Get your weed whacker out and chop those words!

I probably shouldn't write a critique or recommend a book before I finish reading it, but in this case I must. The book is called "GETTING THE WORDS RIGHT" by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. The first chapter talks about reducing. Cutting whole chapters, paragraphs, even characters from your novel. If something doesn't push the plot ahead, it isn't needed. You may think your passage about so and so's great uncle bill is so poetic and pretty, but if you can delete it and the plot isn't affected, then go ahead and delete it.

Words are my biggest enemy when it comes to writing. I like to use a lot of them. And most of the time, I don't need that many words to get my point across. I often write "wordier" when I'm in 1st person, especially when writing through the eyes of a teenager. Here's a sentence from my YA novel that's too wordy:

Panting like an asthma patient, I turned on my bed light and touched my body to make certain it was still there and not covered in blood.

This sentence goes on forever! Let's make it better, shall we? By chopping it down!

Panting, I turned on my bed light and touched my body. I was still in one piece; there wasn't any blood.

Hmmm, much better, don't you think? 27 words to 21 words. Not a huge cut, but doesn't it flow better? I don't have to say "like an asthma patient" because when you pant, you can't breathe right, so why include the asthma thing? I also don't need "to make certain."

Here's another one:

In fact, combined with my blue comforter and brown dresser and nightstand, it looked very earthy.

TO...

Combined with the blue comforter, brown dresser and nightstand, it was earthy.

And here's a really wordy one!

Smiling like a bubbly cupid-struck heroine, I returned to my table of anxious friends where I was overwhelmed by a million questions all at once.

TO...

Cupid-struck, I returned to my friends where I was overwhelmed in questions.
OR
Cupid-struck, I returned to my friends anxious to overwhelm me with questions.

See where I'm going with this? It helps to go through your writing and highlight all the long, wordy sentences. Then copy and paste them to a blank word document and look at them out of context. It helps so much!

Now, I know what some people maybe thinking. I just completed my first draft and it's 80,000 words. Now I have to go through it and chop out a bunch of stuff? The answer is: yes!

The novel I'm currently revising was originally 82K. A perfectly acceptable length for a YA novel. Now it's 73K and will continue to decrease the more I edit it. Is that a bad thing if it goes too low? Say to 60K?

Well, if you end up chopping your book in half that probably means your book wasn't that great to begin with. You probably had a lot of extra junk added in because you didn't know for sure where you wanted to go with the book, so while your brain fumbled through ideas, your fingers typed all this extra crap in, thinking it was doing something beneficial. It's okay though. We all do it. And sometimes it takes a long time to figure that out. Me, it took me a year to realize what a mess I'd made of my novel. I had a good idea. One agent said she loved the "potential" of my novel. Which means underneath all those lengthy words I had a seed. But the seed couldn't grow because it was being suffocated by all the weeds (the extra words). Now that I'm "weeding" out those words, I see the beginnings of a flower. And soon I'll have a garden. :-)

September here I come!

September is here at last! I thought for sure I wouldn't have any time for writing now that I'm back to full-time work again, but I've actually been keeping up. I've put myself on a strict schedule:

Work - Gym/Jogging - 1 chapter edited of Flicker - 1 chapter edited of Dawn

Working out def gives me more energy to write. But I'm not actually writing anything new believe it or not. I'm editing two books. One is a novel I wrote a year ago and one is the novel I just recently finished. I'm not "allowed" to start writing anything new until these two novels are polished which could take several months. And I must also edit my short stories for graduate schools.

Usually I can't survive without a "new" project, but I'm doing just fine. I'm actually enjoying the edit process this time, when usually I dread it. I am, however, not looking forward to possibly having to switch one of these novels to 3rd person.

I'm going to miss the warm weather. I want it to stay sunny all year long!

Query Success

Hard work does pay off. Revision after revision after revision. I started querying SEAWEEDS a few weeks ago. Got slammed with 10 rejections in the first week. And today, I came home and boom, an agent (from AN AWESOME AGENCY) wants to read my book.

Holy yay!

To anyone out there who is feeling doubtful, just keep writing. Keep revising. Keep your chin up. Rejections make us who we are. They make us stronger in the end.

I may not get an agent out of this, but at least I know I have a good query and potentially a good book. :-)

Old stuff you thought was crap but actually isn't

Since I'm not writing anything new (for the present) I've decided to revisit all my old novels. Some I haven't touched in years. For example, my first YA book I started writing in early 2009. I queried it, got rejected a bunch, but I did have one agent read the entire book and she told me exactly what I needed to do--work on the beginning, make it more exciting, draw the reader into the vampire world sooner. Plus, the ending was a little corny. Fix that too. Oh, and it wasn't believable that the girl fell in love with the guy so quickly...

I re-read the novel. I edited a few things, took out all the "I love yous" and replaced them with "I care about you." I re-wrote the ending and made it stronger. And now comes the hard part...CHOPPING stuff out. Literally, I've had to cut entire pages of useless crap that makes the beginning sound like a typical teen story (which it isn't at all). My novel was originally 82K. Now it's 75K and I still believe there's stuff from the beginning I could cut out.

Just because it's already been queried, doesn't mean I can't query it again. It's been almost a year since my last rejection for it. And plenty more agents have popped up since then.

I'm glad I'm doing this. I was so in love with the book, the characters, the world I created...now I'm back and I feel at home.

Accomplishments

In terms of accomplishing goals this month, I got off to a rough start. So the last two weeks I've been trying to redeem myself by writing and reading and querying as much as possible. I finished Flicker last night. Final word count-96,000! And probably with edits it'll end up close to 100K. It's the longest book I've ever written. And while I'm proud of it, I'm dreading the LONG LONG editing process ahead of me. Thankfully because I changed the ending, I think it can stay in 1st person. But it'll still need a lot of revising before it's ready for agents. Goal for querying it is January 1, 2011. That gives me four months. I think I can do it.

I also wrote two short stories, mainly because I want to have lots of pieces to chose from when selecting stories for grad school applications. I think they're decent stories. The plots aren't overly complicated or twisted, mainly they're stories about life and relationships. I think if I submit one piece that's focused on plot and one on character it'll show diversity to schools.

I've been sending queries out for Seaweeds every day for almost a week. Five rejections so far. I expected that to happen. But I'm gonna keep on querying. If anything, I'd appreciate feedback. I got agents in the past to read entire books and provide me advice and it was well worth the rejection to know what I need to work on. My mom finished reading Seaweeds last night. She doesn't think it's my best work and says it's bizarre and weird but funny. Good. I'm glad it's funny. I didn't intend for it to be a serious serious novel. I wanted to write an escape book for people who are tired of seriousness and need to take a dip in the ocean.

My other book, To Catch a Rainbow Butterfly, which I still believe to be my best work, was queried and rejected back in May. I'm going through the agents I sent it to, revising my query, and gonna query it again.

I have another novel that I started writing back in college that has a lot of potential but man, oh man, does my writing suck! So I'm thinking I'll rewrite it.

So all in all. Despite achieving a lot these last few weeks, I still have a bucket load of work to do. And full-time work starts again on Thursday, so I'm spending these next two days of freedom working on everything I just blogged about. I love this blog. If I forget what I'm supposed to be doing, I just come back here and read what I wrote.

To everyone and their writing endeavors, good luck and may your fingers be swift and your brains be imaginative and your hearts be full!

in the mud

I wrote a short story. Originally I'd planned to make it into a novel, but I needed another piece for my grad school portfolio. I have too many murder-related short stories. Need to show variety. Maybe later I'll expand it into a novel, but I don't feel the need to just now.

I'm at that point where I really don't know what to do in terms of writing. Seaweeds is being queried. I expect nothing more than a lot of rejections after going through the query process before with 3 other novels. But I do hope for at least a few interested agents who might wanna read partials or fulls. At least to get feedback would be extremely beneficial.

I seriously am like 2,000 words away from finishing Flicker, but is it really publishable? It's all about werewolves, Fae, vampires, and witches. Everything nowadays is about that. I want to stand out. And I'm not sure if Flicker is the stand out book agents will want to grab.

So do I put Flicker on the sideline like I did once before with a novel and move on to a new project? Or do I keep at it until it's done and at least let friends read it. Because there's no harm in that.

Or do I go back and revise and work on some novels that I never took the time to query?

All I know...I can't survive without writing.

I smell you Autumn

September is just around the corner and I haven't been as vigorous with my writing as I'd planned. I was at the beach all last week and didn't write hardly at all. I got swimmer's ear and spent all weekend CRYING because of the pain. I'm just starting to recover.

I queried Seaweeds today. FINALLY! A part of me is super super scared that no one will want to read it. That's what happened with the last novel I queried. My first two books I queried, I got a few agents to read the entire manuscript. With each novel, I expect more not less. I really want to get an agent this time, or at least get agents interested in reading more.

I still need to finish Flicker. I might need to write a new short story for grad school applications. And I have another novel I want to start writing. Lots to do. A week left of summer vacation and then back to full time work. Yikes. I better be productive!