Five tips for revising your novel.

1. Write a synopsis of the novel-- the whole thing. There are two good ways to do this, for the purposes of this exercise: one is to reread the novel and jot down notes as you go about what needs to go in the synopsis. The other technique is essentially the opposite: write a synopsis of the novel without rereading. Is every chapter of the work present and accounted for? Does anything jump out at you, structurally or otherwise? How many walks at the beach/the woods/the streets of Manhattan does your main character take?

2. Read the novel aloud. The whole thing. You can find someone to read it to or just read it to yourself, but it really does need to be read out loud. I always find sentences I trip over by using this technique, which is a pretty sure sign that the phrasing in that bit could use some fine-tuning.

3. Similar to #1, but suitable for more "visual" people: create a storyboard. Does too much of the action take place in one location? Does the story jump around too much? How's the flow from one scene to another?

4. Make a list of all your characters' names. Most writers, if they've chosen character names they like, will unconsciously return to the same set of sounds (phoneme set? I never took linguistics, and don't know enough about the terminology to effectively look this up) over and over again. So you get novels that include characters named Jessica, Erica, Annika, Veronica, and Monica. Morgan, Aidan, Evan, Damien. If the names are too similar, it's hard for your readers to tell the characters apart. (Watch out for recurring first letters, too-- the "J" is especially common in my experience.) Time to do some renaming. On the plus side: if you decide to have a(nother) kid, you've got a starter list of possible baby names. So there you go.

5. Print out a hard copy and go through with a highlighter, marking all the dialogue tags. Are there too many? Not enough? How flowery do they get? If a writer uses dialogue tags like "exclaimed" too frequently, it tends to be a sign that they're not very confident that the emotion behind the character's statement is effectively communicated. If this sounds like you, and if you're right to be concerned, it's the dialogue itself that really needs work.

I'm not dead yet

...just swamped with client-related work, unusually so for the post-Thanksgiving "lull."

But here's your chance to tell me all about your NaNoWriMo experience: did you win? (Let's talk soon about "winning" NaNoWriMo and why I have mixed feelings about it -- remind me.)

What was your word count?

Did you meet your personal goals?

Are you pleased with the outcome and/or the work in progress?

When will you start revisions?

What advice would you share with a would-be NaNo-er, based on your experience?

Tell me, tell me.

NaNoWriMo: The joys of measurable goals

I'm on Day Four of Crazy Week and, I have to say, pretty delighted with my progress. (If you've queried me recently, sorry to say that's been the bottom of the priority list lately, but the inbox is getting some attention this afternoon.)

I posted, half-jokingly, on Twitter yesterday that I just bought a book called LEARN TO MANAGE YOUR TIME, but wasn't sure when I'd get to read it. I love books like that (shameless plug here for my client Erin Rooney Doland's UNCLUTTER YOUR LIFE IN ONE WEEK), where it feels like a book can provide all the answers to your needs.

But I can't be the only one who sometimes confuses buying the book with reading the book, can I? As if the book's purchase would osmotically impart all of the book's wisdom to me. Sigh.

One major thing (of many!) that I have in common with anyone who strives to make money from their writing is that I have to figure out how to organize my time. There's nobody to tell me what my priorities should be, though there are quite a few people who would like a say in the matter, and I am the only person who gets to decide what goes on the day's to-do list. All my deadlines and all my work projects are more or less self-imposed.

That's scary sometimes, and there are certainly days--weeks--when I have to dig deep to find my motivation.

My mom would tell you that I've always worked best under pressure, which might help to explain why despite the stress, I'm having a really good week as I crank through as many list items as I can. Deadlines, even when they're pretty arbitrary and of my own making, are really, really good for my productivity.

I think the connections to NaNoWriMo here are pretty obvious: nobody makes you sign up, and nobody makes you produce the word count. You've all done this to yourselves. But signing up for something like NaNoWriMo is a way of publicly stating that what you're doing is important to you, and worthy of the time and attention it demands.

If you can't make time to write, you can't write anything.

Here's a post from the amazing Neil Gaiman giving his NaNoWriMo pep talk; it's well worth the read.

Check in in the comments and let us all know how you're doing (and what your word count is)!

NaNoWriMo: What are you so afraid of?

Here's a quick prompt for anyone who needs a NaNoWriMo (or other) boost:

What's the one thing your protagonist most fears?

Make that fear come true.

What happens next?

NaNoWriMo: Almost the halfway point.

Hi everybody!

November's a busy month around these parts, too-- I try to get as many things wrapped up before Thanksgiving as I can, so this last full week before the holidays is a mad rush of sending out submissions, wrapping up contract negotiations, and general desk-clearing.

It's tough to get a lot of people's attention between Thanksgiving and New Year's. There's a lot going on outside of work, and even though publishing doesn't party at the holidays like it used to--a friend of mine tells stories of champagne fountains ("tell me again about the rabbits, George!") at a publisher's holiday party-- it's still challenging, at most publishers, to get enough people in a room to make a decision about whether to acquire a manuscript. This presents the risk, from my perspective, of an editor's enthusiasm for a project cooling off before the bosses have had a chance to weigh in. So, with some carefully-thought-out exceptions, the tenor of my job changes quite a bit at that time of year.

But if things feel hectic for me, I can only imagine how the NaNo participants among you must be feeling, staring down the barrel of that 50,000 word count, with a little over two weeks to go. (Okay, that was mean. Sorry.)

If you're proceeding "chronologically" through your manuscript (writing page 1, then page 2), as a client and I were talking about this morning, then you should be near the novel's half-way point. Given the pacing of NaNoWriMo, it's not a great idea to do much editing as you're cranking out the pages, but if you can avoid switching your "inner editor" all the way on, you might give some thought to the pacing in this part of your story.

I wrote, briefly, in my first NaNo post about what I and a lot of others call the "flabby middle," that plague of writers everywhere, the primary symptom being that the story runs aground for some chunk of time. Imagine an Agatha Christie novel in which Miss Marple stops searching for clues for a little while, and instead describes her current knitting project for ten or twenty or thirty pages. (I might actually like that, but I am a knitter, and I have eclectic taste.) The knitting part might be pretty interesting, and it might be beautifully written, and it might be true to the character, but if it's not moving the story forward in a meaningful way, it should be frogged.

Here's a suggested first-draft technique for avoiding the flabby middle: write a one-sentence summary of each of your chapters. Simple as you can. Doesn't matter if it would read as very cryptic to someone else. If you get to a chapter description that reads like "Character goes away and thinks about what just happened for a while," then that's probably going to read like a flabby middle, unless that character makes substantial progress of some sort during the scene, and unless there's no other (more active!) way for that progress to take place.

Do you have any techniques for avoiding the "flabby middle?" Got any battle-of-the-bulge horror stories? And what's your word count?

NaNoWriMo: useful links

Day Two!

I'm hoping you're not actively procrastinating on your NaNoWriMo project just yet, but if the excitement's starting to wear off and the panic's starting to set in, here are some useful links to take a look at. There is a TON of great advice out there; here are a few of my favorite pieces.

Terrible Minds on NaNoWriMo do's and don'ts

The Struggling Writer on advice from two years of NaNoWriMo "wins"

Galleycat is publishing a tip a day for the month of November

Shameless client promotion: Vicky Alvear Shecter on making NaNoWriMo work for you

Nathan Bransford did a NaNoWriMo boot camp last year, with more to come

I'll share more in a week or so, if these are helpful, but here's my big piece of advice: turn off the Internet. Get off Twitter. Install a browser add-on like LeechBlock if you have to. Limit your distractions so you can focus on what you really want to get done: 50,000 words of a novel.

But once you've met your word count goal for the day, come back here and tell me in the comments section what that word count is.

NaNoWriMo: It Begins!

Today's the day! How's everyone doing so far?

Post your word counts in the comment section!

NaNoWriMo: How do you get started?

Tomorrow's the day: the official start of NaNoWriMo 2011. All over the country (really, the world!), writers are sharpening their pencils... or charging their laptops, hoping to start tomorrow with a bang.

NaNoWriMo, as you no doubt already know, has all kinds of "rules" about how far into a work you can be before it's "cheating" to use it as your NaNoWriMo project. Fair enough. The idea is not to end the month of November with something super-polished (ha, ha), but to get some words-- a LOT of words!-- on the page.

The official NaNoWriMo organization website says that the only things you're allowed to have done before beginning your novel on November 1 are outlines, character sketches, and research. All well and good.

But here's the thing: I know a lot of you don't work from outlines, maybe CAN'T work from outlines. I know because I've seen the look on your face when I ask you to write an outline or a synopsis. Even when you've already written the manuscript, outlining the plot feels incredibly daunting and unpleasant.

I had the privilege of attending a terrific breakfast panel at the RWA Nationals convention in New York back in late June. The speakers were Steve Berry, Diana Gabaldon, and Tess Gerritsen: incredibly successful, incredibly prolific writers all. And guess what: none of them really write from outlines. Diana Gabaldon, I seem to recall, doesn't use them at all. (She is just as funny as you think she's going to be, by the way.) Tess Gerritsen, who seems extremely organized and "together," doesn't use them either. She wrote an interesting post about her process here, if you want to take a look. But it was Steve Berry's remarks about using outlines that really stuck with me: he said he's used outlines in the past, and it's an effective way of making sure you've got your structure in place from the first draft, but it really sucks all the joy out of the writing. Working on the book became a task to be dreaded, rather than something to look forward to.

This is the opposite of the way I'd always figured I would try to write a novel myself (which might serve in part to explain why I've never actually "gotten around to" it)-- but for all three writers, surprising themselves with what comes next is an important part of the writing process.

Maybe this all comes down to a question of what you're more scared of: a creativity-squelching outline or the ominous and terrifying blank page.

But basically, either way you go about putting your manuscript together, you have my blessing.

Here's a little pre-NaNo reading for you, though, so (regardless of your stance on outlining) you can be mindful of some key points in creating a successful and satisfying novel. I expect you're already familiar with Cheryl Klein of Arthur A. Levine Books; here's a talk she wrote a few years ago called "A Few Things Writers Can Learn from Harry Potter."

NaNoWriMo: Getting Started

The response on the last post was pretty overwhelming-- yay!-- it sounds like a TON of people are gearing up for NaNoWriMo this year.

So let's do this! From now until the end of November, I'll theme my posts here around NaNoWriMo. I'd love to hear from newbies and from past NaNo participants alike: what sorts of information would you like to see here? Basic cheerleading, writing prompts, stories of NaNo successes, useful links? Funny, unrelated YouTube videos?

I'll be back here soon with lots of good NaNo stuff-- but in the meantime, have you completed your official sign-up yet?

NaNoWriMo: a quick survey

According to the countdown clock on the official website, the start of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is only five days away!

I've written about NaNoWriMo before, here, but I'm curious: how many of you reading this plan to participate this year?

Let's do a quick survey in comments. Here's the rundown on what I'd like to know:

1) Are you planning to do NaNoWriMo this year?

2) Have you done NaNoWriMo before? If yes, how many times?

3) What genre would you say best fits your planned NaNoWriMo project?

Provided we've got a good number of people participating, I'm thinking of "theming" the November posts on the blog. I'll do a combination of my own advice and a lot of helpful links from around the internet.

I'm going to spend this NaNoWriMo on the sidelines (alas), but would love to cheer the rest of you on in the process!

On NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo, for the uninitiated, stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's an event (now international, despite the name!) in which writers commit to composing 50,000 words of a novel (or maybe it's a 50,000 word novel; I'm not entirely sure) during the month of November. It's been going since 1999 and the number of participants is astonishing.

I think NaNoWriMo is terrific.

To my knowledge, I only have one NaNoWriMo novel on my list so far, though it's entirely possible there are two or three more that were originally composed in the month of November, and the author's just never told me the novel's full origin story.

Here are some things that are great about NaNoWriMo:

1) For lots of people, it's the excuse they've been waiting for to finally get off their duff and write a novel. Many, many first drafts of first novels have been composed as NaNoWriMo projects, I'm absolutely certain.

2) For lots of people, even published authors, it's a chance to make a huge and productive start on a new book project. It anchors the writing calendar. NaNoWriMo is a chance to produce what Anne Lamott calls a "sh*tty first draft," to lay the story out on the page so that you have something to work with.

3) For lots of people, it provides a sense of discipline. I look sometimes at the Twitter feed for the hashtag "#amwriting" and think to myself, "you're not writing, you're tweeting." I think the 50,000 word count is an ambitious and useful goal, a reason to disconnect yourself from the internet and really buckle down and write.

However. I see an increase in my queries every year come the first week in December.

I love NaNoWriMo. One of these years, I'm going to get off my own duff and do a NaNoWriMo project, just for the experience.

I don't love unrevised NaNoWriMo projects. Those proud NaNoWriMo finishers who send me their novel the first week in December haven't even had enough time to reread their manuscripts before pushing send. This is a big mistake.

Take the month of November to write the novel. Take the month of December to let it marinate. Give yourself a little psychic distance.

Then, in January, after you've put the holiday decorations away (or not. I put mine away in February this year; who am I to judge?), get out the manuscript and read it with fresh eyes. Read it alongside a book on how to write and revise. There are tons of great ones out there.

Make yourself a list of the main issues that need addressing in the revision. Some major things you should be looking for:

-plot: is it working? in a romance, do the hero and heroine end up together? in a mystery, is it too obvious or too subtle who the bad guy is?

-characters: what are their motivations? are they consistent? are they realistic?

-dialogue: do your characters talk like real people? Are their phrasings age-appropriate and in keeping with their characters? (and how are your dialogue tags?)

-pacing: does the story hold your interest throughout? I'm especially obsessed with the "flabby middle," which I'll talk about more another time, but in short: many novels have a slow spot right around the midpoint. Fix this.

-genre: this reread is a good opportunity to start thinking about how to market your novel. Who do you think is the target audience for your book? (Please don't say "everybody.")

Once you've got your list, give yourself at LEAST another month to do the revisions, and lather, rinse, and repeat.

Then, if you're very happy with the manuscript in its double-revised form, start the query process.