Dilemma and Discussion Question

by Katy White

I'm in the querying process, and I recently had an agent request a full manuscript of my YA contemporary romance.  Only a week later, I had an R&R (revise and resubmit) request from her.  She told me she loved the book, loved the idea, and thought it would be an easy sell to editors, with just one caveat:  either age it up or age it down.  Make it more mature or more juvenile.

Go raunchy or go middle grade.

I'm embarrassed to admit how much this bothered me.  It wasn't just that I was offended by how young adult literature has become progressively more age-inappropriate.  It was that I instantly thought of a dozen ways to "age it up."  To make it more mature.  Raunchier.  

The thought didn't last for more than a split second.  But in that split second, I could feel the pull of "doing whatever it takes" to get published.  I could feel how easy it would be to make the changes that I'm sure would have thrilled the agent.  I could feel myself losing my grasp on why I love young adult fiction and why I want to write YA and only YA.   And I didn't like it.

Fortunately, two split seconds later, I shook it off.  I reminded myself of the reason I write YA (irrespective of the fact that I'm not a huge middle grade fan).  I write YA because I love it and think it demands more authenticity than you find in other age groups.  More importantly, I write it because I have nieces and young women in my ward who love reading and who are finding less and less new releases that support their standards.  My concern isn't even cuss words or mature themes, because I feel those have a place in literature and an author can tell a valuable, important story by using such things responsibly.  My concern is that more and more books are making standards seem embarrassing and making values look like bigotry.  

I can't stand for that.

I don't know how long it will take me to get published (if ever).  But I know I won't stop trying.  I know I can't sell out.

So...here's my "discussion question" for all of you: where would you/do you draw the line when it comes to making your book a better sell?  When is it appropriate to make something more mature, and how would you do that, if you felt like it was important?

How to Slash Your Word Count

by Katy White

The book has been written, the critiques are in, and it's time to write what I hope will be to complete my final draft.  I hope to both fix the problems that have been brought to my attention and to get my 83k YA Contemporary down to, oh, 80k.  The problem in losing these 3000 words?  I've already slashed the scenes that I thought were superfluous.  So I need to cut the count by words alone. 

How?!

Below is a sampling of areas I'll focus on in my final revision.  

1)  That.  The word "that" certainly has its uses (and I'm sure you can think of myriad examples).  But it can also be a word count killer.  For example:

"He thought that I should stop eating so much ice cream."
"Eating an enormous spoonful in his face, I made it obvious that I didn't care."

In revising, I'll read lines like these out loud for the rhythm of the sentence and keep those that impact readability.   


2)  "Out of" vs. "from."  Every time I can replace "out of" with "from," I lose a word.  This can look like:

"She raced out of from the room."
"His callousness pulled her out of from her daze."

And it's an easy change to make when I use "CTRL+F" to find each instance of "out of" and evaluate if "from" fits, or not.

3)  Axe some dialogue tags.  Once I've established that two people are talking, I probably don't need "he said" and "she said" as often as I currently have them.  

4)  Stop over-explaining everything because I want my reader to see a scene exactly as I see it.  Just because I care that my character cocked his head to the side before saying something, does the reader really need to know that?  Sometimes, sure.  When it helps them better understand my character.  But not always.  Unless it's desperately important essential that you see my character's confusion, as opposed to her being upset or suspicious or some other emotion altogether, the head-cocking just isn't necessary.  In fact, the dialogue should really speak for itself in most cases.  This rule applies to my writing all the time.  (See, I even did it there?  I needed you to read this sentence exactly as I would have said it out loud, even though you really don't need that for comprehension.) 

5)  Remove redundancy.  Instead of saying, "Josh crept stealthily to the barn," why don't I just say "crept," shall I?  Stealth is implied.  And so long, phrases like "nodded his head" and "reached a hand." "Nodded" and "reached" will work just fine.

6)  Sayonara, adjectives and adverbs (where possible).  This sort of fits with the redundancy above, but where something isn't redundant, I probably just need to find a stronger verb.  And if it ends in -ly, I really need to evaluate its usefulness.  That's not to say every adjective or adverb will go, but some will;  the ones that stay will be purposefully kept.  I'll keep the others purposefully. 

The fact is, I'm still going to have needless words.  I'll miss some tightening opportunities, and I'll choose to forego others.   Yes, you read that right:  despite the constant harping in the writing community to make your writing as tight as absolutely possible, I won't.  I'll look at my voice, the flow of my sentences and paragraphs, keep what sounds nice, and only get rid of what sounds clunky.  Because I want to sound like me.  Just the best, tightest version of me (this rule does not apply to my aforementioned ice cream problem).  

Above are the opportunities I find when I revise, but you may find others when you do, and I'd love to hear them (as well as what I'm missing).  So, please, sound off below with your favorite slashing techniques!

Step #8

-a post by Jeanna Mason Stay

Remember here, where I gave you eight steps to NaNoWriMo success? Well, November is over, and now it’s time to start talking a bit more about step #8. There is good news, and there is bad news here. Let’s start with the good news.

The good news is that even if you didn’t do any of the other seven steps, even if you didn’t hit 50,000 words in November—even if you didn’t try at all—you can still do step #8, the most important step of all.

The bad news: It’s harder than the rest of them combined.

Yes, the dreaded step #8 is to polish the novel (or short story or picture book or quilt or whatever).

If you only follow through on the first seven steps, you will turn out a lot of words and you will probably learn about your story quite a bit and tap some creative wells you didn’t know about. This is all awesomeness on your way to epic awesomeness. But, sadly, it isn’t enough. Because what you have is most likely so raw and full of holes no one will ever want to read it (including, maybe, you). (Okay, yes, I know that there are people who write fantastic first drafts, but those people are not me. And I’m sorry to say that they’re probably not you either.)

So the next step is, like Betsy Schow is always saying, to be a finisher. You’ve been a finisher at NaNoWriMo (or maybe not, but that’s irrelevant), but now you need to be a bigger finisher. You need to take what you’ve done, pick it apart, and stick it back together again in a way that makes sense. And then you need to make it pretty.

I’m saying all of this entirely hypocritically, by the way. I have four fairly large (50K or over) novel manuscripts sitting on my virtual shelves, one 30K manuscript, and scads of bits and pieces too. But I’ve only carried one of them to “completion.” (I sigh when I say “completion,” because every time I think it’s done, I get some feedback from a friend or reviewer and decide to fix it a little more. So even though I’m submitting it to agents, and it really is polished, it’s never quite polished enough, you know? Sigh.) So essentially I haven’t been much of a finisher.

That is because this step takes more work and thought and problem solving than any of the others, but I also think it’s the one that sets apart the serious writers. Sure, it’s not exactly “easy” to do NaNoWriMo, but how many people actually do something with their manuscripts afterward? I would bet that most manuscripts just languish for years (like mine).

Be one of the few! Make a plan and a goal. You have the entire rest of the year to be a NoFier (Novel Finisher . . . hmmm, somehow I don’t think this abbreviation is ever going to catch on). I actually ran some imaginary numbers on this at one point and determined that if I devoted even half as much time to writing during the rest of the months of the year that I spent in November, I could easily finish a novel a year. Draft in November, polish/reviews/revisions in December through September, outline a new one in October. Chop chop, that’s that. Tragically, this plan has yet to happen.

But 2014 is my year, people. One more of those manuscripts sitting on my shelf is going to get pretty.

How about yours?

P.S. I really wish I had come up with a cool picture or gif or something to go with this post. But honestly, given my brain power right now, you should probably just be impressed that I used bold and italics. That’s some seriously high-tech stuff there.

P.P.S. If you live in or near Logan, Utah, I hope you are planning on going to LDStorymakers this year. And if you don’t live close, consider spending huge amounts of money to go. We’re talking about Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson here, people (both of whose classes are going to fill up ridiculously quickly). And many other good things. It is going to be full of epicness. Make sure you register early to get into nifty classes and whatnot (registration opens on the 16th), but not any earlier than I do. :)

What Makes the Perfect Critique Partner

I have some of the best critique partners in the whole world. I'm really sorry if you think your critique partners are the best in the whole world, because they're not. Mine are.

At least, they're the best for me.

And that's really the quest, isn't it? To find the very best partner for you. So how do you go about doing it? And how do you know when you've found it?

I don't know.

Much like falling in love, finding the perfect CP is a lot about how well you two mesh together, how well you "get" each other, and that undefinable je ne sais quoi. But here are some tips to help you get started, and hopefully avoid some of the worst pitfalls.

The perfect CP communicates the same way you do. 
If you're a twitter junkie and this prospective CP thinks twitter is for the birds (see what I did there? Eh???), you might be a poor match. If this prospective CP wants to Skype everyday and that bugs the crap out of you, you might be a poor match. You're going to be communicating with each other. A LOT. It should be comfortable for both of you.

(to be honest, though - my best CPs have become my friends and we tweet, facebook, email, gchat, skype, text, and visit in person. so.)

The perfect CP understands your genre AND category. 
You definitely do not want someone leaving six comments on every page saying, "This is too complicated, simplify it!" if your writing actually is quite clear. But if you write adult literary fiction and your CP writes MG science fiction... you're going to have this problem.

You don't have to write the same genre and category as your CP, but you need to understand each other's work. One of my favorite CPs writes YA fantasy. I don't write YA, but I read A LOT of it (in addition to the adult fantasy I read, of course), so I feel capable of giving her useful feedback.

The perfect CP needs the same amount of help you do. 
If you need help brainstorming ideas, structuring your story, building character arcs, understanding grammar, pacing, resolving conflicts, and layering metaphors, but your CP only needs someone to proofread their copy... you're not a good match. She's your mentor, not your partner.

Partners are equal, or at least semi-equal. One of you should not be pulling the other along through the marshes of this crazy world we call writing, you should be helping each other. If one of you is pulling the other, it's a mentorship. If you have one of those, be grateful for it and be on the lookout to be a mentor to someone else when the time comes.

The perfect CP does not need help with the same things as you. 
This would be like the blind leading the blind.

The perfect CP gets your style. 
Personal story (because the rest of this post has been so impersonal, you know): I once traded manuscripts with someone who tore my book to shreds. She changed every verb, crossed out and re-worded literally every sentence, questioned my characters, ridiculed my focus, said, "You've written a character-driven story, and I really think it needs to be a milieu-based story instead."

Guess what?

I didn't make any of those changes.

She didn't get me or my book. She wanted a different book, she wanted something that I wasn't writing, and she wasn't willing to see past her own preferences to see what I was doing. And that's totally okay. She's a perfectly good writer and she's the right partner for somebody. Somebody else. 

So there you have it. Five tips to help you identify the perfect CP. I found mine on twitter, you can find them through writing groups (like ANWA *shameless plug*), or you can check out this excellent site, CPSeek.com , where I also found two of my favorite CPs.

Go forth and find your match.

Saturday So What: Mommy Writer's Guilt

I have an epic case of Mommy Writer's Guilt. I am neck deep in revisions and the changes that I thought would be easy, have ended up altering the entire structure of my book. Characters are falling by the wayside.  Lost and forgotten.  Including the two most important characters... my kids.

I have an almost 3 yr old and a 5 and half yr old. I'm worried that for the last week and the next one to come, they are orphans. My husband is going to school full time and in the middle of finals. When he's home, he's locked in his office.And I have spent at least 40 hours this week making the editorial revisions. Trying to meet my deadline in a week and a half.

If I don't lock myself away, then I am constantly distracted by the screaming and guts flying everywhere. Don't worry-- it was just the Teddy Bear's. He pulled through the reconstructive surgery. If I wait until they are asleep, I can only make it until 10 oclock before my brain turns to mush.

To make matters worse, next week I start school again too. For five hours a day, the little ones are going to be shipped off to grandma's, summer camp, or whoever else I can get to take them. I feel horrible. Up until this year, I have been a stay at home mom who's main task of the day was making sure the kids had bathtime.

 I am used to spending every waking moment with my kids. They still follow me to the bathroom. Now I'm seeing them less and less. Normally, I try not to let my WIP take time from my kids. I write during preschool or dance class. But schools out, and the deadline is looming.

Am I just making excuses by saying that it's only temporary? Just another week and then when I'm home.. I'm all theirs? Or am I horrible mommy neglecting my kids?

Do you struggle with writing and other pursuits getting in the way of family time? What do you do? Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated. Sorry that this isn't my normal upbeat kind of post, but I wanted to share what I was feeling.

Hopefully I can survive the next 8 days, but if not, you can read me post mortem :) This week's posts are De-Sensitivity Training for the Zombie Apocalypse and The Incredible Shrinking Catwoman.

Saturday So What: Revisions

Today, I am searching for the vision in revisions. I'm currently working on three different books, each of them in a different stage of the the revision process.


Finished being Fat, is in the line edit stage. No thought required. Just fix the grammatic mistakes, a few word choices here and there.. and voila. Done.

Trouble's on the Menu, is in the editorial revision stage. That's where my editor has read through the manuscript, accepted it, but has a list of changes she wants before it goes to press. These can get really nit picky or broad. Most notes are content based. One in particular has me eliminating an entire character from the book.  I'm not gonna lie, it hurts, and it's a lot of work. There's an element of pride involved. Finding out some of the things you thought were clever turned out to be lame. But I have to change it anyway. Why? Because they're paying me to and my contract says I have to. LOL

House of Emerald is so much trickier. It's still in the pre-submittal phase. I'm working on it with my critique groups and a beta reader or two. This is where I need to find the vision. My vision, because everyone else has one as well. I have notes that say I need more description, I have notes that say I am using too much description. If I followed every single critique I've gotten, my book would be a mess. It's easy to take everyone's advice as law. But it's not. It's an opinion. And in the end, I need to weigh them and then trust my gut and incorporate some of the suggestions.

Revisions can be tough. It's really easy to get lost, but the best advice I can give is to remember one thing. It's your book. You make all the decisions until you sign that puppy over to someone else.  And even then if you really believe something, there's a bit of wiggle room. Trust yourself and your vision. At the same time, realize that sometimes you have to let a few favorite lines go for the good of the book.  Make a separate word file and cut and paste them over there. Never know when they might come in handy.

Thanks for reading. You can pick up a few pointers on character voicing on my blog post Tut, tut, looks like rain. Or read about the post marathon let down in ... now what?  See you next week.