Category Archives: All Things Writing

A rose by any other name…

Last month, I attended a meeting of a group of women writers I joined last fall. Our moderator (who also happens to be C., my editor) often brings interesting bits of industry news and great pieces of advice to our monthly meetings, and last month was no different. She had stumbled upon a web site devoted to book titles and suggested we visit it, for inspiration or a laugh, or, in my case, for cautionary examples.

 

As I was hell-bent on finishing the editing of my manuscript this month, I didn’t visit the site immediately, spending time instead with my new BFF Search and Replace (see last post). Well, the process went quickly, more quickly than I expected, and C. and I got to the point where we were ready to start talking about titles.

 

I’ve been working on this same manuscript for close to five years now, and it’s always had the same working title, but just because I kept it this long, doesn’t mean I was satisfied with it. So I asked C. for some input, which she graciously provided; I also toyed around with some new titles of my own. Ultimately, between the two of us, we came up with more than two dozen possible titles for my book. Egad! How am I supposed to make a rational decision with a list that long? I can’t even decide which pair of shoes to put on in the morning, some days!

 

So C. invited me to open my list up to our group for feedback. That was a tough thing for me to do—I’m still new to this supportive group feedback concept. I’m more familiar with the paradigm of submitting to professors, agents, and publishers and receiving in reply either the stony silence of utter rejection or a scathing retort indicating I should not quit my day job.

 

Imagine my surprise, then, when the group came up with not only a number of excellent title suggestions, but even went a step further to provide insightful, concise, and helpful feedback on the book pitch I’d shared with them as well. Each new message was a wonder.

 

Now, for those of you who have been following me from the beginning, you may recall my agreeing in earlier posts with writer Philip Roth, that writing should not be done by committee, but in this case, I feel I have really been missing something, and I am here to ‘fess up to it: Feedback is good. Feedback is not only good, it’s critical.

 

To be absolutely clear, I’m not referring here to the type of feedback you get from your best friend or your mother or the local librarian you bribed with a cup of coffee before sliding her your manuscript. I’m talking about skilled feedback from readers with critical eyes yet supportive touch; readers who can tell it like it is without breaking your heart in the process. Readers like my other new BFFs in my writers’ group.

 

So—the title. Have I decided yet? Nope. In the end, with all the feedback I received, I wound up with a handful of frontrunners and an additional 7 title suggestions. I have studied the list, narrowed it down to my top 3, and when I meet with my group this week, I plan on asking them for a straight vote. I’m hoping it will be less contentious than the GOP primary, but you never can tell—writers have strong opinions about everything.

 

I’m still shocked, however, that of all the things I’ve spent so much of the last few years writing, rewriting, and editing, it is the title that is causing me the most trouble.

 

In an effort to educate myself a bit more about good titles, I did go to the site our group leader recommended, and I’m glad I did, because there were some real doozies in there. Cooking with Pooh is my favorite from the list, an illustration of another important concept in writing, that of reading your work aloud to hear how it sounds.

 

All this focus on choosing the perfect title for my book brings to mind Shakespeare’s immortal lines, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” He’s right, it would, but I guarantee, if the rose were called “Pooh,” a lot of people out there would never give it a sniff to verify if that’s really true.

 Yep. No doubt about it, titles are important, and I hope to have one locked in soon.

Search and Refine: My New BFF

I confess: I’m a technophobe.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I’m techno-resistant, which frustrates my geek husband to no end, poor thing. Up until roughly three years ago, I’d never sent a text, I still did all of my writing longhand on legal pads, and I had no idea how to use a GPS. All right, I still don’t know how to use a GPS.

I used to resist out of fear that I would irreparably harm whatever gadget happened to be at hand by pressing the wrong button, because, as we all know, modern technology always comes with a well-camouflaged but easily-activated self-destruct button.

Now, however, I think I resist because even though, on a rational level, I know there are faster, easier (and cooler) ways to accomplish my goals through the skillful use of technology, spending the time to learn those skills really irritates the crap out of me. And then, by the time I’ve learned them, the technology has already morphed into yet another version, which I then have to learn all over again. I don’t want my phone to do 800 different things; I just want it to make my call, for cryin’ out loud.

Yeah. Not a geek. But I know I need to catch up with the rest of the 21st century, so I am trying, even if I’m ridiculously slow to adopt, which brings me to the subject of today’s post, my recent introduction to the Search and Refine feature in Word as an editing tool.

All right, all of you out there laughing at how backwards I am: off with you! I’m speaking to my people now, those who still fight the persistent fear that they can make their laptops explode just by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete one too many times. (You can’t, by the way. I checked it out.)

As you may remember from my last post, I recently started working with an editor, hereafter referred to as “C.” Just like “Q.” and “M.” in the Bond movies, she’s fun to work with but she uses fewer pyrotechnics. C. is helping me prepare my manuscript for publication this year. When I first met with her last spring, she recommended I read the book Write in Style, by Bobbie Christmas. I gamely purchased a copy, read the subtitle, “Using Your Word Processor and Other Techniques to Improve Your Writing,” and promptly buried the book under a stack of files on my desk. Word processor. Harumph.

The book remained buried until I sent C. my first 5 chapters. She inquired if I had used the Search and Replace feature on my manuscript yet, (referred to in said book). Of course I hadn’t; that would’ve involved learning what those other buttons on “the ribbon” do. [Who names these things, anyway?]

C., who probably had me pegged from the start as a techno-resistant arse, appealed to my practical side instead. She suggested that if I used that technique before having her make her first editing pass, it would save me money, since I wouldn’t be paying her to make all those refinements. Moved by her gesture of self-sacrifice, I plugged my nose and decided to give it a shot.

C. provided me with a list of overly used words that she regularly sees in her work, and I set out to search the first 5 chapters of my manuscript for those awful offenders. I was skeptical (after all, my work is perfect as is), but as I searched, and discovered, offender after offender, my attitude soon changed.

I found instance after instance of those pesky little words—words like “only,” “just,” and, the mother of all offenders with 224 appearances, “so.” In all fairness to me, however, the search did turn up “so” not only when it stood alone, but also when it appeared within other words and expressions, like “masochist,” “sophist,” and “son of a b—.”

My reactions as I searched and replaced veered from “Holy cow, what was I thinking when I wrote that?” to “What was I drinking then?” and, on at least one occasion, “Clearly, I wasn’t drinking enough!”

When I finally finished the process (and keep in mind, this was just the first 5 chapters), I was broken, a shell of my smug former self—and a true convert. When I read back over those 5 chapters, the difference shocked me. It wasn’t just better; it was radically, drastically better, and I felt like an idiot for not having used the feature sooner.

Thank you, Peanut Gallery, for not providing confirmation.

My point to all of this?  I have learned that technology is not the enemy.

Wait. No, I still kind of think that.

How about…the enemy and I have called a truce? My fellow techno-resistant lambs, if you don’t yet use the Search and Refine feature in your writing and editing, it’s a superb tool for showing you where every little weakness in your work is hiding. It can’t fix them for you, you still have to put in that work yourself, but it pinpoints them in a fast, easy way that makes the revision process so efficient, you wonder (as with most technology), how you survived before you discovered it.

So thanks, C., for the suggestion—I’m setting off on my next Search and Refine mission now with the next 5 chapters, and feeling like a Lean, Mean, Writing Machine.

Oh, wait—you’re right, I did gain some weight over the holiday. Guess I’ll have to settle for Mean Writing Machine now instead.

 

 

   

And the winner is…

…the kids. There was a general outcry (all right, maybe it wasn’t quite that pronounced, more a general wave of frownie faces) when I told the kids I was trying to decide which novel to resume and that it might not be “theirs.” They really wanted me to work on something I’ll actually let them read, so that was that–I am back to work on my youth fantasy manuscript. And surprise–I’m completely engaged in it, much more than I was when I last set it aside a few months ago.

New characters, plot twists, even a new title and a theme, an actual theme, have all been popping in and out of my mind like some crazed literary version of Whack-a-mole. I feel like Neo at the end of The Matrix, when he looks at the agents and sees only code, the entire world laid out before him in insanely pristine clarity. After so many months–let’s face it, closer to years–of working at revising a manuscript, I had almost forgotten how much freakin’ (to quote my kids) fun it is to create a new one.

I just spent two hours working on it and it felt like two minutes. I am filled with joy at rediscovering that feeling.

Writing this book is also different in that I not only can share it with my kids, but I want to; they are, after all, my target audience. Hearing their feedback and pondering their suggestions is turning out to be much more fun than I ever thought it would, though probably not, in reality, as much fun as they thought it would be:

“What did you think of my new title, guys?” “Got any ideas for a good name for my new character?” “What do you think Bibi’s favorite color should be?”

“Really, Mom? The novelist thing was kind of cool at first, but could you just get me a snack and let me get back to Roblox? I’m at kind of a critical moment here…”

Let ’em gripe. I’ll just write it into the book. Mwahahahaha…

Here we go!

Yes! I finally finished the rewrite of my manuscript (take 3)! After sharing it with some trusted readers this spring, and upon the advice of my now-editor, I embarked upon a full rewrite, not an insignificant task. The initial, seemingly-small change my editor had suggested was to set the story in a different era, which just could not be done with a few line-item changes here and there, so a full rewrite it was. It’s been slow going, but I finally got the thing finished and sent it off to my editor. Now the real work can begin, I guess.

Next step: Wait for her changes (hopefully they will not entail another full rewrite) and keep plugging away to get it as close to perfect as we can. If she likes it, and we can plow through the edits expeditiously, I’m (cautiously and optimistically) aiming for publication this spring. Of course, I’d like to find a conventional agent and/or publisher, terrific, but with all of the options now available for self-publication, I am awfully close to “damn-the-torpedoes/agents-full-speed-ahead” mode. But it is, of course, too early to make that call just yet–most likely by year’s end.

So what will I be working on now that I’ve “finished” that (that stage of it, anyway)? Well, there’s my bread and butter writing (grant proposals, newsletters, articles, etc.), but I’ve already got 2 other novels in progress, one a youth fantasy and the other…well, harder to pin down, but it’s definitely more commercial fiction. Which one to work on now is the harder question: my kids, for obvious reasons, really want to see me finish the youth book. (They’ve definitely influenced the first few chapters, so they’re understandably eager to see “their” story continue.) But the second novel just draws me to it–I can hear the characters chattering away in my ear so often that it smacks of insanity. I wonder if I just wrote the damn thing they would finally shut up…

Ah, well–only one way to find out, isn’t there. Back to work.

 

Writer seeking balance…

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I recently attended a great networking event, at which many of the writers present touted a specific book about the importance of “building your platform,” maybe even before you finish writing your book.

I’ve been reading the book now, slowly, for the past few weeks, and have been pretty satisfied to find that there are a number of recommendations within that I’ve already been doing–this blog, for instance.

However, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to balance the things I do that are platform-building related with the actual writing that I want to be doing.

The more steps I take to make myself more visible, ahead of publication, the more the possibility of finishing this last rewrite seems to recede.

Everyone out there says that, in order to succeed, you need to write each and every day, and I do–most days, I spend 4-6 hours doing nothing but writing. It’s just not writing (read, rewriting) related to my manuscript.

It’s not a lack of inspiration or anything. I am doing vast amounts of “soft writing,” that mental drafting and redrafting that whirls around inside your head before coalescing into something you can actually set down on paper. That has been helpful, to be sure, because I have definitely had some breakthroughs on plot points. But it always seems that there’s something platform-related that I’m having to spend some time on, and I’ll let you in on a little secret:

I hate it.

I know that I’m not alone in that–virtually every presenter at that networking event referenced just how much most writers feel uncomfortable in that arena. As a group, we’re much happier hunkered down over the notepad or keyboard, rudely ignoring the fact that marketing, sales, and platform will ultimately play a role in any work’s success or failure. But knowing that I’m not alone in my dislike of it doesn’t change my dislike.

Sigh.

There. I’ve updated my blog for today. I didn’t really want to. I wanted to spend some time on the writing I want to do, but I know that I need to keep things updated here, or else “my platform will suffer.”

Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’ve got more important writing to tend to. No offense–just a writer, being, out of necessity, a little rude.