Category: Writing

All summer I worked on revising my YA science fiction novel.  Through the whole process I tried to keep reminding myself that this was only the first of many revisions I knew were necessary.  But it’s so tempting when you are working hard on something to fantasize that you might be done, or even close to done.

I would compare it to my students who love to write “The End” at the end of their first drafts.  It’s their way of saying they’re done, no matter how much I might encourage them to revise.  And who can blame them, it feels good to be done.  Barry Lane wrote a terrific book about teaching revision called After The End, that addresses these issues.

Of course it’s one thing to tell my students they need to revise and quite another to tell myself.  I think I’m worse.  I know I’m worse.  I want so very much to persevere and write something truly great.  And yet I also want so much to be at “The End”.

I just went through my entire manuscript using the find feature to locate the word “felt”.   My goal was to rid the book of places where I say how the character “felt” rather than showing it through dialogue, thought or action.

For example I replaced “I felt queasy” with “My stomach contracted nervously emitting a serious of strangled gurgles.”  One is much more evocative than the other, if a bit wordy.

Other words I intend to weed out are uses of “noticed” or “observed” in which I’m describing what or how something was seen rather than just writing it outright from the main character’s perspective.  Of course they’re noticing it, it’s their story.

I also plan to go through looking for over-usage of “suddenly”.  I read a good blog post on how this word can be a crutch used instead of writing good transitions.

Show don’t tell.  It’s one of the oldest axioms in the creative writing world.  The example I always use with my students is:

Mrs. McGillicutty was mean.

or

Mrs. McGillicutty smiled as her rocker rolled over the cat’s tail and it let out a tremendous yowl.

Basic, but you get the idea.  However, there are times when it’s important to tell and not show.  I’ve been thinking about this as I revise my YA novel.   Perceptive agent pointed out that there’s quite a bit of what she called “walking around music” in my current draft.  By this she meant that I’m describing a scene in detail that I could simply summarize in a few quick lines.  The scene itself isn’t actually all that important for the reader to witness first hand.  For example, in one place my main character convinces her parents to let her go to the bonfires.  It’s not actually all that important how she convinces them, so instead of writing out that whole scene I can simply sum it up and the outcome is the same and the story line holds more tension.

A more obvious example of this would be if you described a character tying his or her shoes instead of simply saying he or she tied her shoes.

Isabelle carefully laid one lace over the other, making a loop and then chasing the rabbit through the hole as she had learned in Mrs. Wilcox’s warm sunny kindergarten room.  She gently pulled the loop through and…

or

Isabelle tied her shoes.

Now unless Isabelle is recovering from a traumatic head injury, the first description is really unnecessary.  I haven’t unearthed any examples in my own writing that are quite this flagrant, but it has helped me trim quite a bit of unnecessary fat from the manuscript.

“I can read your books, I’m a young adult right?”

A friend of mine asked me this after reading the descriptions of my current writing projects.  First of all the answer is unequivocally yes.  There are a lot of so-called adults who read YA, and there is a lot of YA that is considered cross-over.

But her question made me think that there are really two definitions of a “young adult”.  There’s the more traditional definition of an adolescent or teenager in the roughly 13-20 range.  But there’s also this idea of someone who is  sort of new to being an adult, in their late 20’s to mid-thirties (or later depending on emotional maturity), someone who’s still getting used to the idea of being an adult.  Whatever age you are, you’ve never been that age before, so we’re always learning about how to be in the world.  Maybe that’s what makes the tropes and themes in YA books so appealing to so many different ages.

I once read a commencement speech given by Tom Brokaw in which he cautioned the future graduates that the real world wasn’t much like college, or even high school.  The real world, he said, was a lot like jr. high.  So maybe we’re all Young Adults to some degree.  Accept it, embrace it… and read whatever you want!

I usually know when I’ve got something difficult to write because my house is really clean.  In other words, I’ve resorted to cleaning as a form of procrastination.  But it’s more than that.  Cleaning the house is something I can control, it has a clear beginning and end, and it makes me feel that I’ve accomplished something.  Now to accomplish some writing…

For further procrastination, check out this great interview with YA writer Sara Zarr.  Her book Story of a Girl is one of my favorite recent YA reads.  She nails the voice of a teenager and presents teen sexuality is a complex and truthful way.  I loved it!

When I knew I had this major revision in front of me I put a call out to some writer friends to get their thoughts and ideas about revising a novel.  What I was able to glean, from their helpful hints and a lot of web research, is that everyone has their own way of going about it.  (DRAT! I was hoping for an easy answer!)

I got some great words of wisdom from the fabulous MG writer Deva Fagan (author of the recently released Fortune’s Folly) a few of which I would like to summarize here.  You can check out her blog where I believe she posted the longer version.

One thing she mentioned was that she keeps a file called “big cuts” where she pastes in the big chunks she removes as she’s revising.  This is helpful in case you cut something and then want to add it in later, but it’s also kind of a writer’s security blanket.  All those words are still there if you need them, and it can help you to cut more freely.

One other thing she mentioned was a little index card she keeps next to her computer which says the following things.

1. Protagonist must protag
2. character/setting/plot = scene
3. What changes?  How is the story advanced?

This little card reminds her of the basics as she writes and revises and also reminds her that no matter how great the writing is, it has to be contributing to the book in one of these ways.

Today I finished the new ending for The Fills, my YA science fiction project that is currently in revision.  Reach hand up over head and pat back. This ending is the original ending I envisioned when I started writing (before I got freaked out about how long it was and decided to end it prematurely) and it feels good to be there.

I wonder which YA series started out as one really long book and got broken up, versus books that were always envisioned as a series or books that became a series though the author never originally envisioned them that way.

If there is one thing I have learned in the revision process it’s that you can’t hide your “problem areas”.  If you (meaning me) think there is a major issue or problem in your novel, there probably is.  I ignored two major issues in order to just finish writing a first draft of my YA novel and lo and behold at the end of the first draft there they still were.

Sometimes it is good to ignore problems in order to churn out that first rough draft, but you can’t ignore them forever.   Other people, in this case my very savy agent, will see them too.  On a positive note, these problems are good because they represent an opening, an opportunity to vastly improve your book, and the good news is, you already know what they are.