1

Great Guides to Revisions

Posted by Jamie Wilson on April 22, 2014 in Uncategorized |

I have revision on the brain – two novels that drain all life and sanity from me when I gaze upon them, three short stories that are great but need complete rewrites, as in throw-away-the-current-version-and-retell-the-story rewrites. So I thought I’d post a couple of links to some of my revision resources.

For bare technique, nothing beats Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Manuscript Revision. It’s the mental pain equivalent of sawing off your own arm, but it gets all the suckitude over with FAST. One notebook, one red pen, one printed out manuscript, and about a week of horrifying, relentless mental agony – and you’re all done and ready to create your clean copy. Pro tip: the third paragraph on that link? Read it EVERY SINGLE DAY you’re revising. It’s comforting.

To give yourself perspective, read Chuck Wendig’s 25 Steps to Edit the Unmerciful Suck Out of your Story. With a caveat that there is pretty raw language in this piece, it will make you laugh at the evil that is revision. To use these two articles together, you can insert the One-Pass Manuscript Revision technique somewhere around Chuck’s #12 or 13.

Once you have your revision ready, go out and read Dave King and Renni Brown’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. The editorial notes you took above were for major revision and changes to your novel. King and Brown’s book will help you with the nuts and bolts, smoothing out rough edges and making your story flow properly.

Concurrently, I recommend coffee – lots and lots of coffee.

3

The Rule of Least Harm

Posted by Jamie Wilson on April 2, 2014 in Uncategorized |

A few days ago, I had a very good conversation with friends and strangers on Facebook. We had been debating – politely – whether or not abortion is wrong. I used a rationale I called the Rule of Least Harm: when faced with an uncertain situation, weigh the potential bad outcomes, and choose the one that does the least harm. In the case of a pregnancy, the two potential bad outcomes are harm or, rarely, death to a woman, and the death of a human being. It is clear that a woman’s desire to avoid nine months of discomfort (at whatever level) and the baby’s outright death are in no way equal. When the woman’s life is on the line, the equation changes, but overwhelmingly this is not the case.

This line of reasoning, I just recently learned, is commonly used in ethical vegetarianism as well – in most cases, the argument goes, your desire to eat an animal or wear its skin are outweighed by the animal’s need for its flesh and skin. (I wondered, after reading this, why so many ethical vegetarians are pro-choice; it’s as if they don’t really understand their own arguments. But whatever.)

Pro-choice people have gotten around this obvious argument by treating the baby (or potential human being, if you insist that it’s a fetus) as if it’s not a real human being but only a parasite. I will ignore the ethical-vegetarian counterargument that killing a parasite put there by your through your own choices is even worse than killing a pig for its bacon. Instead, I’ll go to a different point: by arguing that the “parasite” should simply be eliminated, pro-choice advocates are able to pretend that, once a woman has an abortion, it’s as if the baby – I’m sorry, developing human being – had never been.

But “as if” is simply a lie. It WAS there, and you chose to evict it, possibly in a most grotesque manner far less humane than the most primitive of animal slaughter techniques. Women have a real gift for identifying truth. It’s the source of so-called women’s intuition, a real-life built-in bullshit detector. And we know that, even if it is not now, a baby that rested in our wombs at any given point WAS.

I never understood the abortion issue until I had a miscarriage in July 2006. She* was a baby I wanted terribly – the daughter I wanted to cherish with my husband – and when I found I was pregnant I was ecstatic. When I was three months along, my husband was sent to a training program for new Navy technology; he’d be gone a month. Only a few days later, I started spotting and cramping. Within hours, I had lost the baby. It took me weeks to recover physically; I had lost a lot of blood.

I will never recover emotionally. I loved that baby as much as if I’d held her in my arms. Today, when I watch my two daughters born after I lost her, I can “see” the echo of the little girl who could never be playing with them, brushing their hair, singing and playing games. Women who have abortions know, just as I did, that the baby was real – even when they bury the truth, hide it from themselves. They will always regret the baby they never had, and some will regret it mightily.

And so I wrote Biscuit Boy, the tale of a little boy who would never be but who would always be, the child his mother aborted but who would live within her always – just as every baby, born and unborn, does with every mother. No matter how she denies it.

* I am certain someone will point out that at three months, you don’t know what the sex of your baby is. I have five children, and I knew the sex of every single one before the doctor did, and usually knew within a day that I was pregnant. Besides, as I told the gynecologist who foolishly pointed out there was no way to know if it had been a girl, “She can be anything I want now.”

Tags: ,

3

Whereas A New Year Has Dawned

Posted by Jamie Wilson on January 22, 2014 in Uncategorized |

2014: a critical election year. The year epublishing begins to surpass traditional publishing. The year of the independent writer, of the gatekeeper, of the talented blogger demonstrating how to leverage an audience into a career. These are the things that will be happening, and we should all be ready for it. Start with the tools.

Hardware. Some people need pens and paper, others have to haul out a Selectric (yes, even in this day and age). Me, I need flexibility, but I also need to be able to get ideas down fast; I think faster than I can speak or type. So my main tools are my lovely powerful desktop computer, my beloved iPad (I shall give it a Viking funeral on the day it finally passes), my Kindle, and my iPhone. I also carry around pen and paper no matter where I go, just in case I forget to charge everything, or we’re traveling and I suddenly get an irresistible idea. And I use every single one.

But typing is not enough for me. Sometimes I’m struck by an idea while folding laundry or driving. Dragon Naturally Speaking and a really good headset are also helpful, though I have not utilized them enough. Resolution: that this year I will finally train my Dragon to understand the words that soak, molasses-like, through my thick accent. (Hah!)

You, dear writer, should find the physical tools you love, the ones that feel heavy and powerful under your fingers, and have something with you at all times that can take note of sudden brainstorms. If that tool is pen and paper, it will do; if it is the mainframe computer down at your office, well, that might be hard to keep in your pocket, but whatever floats you. The important thing is that your tools be transparent to your creativity, conduits that your stories can range down with no friction to slow them. Later you can worry about typing and formatting.

Software. Great hardware is nothing without something inside it, just as a good but uneducated and uninformed mind makes a very poor writer. We writers have an embarrassment of software riches today. This post is being composed on my iPad in the WordPress iOS app. I could just as easily email it to my WordPress account for publication, or compose it in Word and upload it directly. But that’s just for blog posting.

When you create stories, the most important thing about your software is that it be easy for YOU to use. It’s entirely possible that you will compose best on a bare-bones word processor like Textpad (though if you’re composing anything lengthy, I strongly suggest Wordpad instead to handle the larger files.) Others do better on a traditional word processor like Word, where they can create what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) files that look just like a printed page. If you’re like me, though, you need a little extra help controlling an overly-verdant imagination and pruning unruly plots.

So I use three essential tools when I’m writing anything of length: Scrivener or yWriter (they do approximately the same thing) and DocuWiki. Scrivener ($40) and yWriter (free) are essentially word processors built on a frame that enables writers to easily organize and re-organize writing, create templates for books or character outlining, and basically function as a second creative brain. Both allow you to create synopses and shuffle scenes around easily, note which sections of your book have been written and/or revised, and track all the other little bookkeeping chores you’ll find necessary when writing a long work. I prefer Scrivener, but it costs money and has a high learning curve. yWriter, though, is perfectly adequate to do everything most writers need, only a little bit clumsier.

DocuWiki is completely different. It’s a standalone wiki that you can use for organizing files. It will not open document files natively (darn it) but you can use it to track all your research, develop story bibles, build your plots and characters on the fly, and ultimately use as a robust story reference. Its limitations are prescribed only by you. A modified version, DocuWiki-on-a-Stick, can be installed to an SD card or a flash drive and moved from computer to computer if you write on multiple devices.

About those multiple devices: you will also need something that keeps notes and files accessible if you’re often on the go. This requires a different set of programs entirely. I get lots – and I mean LOTS – of ideas at odd times. To address this, I have Microsoft OneNote installed on every device that can handle it. This nifty little program lets me write bare-bones notes to myself, then file and organize them, and drag and drop in links or images from the Internet or other external resources. One of the niftiest things about it is the native OCR; if you drag and drop an image with text in it, like a scan, you can tell it to convert that image into editable text, and it does a surprisingly clean job.

More importantly, though, you can set OneNote to function in the Cloud with very little trouble. That means all your devices keyed to your OneNote account can instantly see changes you’ve made on another device, keeping your OneNote files completely up to date all the time across platforms. I use it frequently to write short stories in; that way, I can keep my creativity flowing no matter what I’m doing or where I am.

You can likewise back up documents into the Cloud. I generally back up to hard drives or flash drives, but many services, like DropBox or Google Docs, offer you free space for backing up files. You can use Google Docs natively as a word processor, or you can keep your different devices synced to your Cloud-based files so you always have access to the most recent files.

And now, if you’re not a technophile like me, your head is spinning. So, in a nutshell: choose your favorite writing medium, whether it’s electronic or paper; choose your favorite word processor or writing program; back up your files somehow; and go to town. The other stuff is advanced, things that make a writer’s life easier but are not required in order for you to craft a good story. That part of the writing process resides between your ears and depends on how long you apply the seat of your pants to your chair.

Copyright © 2014-2024 Jamie K. Wilson All rights reserved.
This site is using the Desk Mess Mirrored theme, v2.5, from BuyNowShop.com.