Update on Revisions
Time for a much delayed blog post from me. I’ve been keeping myself so busy (either sick or editing) that I keep forgetting to post. However, I was reminded forcibly by a friend who recently wrote on her blog post about blogging is part of the “building a platform” job of being an author in today’s digital age. Plus, I actually have stuff to talk about.
Years ago, I heard about Lani Diane Rich, who also goes by the pen name of Lucy March. I first heard about her because she has published Nanowrimo novels and because nearly every year, she offers a spot in her revision class to one lucky Nano-er. Now, of course, I know a lot more about her, mostly because she and her husband, Alastair, have one of the best writing podcasts out there, Storywonk (Seriously, it’s on daily, monday – Friday. If you’re looking for a writing podcast, listen to theirs). I have been hoping for years to take her revision course though and this year, I am pleased to be able to say that I was able to enroll.
Lani is a great teacher and I will probably end up doing a full post on Sunday about what I have learned so far in this class, since that will place me squarely at the midpoint. As a quick explanation, I can say that I have learned more in the first two classes than I have been taught about structure and editing during my twelve years of Canadian schooling. Due to her class, I was able to go back over my manuscript and discover what my seven key scenes are. I also learned that at least one of my key scenes needed to be rewritten, since it wasn’t doing what it needed to. I’m also going to be spending a bit of time this week trying to reorganize about 25% of my manuscript. I have learned that Act II of my manuscript was about 15% longer than it needed to be. This means I either need to re-identify my key scene there or that I’ll need to play around with that particular scene and see if it can’t come earlier than it currently is. Once again, if you’re interested, come back on Sunday for the full write up on how I’m applying her class to my book. If you’re looking for a class yourself, keep an eye on her main site and sign up whenever she next offers it. Unless you’ve studied Structure and Editing individually, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll learn something from this class, even if you don’t always agree with Lani’s personal opinion about how to fix up your novel.
One of the other things I’ve been looking at lately is rebooting my Dual Melodies. I put up a message saying that until I figured out where it was going that it was on a hiatus. It technically still is, but I’ve been looking at structure and how I’ll be applying it to this story. It will end up being just a novella and I’ll still be offering it here when I finish writing more of it. Then I’ll take it for a few runs of edits and perhaps sell it as an e-book if it is good enough. Like I said, it’s technically still on hiatus but I wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten about it. The main problem I ran into was that when I started fleshing out the novel and I wasn’t focusing on characters, the story changed signifigantly enough that I felt I couldn’t keep putting it up in its current form. Hindsight though is 20/20 and I’ve now realized that the story it became, isn’t the story it was and that those characters still wanted their story told. Now that I know I’m working on two different stories, I can promise that planning and writing on it will be starting up again.
And that is where my update stops. I’ll try to have a nice post about the class up for all of you on Sunday. Till then, keep writing and let me know how you’ve been, what you’ve been working on and if you have any tips on how to survive the editing/revision phase.
Tags: Alastair Stephens, Blog, editing, Epic Robot Danni, lani diane rich, Lucy March, Nanowrimo, Revision, storywonk, Writing
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.