Bringing It Up a Notch
Soooo, I’m revising Hot Shot because it’s been rejected for being too category. So I’m digging deeper into my heroine’s motivation to make her conflict…more.
Bringing it up a notch – it’s what I’ve been doing since I signed with my agent. First with Hot Shot, making the ending as exciting as the beginning (I have a tendency to have two halves to a book). Then with DLB, making it sexier, more conflicted.
I know Donald Maass is famous for talking about bringing your book to the next level. I suppose I should go check out his book?
With Hot Shot, what I essentially did was rewrite the back half. With DLB, the way I’m doing it is going through scene by scene, line by line, to dig as deep as I can with each sentence. It’s exhausting, and I have to remind myself to stop when I get too tired or I won’t do the book justice.
Once I have the new ideas in place for Hot Shot, I’m going to do the same. It’s hard. As well as you think you know your characters, sometimes you don’t. And sometimes you know them too well and you realize your reader may not know why the characters are doing what they’re doing.
It looks like this will be the year of revisions – Beneath the Surface after this, then Vanished. All of which need to be tilled and mined for the best story I can tell.
How do you bring your writing to the next level?
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- MJFredrick
- I'm a mom, a wife, a teacher and a writer. I have five cats and a dog to keep me company. I love bookstores and libraries and Netflix - movies are my greatest weakness.
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7 comments:
Good luck with this Mary! I know you can do it. What I’m doing is using the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. I’m taking a practice run on my YA to see if I like the method overall (I have tried some of the exercises and like them, we’ll see if that holds as a whole). If it’s a go, I’m going to tackle The Boys’ Club using the same method.
It is exhausting! I have read most of Donald Maass' book, but then the pages started falling out, which was a bad sign :) It is brilliant though. I wish I'd read all my craft books first, but then you wouldn't understand any of the things you were reading about.
The trouble with adding stuff is it has to work and flow throughout the story, it can't jar you when you go back and read it again straight through. And it takes a lot more time, and you seem to have a lot less to show for it, but I guess you are (hopefully) making an OK story 'good'.
With FORBIDDEN TERRITORY, I had a somewhat weak villain (or pair of villains) whose motives were petty (robbery gone bad). In my rewrite, while those same bad guys remained part of the story, I made them pawns of a bigger villain with a more complex motive. I also completely retooled some scenes to make them more active and to build the danger to the characters. For instance, the first kiss happened in a rather pedestrian way in my first version, and while it was a good scene, it seemed ill-motivated. When I rewrote the book, I put the first kiss at the end of a tense scene fraught with great peril and it worked so much better.
It sounds like you're going about your rewrites in exactly the right way.
I don't pretend to know what I'm doing. :) Lisa Gardner gives a good talk about revisions and making the book "bigger." I think the gist of it was that you needed to dig deeper into the characters and make their conflicts more interesting, more powerful. Lots of layers and don't show your hand too soon. I'm still learning, too!
Sounds like you're on the right track, Mary. I know it's mentally exhausting work, but it's going to pay off. I just know it.
Cursing and swearing, yeah, that sounds familiar. I'm trying to write a new first scene and I just can't make it ring true to the characters, who are both kind of isolated in their own ways. But now I have another new idea, so I emailed my agent. Will wait to see what she says before I move ahead.
Charity, good luck with the workbook! Let me know how it goes!
Toni, you're right that you have to learn about writing by writing! The craft books are good, but a lot of times they just make my mind twist around.
Paula, I can't wait to read that book!
Michelle, I listened to the Lisa Gardner CD some time back. All the talk about index cards scared the hooey out of me, but maybe I'll give it another listen this week.
Trish, I just wonder if we'll ever write new stuff again!
Go Mary! You can do it.
You're stuff wass too category because you'd aimed it at the category market. But the books were too big for category. So now you know where they belong and it's a whole new process, but once you're done the books will be better than ever!
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