Storybundling the Write Stuff

Here’s five gifts for the writer on your list (even if it’s yourself).

A little history. One of my favorite reads this year was Bud Webster’s Past Masters: And Other Bookish Natterings. Bud’s book combines hearty doses of interesting history with some deliciously thorough reading lists, that will only lead you to more and more reading. Bud always managed to tell me something about the writers that I didn’t know but which shed more light (and interest) on the stories I already loved. Heartily recommended, particularly if you’re well-read in the SF field and want to know more about some of its greats.

A little inspiration. WonderBook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction is a fabulous, gorgeous book about writing created by Jeff VanderMeer and Jeremy Zerfoss that will inspire and amuse. There’s a lot of writing books produced each year – this is not only the nicest of this year’s, but one well worth dipping into over and over again.

A little fuel. Writers usually require coffee. This year, due to this blog post by Chuck Wendig, I’ve become a fan of the Chemex coffeemaker. It’s got a nice little ritual to coffee-making that helps start the day right. Or a pound of fancy weasel-butt process coffee, if you want to go all out. Uncaffeinated writer? Get them a gift certificate and let them pick their own liquid.

A little efficiency. Dragon Dictate is dictation software available for Windows and Mac (although check what OS you’re running, a version hasn’t been released yet for the latest Mac update.) I love Dragon Dictate and think it makes me significantly more productive. It does take a little getting used to, but once you’ve worked with it a while, writing by hand feels archaic. And slooooooow.

A little notebook. Though it may seem unoriginal, writers always need notebooks. There’s a reason Moleskines keep being popular. Toss in a few fancy pens like this or these for a coordinated gift.

The Editing class is split into three sections. In this first session, we focused on developmental, or “big picture,” editing.

Some people are taking the class in order to edit their own stuff, others to edit for other folks, a couple for a combination of that. We talked about what a developmental edit is intended to do, and how it’s different from a copy-edit. In fact, you want to avoid copy-editing (other than a couple of cases which I’ll get to in a minute) because often that sentence you’re tinkering with will end up discarded or substantially revised in the final version.

Honing your editing ability to where you can trust it is one way to free yourself up when writing. Instead of listening to the internal editor telling you that sentence isn’t perfect or that you need to check that name on Wikipedia before using it, you can assure that editor it will get its chance during the revision process and go on writing.

Developing a process also helps you know when to stop rewriting. I work from the big picture stuff in, moving to small sentence level details in a second or third draft. Usually my process goes like this:

1. Bang out a first draft. It may have parenthetical directions like (expand on this) or (transition here) or (describe), but it is a complete story.
2. (Optional but encouraged) Let it sit for a week or two. This is where procrastination can really bite you in the ass.
3. Print out the draft and write all over it. This is my developmental edit, in which structures may get changes, sections moved (or eliminated), point of view or tense changed, etc. It’s also where all those parenthetical directions get fulfilled.
4. Entering these changes onto the computer may involve some more tinkering as I do so, but generally I’m working towards another draft that I can print out.
5. That draft gets printed out and edited again. This stage is where I read aloud and tinker at the sentence and paragraph level. I may changes names at this point, and I’ll do things like look for adverbs (as discussed in The 10% Solution).
6. I will probably do another read aloud pass after that’s entered into the computer, depending on how hard a deadline is pressing.

More on developmental editing, what it is, how I do it, and how one needs to adapt editing to genres such as hard SF, dark fantasy, horror, etc, in another post.