Line-editing comes easily to me. I can spend hours tweaking sentences, polishing description, making dialog snappier. All of which is akin to lovingly smoothing on the wallpaper while the roof leaks, the furnace belches carbon monoxide and a colony of rabid bats has taken residence in the attic. It’s harder to see the overall arc of my story, the structure of my novel, which was one of the reasons why I signed up for How To Revise Your Novel. I wanted to learn how to find and fix my big problems before I spent hours deciding which shade of off-white to paint the walls (Old Linen or Cream Yellow?), only to discover that the walls need to be knocked out so that the kitchen could be enlarged.

And one of the lovely little tricks I learned from HTRYN is writing one-line descriptions of my scenes on index cards. And now I have both a visual representation of my novel and the flexibility to try new structures by moving my scene cards around.

This was the study floor a while ago (I couldn’t leave  my cards down  for too long since I have three kids whose passage is heralded by gale-force (ha! note pun) winds):

I laid out my cards in chronological order, but also in three columns each representing a plot thread (innovatively called Main Plot, Subplot A and Subplot B). This way I could see where my main plot was stretched thin, when there was overlap, where there was too large a cluster of scenes that only dealt with one subplot. To see my novel like this was a huge help to me. I can lay out my novel in so many different ways using colored scene cards–based on POV, location, subplots, the presence of certain characters.

For further reading:

Holly Lisle’ has a workshop for using index cards to come up with a plot in the first place. More on plotting using index cards here and here.

I haven’t written a lick of original fiction since–*squints into the misty past*–I worked on Rainbird last fall (*gasp*!). This year, I’ve funneled all my storytelling efforts into revising Quartz using the HTRYN course, and diligently beat down any other contenders for my writing time with a big thick stick.

I blame spring for what happened yesterday. Something in me just wanted new birth, to have a chance to grow into tentative life, to bloom into something small and shy, or big and showy…

So I started with a fairy tale to twist, a first scene, two characters and the glimmerings of a setting (city! rain-slicked, domes and towers striped like candy), and started writing. It was hesitant writing, full of fits and starts, long-unused muscles figuring things out all over again.

This story might go somewhere magical, or go nowhere at all, but the beauty of it is that there is no pressure. I love it.

It’s been a lot of fun to read how titles fit into everyone’s writing process. No matter where you are on the spectrum, it’s a great feeling to have picked out the right title for your story. Here are a few of my favorites, from my own stories:

1. Out of Shape, because it fits perfectly with the plot on two levels, one of which you can see right away in the first paragraph:

Thaddeus Pudgekin, middle-aged accountant, paunchy and balding, ran for his life through the gloom of Blackburn. Sweat plastered his thinning hair to his scalp and stained the underarms of his silk suit coat. Acrid air scoured lungs, blood bludgeoned heart and brain, skin strained against shirt. He cursed his flabby body and all the food it had ever consumed; the buckets of deep-fried eels, trays of trembling soufflés and luscious bonbons, even the two biscuits with his mid-afternoon tea.

2.  Singing for the Enemy, because it contains one of the twists of the story. There’s a lot of things you can imagine doing for an enemy (all unpleasant), but singing isn’t one of them. It took me a while to come up with this one–Poisoned Lullaby was stuck in my head for the longest time–but I love it.

3. Here Comes the Bride. I took a well-known phrase and used it as a title for a story that twists the concept of bride walking down the aisle in a couple of different ways.

4. Beauty, Unraveling. One of my recent stories, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I didn’t want to name the story just plain Beauty, because that’s overdone (and Robin McKinley wrote a novel-length retelling with that same title ). Then I noticed how much I used the words and imagery of coming apart, and this title was born. It’s literary-ish, which is a fun mask to don once in a while.

Have you come up with the perfect title? The one that completes the story, that zinged your nerves when it first popped up? Please do share.

I suck at titles. Once in a while, titles leap fully-formed from my head with accompanying stories (Out of Shape and Second Sight being two) but mostly, coming up with a title is a hard slog. You can see my lack in the entitling department in my lackluster novel names: The Changeling (boring), Season of Rains (too subtle), Quartz (working title) and Kai’s book (I’m not even trying here).

It’s tempting for me to dismiss titling my fiction as a hoop that I have to jump through on my road to publication, akin to putting my story into Standard Manuscript Format. (Why can’t we just name stories like we do piano sonatas? Then we could have stories like Teenage Vampire in Angst Major). On the other hand, some might argue that a good title is an integral part of the story, one that completes it and adds that final polishing touch. Others might say that it is a marketing gimmick, hooks designed to lure the reader in, to sink into the reader’s brain.

How does titling your work fit into your creative process? How important is the title to your story as a whole? Does your story feel incomplete unless you have titled it?

I’m convinced that what separates the professional-level writer (published or not) from the enthusiast is the thoughtful, deliberate act of revising. Often, the focus is on just getting the words out on the page. There are organizations, books, communities and other cheerleading squads dedicated to helping writers get their stories down on the page. What we often forget or gloss over is that the first draft is only step one of the process.

The first draft is like getting together your raw material, assembling your tools, creating that first sketch, making a miniature model. In order to get a book that is cohesive, consistent, and worthwhile for others to read, a writer must master rewriting.

Rewriting (or revising) is not the same as line editing. Rewriting is not agonizing over word choices, tweaking dialog or making sure that Susan still has blue eyes on page 80, like she did on page 7. Rewriting is the ability to look at your story in terms of plot arc and character development. It’s to make sure that your conflict is present and meaningful; your plot is logical and plausible according the rules you have set for your world; and your characters don’t do dumb out-of-character actions.  Rewriting is a process in which your left brain and right brain work together to uncover the story you wanted to write from the mess of words in front of you.

Rewriting is a hard skill to learn. My first book, The Changeling, was a rather clean first draft. It didn’t take too much work to get it to the point where it is the book I wanted. Yes, it still has issues, namely of the pacing kind. It has a prologue; it has many chapters about the main character growing up; the inciting event that kicks off the whole quest journey doesn’t even happen until a third of the way through the book. It may not be a marketable book, but it is the book I wanted to write and I’m happy with how it turned out.

My second book, though (*shudder*). My MC spent most of the book reacting instead of acting. I kept secrets way past their expiration date. Instead of bringing out those things into the open and using them as conflict, I spent most of the book trying to keep everyone in the dark while all these inexplicable things happened just so I could pull out my aces (ta da! Here’s what everyone’s been hiding!). It turned the book into a big mess that has been a headache to revise.

Then we have Quartz, the most broken book of all. So broken that it didn’t just end, it petered out. So broken that the last chapters are peppered with notes to myself in red font–”blah blah blah” “boring!” “I don’t want to write this scene so I’ll just move on to the next”. Somewhere along the way, in spite of a dynamic opening, great dialog and some truly exciting action scenes, I got off track. Now I was stuck in the mud, wheels spinning uselessly. I knew Quartz needed a major overhaul, but revision was never my strong point. I approached rewriting in a haphazard, insert-a-comma-here-delete-a-scene-there sort of way.

Then along came the How to Revise Your Novel course. Since I had no method (and only madness!) to my revising, I decided to try it Holly Lisle’s way. There is a strong left-brained aspect to the course (complete with worksheets and index cards) which works for me (all the jobs I’ve had—and been good at–have been detail-oriented and task-focused). Instead of my usual scatter-shot approach, I’m combing through my ms in a more systematic way. So far, it’s both manageable and enlightening. And best of all, I’m no longer as overwhelmed as I normally am when facing a rewrite.

So, taking Quartz through that course has been the major component of my writing this year.

How about you? How do you handle the process of revision?