kingdom City: Resurrection by Ben Ireland, was released in February 2014. Her latest project, Vanguard Legacy: Reflected by Joanne Kershaw, was released in March 2014.
Jessica’s next project, On The Isle of Sound and Wonder, a Steampunk fantasy by Alyson Grauer, is slated for release in November 2014.
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