5 Things to Consider Before You Spend Time Editing

Congratulations to William & Kate on a beautiful wedding! Best wishes & God bless your marriage.

Sharon, thanks for that great link you posted on Wednesday for the ten mistakes writers don’t see. I’ve read a few of the books that were quoted and the author put names to the things that were vague or just didn’t settle well when I read them. Smart guy.

I would say that there are a few basic questions that need answering before a writer invests a lot of time line editing a manuscript. To begin, put the manuscript away. Let it cool off. A really long time. Resist the urge to peek. When so much time has passed that you hardly recognize it, take the manuscript to a neutral setting and read it through all at once. As you read, consider these questions:

• Does the story begin in the right place? Back story has no place at the front. If the action begins too quickly, we may not know enough about the protagonist to care what is happening. Is there a good hook in the opening?
• Are there too many characters? Does the reader have trouble keeping them straight? Are some characters too similar? Are any clichéd?
• Did you use the best POV? Just to make sure, write a chapter from another character’s viewpoint. Is it an improvement? Does it add an interesting dimension to the story?
• Is the setting real? Readers need to be grounded in the setting, both in the story overall and in each scene. Will readers ask if it’s a real place?
• Is the story feasible or contrived? Is the story based on coincidence? Unless it’s a story about coincidence, it won’t have credibility. Does the hero/heroine solve the issue on his/her own or are they rescued?

When you’re certain these five questions have been answered, start work on the micro corrections like grammar, punctuation, spelling and word choice. When it is so polished that you can see your reflection in it (gosh, I look older – how long ago did this whole process begin?) put it away AGAIN. Let it cool.

Now it’s time for the last read-through. This time, you’re looking for any passage, sentence or word that causes you to stumble, even in your head voice. It could be an awkward sentence or an unfamiliar word or one that paints a dissonant word picture. Be dispassionate. Be ruthless. If something causes your reader to stop and consider, they may decide to put the book down and make tea. And making tea, they may realize they are hungry and get out a box of macaroni and cheese. And when they look for milk, they realize the carton has passed its expiration date and decide to make a grocery list. So they pull out the cookbook their daughter gave them and start perusing recipes so they can list ingredients on the grocery list, and – well, you get the picture. If you give a mouse a cookie… Don’t give the reader that cookie, or, er, whatever.

Eventually you have to stop editing and submit the manuscript. How do you know when it's time? Well, how about you?

Long Moments and Other Things that Drive Me Nuts

On Monday I wrote THE END on a novel I've been working on for two years. It was a difficult story to write, and I really rejoiced when I completed it. So what's next for this manuscript? Well, besides seeking expert input from some of my Novel Matters pals who have time enough to read it right now, I go back to the beginning and start my edits. Some of you love this part of the writing process. I don't happen to. But do I think it's necessary? Absolutely.

I came across an article more than a year ago titled "The Ten Mistakes" by Pat Holt that I thought would be a useful resource once I'd completed this (and future) manuscripts. I printed it out and filed it, then promptly forgot about it. But when I was looking for another resource yesterday, which I still can't find, I came across the article. (Really, I'm not as unorganized as I sound.) It's subtitled "Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do). So as I read the manuscript for the big picture things: characterization, conflict, scene evaluation, rising action, etc., I'll also be looking for some of the common mistakes that Holt writes about.

Sol Stein, in Stein on Writing (an absolute must for your writer's bookshelf), suggests the triage method of revision, which is dealing with the big picture items in your first read-through, and then dealing with "trivial corrections" with the next read-through. That's good advice I intend to follow. Besides, who am I to contradict Sol Stein??

But for the sake of this post, let's assume I've done my big picture revisions, and have returned to Page One for the trivial corrections. What are they? According to Stein it's excising every cliche, eliminating unessential adjectives, tightening dialogue. In short, making every word count. Here are a few more according to Pat Holt:

• Repeats -- These are "crutch words" we unconsciously use -- over and over and over. Or they're really good words or phrases that are perfect when you use them once, but that become obnoxious and show-offy when used again. And again.


• Phony Dialogue -- That's when characters talk to each other about things they already know purely for the benefit of the reader. Here's an example of a husband and wife having a Phony Dialogue conversation: "James, darling, my husband of fifteen years, our only son Edward, who attends John Muir Elementary School, needs to be picked up today at noon, because he has an appointment with Dr. Gums, the dentist we've gone to all of Edward's young life. Will you see he gets there, my love?" "Unfortunately, precious, my brother Woodrow, who is three years older than I am, needs me to take him to the airport since his wife Zelda, who took their only daughter Phoebe, and ran away with their accountant last week, is unavailable." Exaggerated yes, but we've all read books with this type of mistake.


• No-Good Suffixes -- There are "ness," "ize," and "ingly" words, to name a few. Example: "He tackled the job with fearlessness." Much better and more straightforward to say, "He was fearless in his approach." "I territorialize my bathroom vanity" vs. "This half is mine, bud!" "I look adoringly at my granddaughter, Abbie" vs. "I adore my little Abi-girl."


• Empty Adverbs -- This happens to be one of my pitfalls. I put them in when I write, then take them out when I edit, because they're (completely) unnecessary. Enough said.

To this list I add an item of my own: Search and Replace. I keep an ever-expanding list of words I use unconsciously that weaken my writing, but they're not quite the same as Holt's "Repeats." Using my list, I search them out and delete them. Sometimes I can do it with a touch of the Delete button, and sometimes I have to rewrite the sentence to strengthen it first. But bottom line, I get rid of them. Many are adverbs, but "got" is near the top of my list. For example, I'll write, "I have got" to do such and such, rather than "I have" to do such and such. The "got" adds nothing to the sentence, but makes the writer sound less articulate. I also search out verbs to which I've added "ing" making them nouns, and rewrite the sentence. Example: "There was a drawing of spectators to the scene of the crash" vs. "The accident drew a crowd."

Holt's article covers other topics such as Flat Writing; The "To Be" Words; Lists; Show, Don't Tell; Awkward Phrasing; and Commas. While I've only touched on a few of the mistakes, the article is worth printing out in its entirety and filing away where it won't be lost.

I'm excited to read through my newly completed manuscript. Unlike other novels I've written. I haven't saturated myself with this one by reading it over and over as I write. Instead, I've written this one with a minimum of looking back, which will make the work fresher as I begin my edits.

What resources do you use when you begin your revisions? What are some of the repeat words you use in your writing that you need to search out and annihilate as you revise? Do you have any particular pet peeves in the way of words or phrases? I do. "Long moment." I see it all the time and it drives me nuts. Honestly, a moment is a moment. If it's long, then it's something else. A writer should try to figure out what that is.

He is Risen Indeed

I hope all of you had a blessed Easter.

There was a time when Easter meant a good time with my family, a littletime off. And then there was that first time for me when I understood what had happened, what the resurrection meant for me. To this day, the words in the title above move me. The line from the disciples walking along the road that day can move me to tears. We should have known. "Didn't our hearts burn within us?"

I know the feeling. My conversion happened over the course of three years, but it began at a Catholic church camp when I was sixteen, when I first felt what I now know as the presence of the Holy Spirit. I was so overwhelmed that I told God, whoever he was, that I would do anything, if he would lead me. (I didn't assume it was Jesus. I'd grown up with him.)
When I was nineteen, he lead me to a Bible study, where I met him as I'd never done before. That's how it began for me.

As with Katy, my conversion was a lengthy process, which began when I was very young. My grandmother was a pastor for many years, and provided me a tremendous spiritual heritage. This pentecostal girl married a catholic boy, and, though we were both searching for God, we had a difficult time reconciling our different points of reference. We tried several churches, but none were a good fit for bothof us. A few years later, Rick began to work with a guy who continually invited him to church. By that time, Rick wasn't interested in going, and he held out for almost a year. Then Easter rolled around (1977) and that good catholic boy -- who knew to go to church on Easter -- decided to take his family to the church his friend invited him to. From the moment we walked in we both

had a difficult time controlling our emotions because there was such a presence of God there.They performed a beautiful Easter cantata that presented the message, that, yes, He is risen indeed! That church has been our home church for 34 years. Rick became an ordained minister with that denomination and served on staff at that church. He's led missions teams from that church (and many others) to work and minister all over the world. The continual invitation from that co-worker ultimately changed our lives. We're very close friends to this day. I worked for a number of years as a teacher's aide at the school our church has. Our children attended that school, they were baptized at that church,

were married there, have had their children dedicated there, and our son's funeral was there. The ministries we've been involved in there are wide and varied. I thank the Lord for a grandmother who planted the seed deep in this girl's heart, and for a man who didn't flinch

when it came to sharing his faith.

The Lord came to me, so to speak, and I submitted to His authority as soon as I realized Mormonism was false, and that its god did not exist. It was a situation in which an enemy submitted to a Conqueror. The part I'm ashamed of --- yet, I don't know what I could have done differently-- is that I didn't come to Him until ten years later. That was a period in which my soul dried up from the inside out. By the time a friend pulled me up out of that spiritual wasteland in which I was doing everything "right" and yet dying inside, I thought I was doomed to live the rest of my life that way. Thank God, thank God we made peace.

I don’t remember coming to Christ. What I do recall is when I was six years old I overheard my mother explaining the concept of hell to my older sisters (maybe they had done something terrible? The detail why is lost). When my mother was done, I went to my room and prayed the prayer my mother had told my sisters you must pray in order to go to heaven. I prayed to Jesus, and my prayer went like this, “Please come into my heart, Jesus. I don’t want to go to hell. I don’t want to go anywhere if you’re not there.” And the Lord spoke to me, “I’m already here.” A lovely beginning, don’t you think? It’s the sort of beginning that makes you think, everything’s going to be fine over here. She’s going to have a good life, stable, purposeful, focused, abundant.

Funny thing about abundant life. Jesus tells us He came that we might have abundant life – but it’s never the sort of life you think it should be – rather the abundance that Jesus brings turns out to be a very different kind of life than we think ought to be. And the sufficient grace that sustains that life He brings, turns out to be a very different sort of grace than we hoped it might be. But in the end, it saves our life. From the time I was six, I've been on the journey of losing my life in order to gain that which I cannot lose.

On the morning after my father died, my mother told me God had something

more important for Daddy to do in heaven. I know, not the best piece of wisdom for a 3-year-old, but she was 27 and mourning the loss of her husband. As you can imagine, this made God a bit of a boogie man for me. Hollywood depictions didn't help--my only exposure to things of a spiritual nature. I grew up fearful and feeling inadequate and NOT interested in anything God had to say.

At 14, we moved to a new town. I'd made the decision before the move to try drugs and sex, since being "good" hadn't brought me the sense of belonging I wanted, but the only people interested in pimply ol' me were the church people. Before long they had me going to Bible studies, only I didn't know they were Bible studies because they used the Good News for Modern Man version--with stick figures! Anyway, there was this hot shot summer intern--read that: Jesus freak--leading the study. I heard all about the love that compelled God to die for me. It took about a month of wooing, but I was his. I crawled into bed on night and asked him to be my Lord and Savior. The real joy came when I learned he'd always been my Abba, Daddy. He is risen indeed!


I grew up in church from the time I was old enough to stay in the church nursery. Ten years of Sunday School and Vacation Bible School led me to a relationship with a loving God who revealed himself in his Son, Jesus Christ. I remember the song "Have Thine Own Way, Lord" was playing when I walked down the long aisle and knelt at the altar. I don't think I actually said anything in my heart to God. The Bible says that sometimes we don't know what to pray but the Spirit speaks for us, and that's what happened for me, putting my desire into words God could hear. Of course, that was just the beginning of our relationship. I wish I could say that I have always made the right choices, but God never let me get very far from him, and even after all these years, he reveals himself in new ways all the time.

The Good Friday Blind Spot

"Could not a book with just a masterful sliver of God in it carry the fullness of His message to the mind [. . .]?" Latayne asked on Wednesday.

My biggest mistakes as a writer have happened in the moments after I decided

I knew the whole story. When I thought I understood where the story must go and why. In those moments I relaxed into cliched phrases, pat answers, short cuts, and the easy way out. When I believed I knew what the story was "about", it was as if I had set a pot on the stove and simmered the contents to reduction. And in the dense mix there was no longer room for characters to speak and act their own truth. There was only slavish devotion to the singular point of my positive message. My desire to impart truth strangled the art of story, drained the mystery out of faith, and delivered a stillborn idea.

I'm learning to approach my writing with fear and trembling. I am a writer with faith, but I do not know the fullness of His mystery. Jesus came to earth, but I have no idea what it is like for God to slip into skin which sweats and burns and callouses. He was betrayed, but what is it to look into the eyes of the man who will sell you yet love him so intensely you will die for him? Jesus sweated blood in Gethsemane, but what is it like to teeter on the edge of spiritual and physical no-man's-land, to forge with your life a trail no one has walked before?

I'm learning to stop fooling myself into believing the life of faith is easily explained. That is can be summed up with a happy ending. That victory looks anything like we think it must.

I'm learning that the moment I believe I know the whole story - novel, or faith - is the moment I need to repent, and go a different way. The way where victory is not easily recognized, where success looks like losing your life, and the happy ending is no longer the point. I must abandon my pot of reductionist ideas, and embrace the vast wilderness of a love that costs us everything.

Let us get so lost as writers, as people, that we are willing to be led through the wilderness.

We at Novel Matters wish you a blessed Easter.

The Trinity, a Hologram, and Christian Fiction

I know that one of the spiritual limps I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life is an aftereffect of believing in a god who didn’t exist. To this day I struggle with the concept of a triune God, and I know that many Christians without my cultic baggage do as well.

One graphic that has helped me is the time-honored ancient depiction of the Trinity, a simplified version of which appears below.

But while it might clarify some issues, it doesn’t come close to encompassing the incredible complexity of images that Ezekiel, for instance, experienced when he saw God: interdependent wheels and flashing lights and overlapping and multifaceted living beings no human could paint or even conceptualize simultaneously, but only in mental snapshots.

But recently a friend, Janis Hutchinson who like me is an ex-Mormon author, gave me another tool to understanding God, that of the concept of a hologram. As you might know, a hologram is a three-dimension image produced by a unique photographic process usually involving a laser.

But one extraordinary feature of a hologram is reminiscent of the Trinity. If you cut a holographic image into two, you don’t end up with two partial pieces. You end up with two complete images of the original. In this, a hologram is like the Trinity in that one of the Persons can be considered separately, so to speak, without diminishing the whole, as when Jesus left the Father and came to earth. The Godhead wasn’t reduced by this, even though Jesus brought with Him from eternity all the fullness of the Godhead.

What does this have to do with writing books from a Christian worldview? Some people criticize Christian fiction that only alludes to the gospel message without spelling out such elements as a complete conversion, for instance.

But if God is not diminished by considering or even imparting just one aspect of Himself – could it be that His message might have the same holographic capacity? If a book conveys eternal truth, with careful and responsible crafting by a writer who loves the word and The Word (and what a universe can reside in such Language!)—could not a book with just a masterful sliver of God in it carry the fullness of His message to the mind as well?

Giving Characters Their Emotional Acre

I meant to cover more ground each time I posted on our book talk about Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, but there's so much in each chapter. Today, "Character." Let's flang some ideas around about developing characters and infusing hope into our stories. If you haven't read the book or chapter, no problem. We love hearing what you have to add.

Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own…And as long as you don’t hurt anyone, you get to do with your acre as you please. Anne Lamott

I agree with all Anne Lamott says about creating characters. They have their acre, just like we do. In fact, they are us—sometimes a lot of us and sometimes just the fearful, ugly, and angry parts. This makes us love them all the more to the point we don’t mind spending months and years with them. And there are times to leave your character where “Jesus flang him.” Yes, characters do zig when you think they should zag. We’ve all had to run to keep up with our characters, but where they get flanged is usually better than where I can plot them. And so, we learn to trust our characters and Him who flangs them.

And we must know our characters better than we know our sisters and brothers, certainly better than the minds of our grown children (oops, another topic). I answer 50 questions—from what my characters carry in their wallets or purses to their physical and emotional scars. I search and search for a picture of them on the Internet, along with pictures of their houses and their dogs. I also give them a moral flaw that embarrasses me, and make sure their personality profile fits a Meyers-Briggs category. When that is done, they are no longer ephemeral, a mere shadow in my imagination, but flesh and blood. They frequently take showers with me and whisper to me in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep. I get very lonely between stories.

One step Anne leaves out that I’ve just started to include comes from my reading of John Truby’s book, The Anatomy of Story—I hope I’m not committing some sort of book-talk incest by bringing up another book. Please forgive. According to Truby, I must, must, must know why each character is in the story. Are they there to provide opposition, sage advice, or are they an ally who seems strangely sinister? Actually, this step comes before all the questions and Internet searches.

Before I knew to build characters around their roles, I’d invented Fred. I wrote four or five scenes with him and the protagonist. He was charming in a threatening sort of way. Good looking. Wise in the ways of the world. Best of all, he spoke snappy dialogue. Not good enough. I fired him because he didn’t move the story along. Worse, he detoured the story! I deleted 10,000-plus words that involved him. If he’d had a job to do, this never would have happened. Please note: Fred is still in my deleted scenes file. When he gets his story-world résumé in order, I might give him another chance.

Fred isn’t the only character I’ve had to excise from a story. My deleted files are full of interesting, quirky yet unnecessary characters. I don’t have time for such indulgences anymore. That’s why I’m adding this step to Anne’s chapter on character (I know, such hubris). You might want to add John Truby’s book, The Anatomy of Story to your reading list.

I can’t sign off on this post without adding my amen! to the importance of hope in novels. A novel must be hopeful. And the characters are the source of that hope. They’re the ones who face tough situations —from deep psychological scars to the destruction of all the love. They suffer for the sake of story, and come out of the gauntlet a better version of themselves. If this doesn’t happen, you might as well throw rocks at your reader. It hurts that much.

And don’t confuse a happy ending with hope. Tied-up-with-a-bow stories are false, not hopeful. Characters demonstrating growth, the evidence of redemption and renewal in the face of overwhelming destruction, that’s what I’m talking about. And that change can be subtle, a slight turning of the shoulders toward truth. That’s hope.

How do you build your characters? If you dare, tell us about a time you based your characters on someone you know. Having characters get flanged somewhere unexpected can be unsettling. Has this happened to you? How did you adapt?

Spring Cleaning the Writing Life

Spring has finally arrived in Northern California. We think. We hope. After record rainfall and cold, a small rise in the mercury has everyone dressed in tanks, shorts and flip flops, which don't hide the goosebumps.

As a child, I remember my mother's spring cleaning every year, though our house was already spotless. The furniture was moved for a thorough dusting and vacuuming, the wooden floors were waxed and polished, the windows cleaned with vinegar and newspaper, the cobwebs removed from attic to basement. She washed every rug, blanket and quilt and draped them on the clothesline to dry in the mottled sunshine. Cabinets were cleaned out and the Contac paper replaced, even under the kitchen sink. The broken, useless and out-of-date were tossed. By the end of the week, the house had a great freshness and exuberance after the long winter.

I would love to continue her tradition (I see merit in it) but I'm lucky to accomplish the basic weekly cleaning that keeps our house livable. If I were to choose one area to freshen, it would be my writing space, and I'm not just talking about my desk. I'm thinking that a good spring cleaning could extend to my writing life, as well.

I'm thinking of the box beneath my desk with the dusty files of just-begun stories I toyed with when I was trying to find my writer voice, as Sharon mentioned in her last post. Or the numerous revisions of the manuscripts that quietly and naturally expired before publication. Copies of revisions for books already published. The resources - now out of date - that I'd gathered for a series I wanted to write, but now realize isn't the direction I want to go.

Copies of old writing magazines. Shelves of books on writing, the writer's life, writer's devotionals, essays on the writing, how to get published, how to market, market guides, dictionaries, thesauruses, pocket dictionaries and thesauruses, word finders, synonym finders, baby names, and even more baby names. An old computer that died in the middle of my last manuscript. Tapes & CDs of writers conference sessions. Binders with worksheets for the tapes & CDs from writers conference sessions.

Why would a person keep all of this stuff, aside from the too-busy life that doesn't allow for much deep cleaning? Does the clutter define me as a writer? I've begun the task of cleaning this out several times, but the job turned out to be overwhelming and I ended by packing it all back in the tubs. Keeping a few indicators of the writer's journey makes great sense. We need to see the progress we've made. But at some point, this clutter can hold a person back. It can whisper, "This is you, now and forever. No freshness can penetrate." It can speak of failures and misguided attempts to define ourselves when we were just wandering and trying to discover who we are.

So, aside from ridding ourselves of the obvious junk, how do we spring clean the writing life? It could begin with something as simple as changing up a subscription from a writing magazine we no longer read cover to cover with something new. Perhaps we begin our writing time composing or reading a poem. Maybe we try submitting an article or personal experience piece to a magazine or story collection, something that has a beginning and end so we can see the results immediately, even if it's never published. Or we begin our autobiographies, keeping the bigger picture of our lives in mind.

We rid ourselves of the negative self-talk that keeps us in doubt of our calling and makes us question the time we sacrifice for it. We treat our writing as a job and reestablish our boundaries. We consider our writing time an appointment we keep with ourselves. No one else needs to know the reason.

With the changes in publishing, we may need to forgo the vision we had of publication and be open to something new, or be willing to change our trajectory altogether. We need to ask for a new vision of our futures as writers from the One who knows the best desired outcomes for us.

Can you think of more ways to spring clean your writing life? I would love to hear!