A Revision Technique for Cutting Out Wordiness

I have a tendency to be wordy and redundant in my first drafts.  So how do I deal with this in revision?  What helps me cut my beautiful words that I worked so hard to bleed from my brain? How do I do this without worrying that I'll lose anything important?

Identify, Isolate, Highlight, Analyze, Cut, Reassess.  Those are the steps. (No, they don't make a cute little acronym.  I.I.H.A.C.R.  Yuck. Sounds like a cross between a cough and hacking a loogie.)

Identify

One strategy I’ve found is to find (or ask beta readers to find and highlight) the wordy places where they think it could be tightened up. 

Other times I can find it myself by noticing the paragraph sections that I inexplicably skip reading.  If I notice I want to skim, that’s a pretty good indication it needs to be tightened/eliminated.

Isolate

Next, highlight the section in question. It feels a lot more do-able to condense a section that is visibly marked.  The highlight tells your subconscious brain that for the next 10 minutes that area is your sandbox and anything can happen there. Deletions. Re-ordering.  Rewording. Additions, even. (gasp)

Keep it between 5-8 paragraphs long. If it's longer than a page, it is harder to work with.

Be sure to record how many words long the section is. This gives you a number to compare at the end so you can see how much you’ve condensed.

Highlight the Essentials

Print out a copy of the highlighted section, then pull out your highlighter marker.  (If you used a highlighter marker in the “Isolate” step, you’ll have to change to a different color in this step.)

Read through and highlight the words that represent the bare essentials of what is important to the story in that section.  Don’t highlight sentences, just single words or short phrases. This tells you what story elements definitely stay in.  Highlight beautiful wording only if it is particularly vivid.

I find it helpful to focus on action words--what the characters actually do. That is usually essential.

Analyze For Patterns

Are any of the highlighted sections similar? They can be brought together to create more punch.

Does the order make sense, or should it be reorganized?

Cut the Fat

Large sections that aren’t highlighted are fair game for cutting. Notice redundancy and eliminate it. (Like when the hero winks or smiles multiple times, or the heroine takes her second and third deep breath.)

Slash.

Burn.

Re-jigger wording.

Massage sentences.

You can’t cut everything that is un-highlighted because you need sentences to string the essentials together, but you’ll be surprised how much you can cut.

Reassess the Result

You’ll have to read through it at least once to make sure it still makes sense.

Once you’re done, check how many words you have left and compare it to your starting word count. 

Congratulations! You have cut like a pro, keeping what works, and getting rid of what doesn’t. Your prose should now be a concentrated distillation of emotional awesomeness with maximum impact.

Things to do on next book as I write that will prevent headache in revision

1)   Write the summary of the action for each scene  (This will help with creating the story synopsis.)

2)   Track the goal of each scene, character goal (This will ensure that characters remain active and purposeful, moving the story forward.)

3)   Track the conflict of each scene, source of tension. (This will help ensure that each scene is interesting)

4)   Track the change that occurs to move the story forward (This will help ensure that each scene is necessary to the story)

5)   Track the promises that are made and where they are kept (This will help ensure that I leave no threads hanging that shouldn’t be tied up by the end. Unless they are supposed to still hang free for a series.)

6)   Track what people do to fall in love or show love for each other. (This will help ensure that relationship arcs build in a meaningful and natural way.)

7)   Track time passage (This will ensure that I can track the timing of the plot and spot any problems.)

As I read through what I have written, I might find things that have to be fixed or added later. I can make notes on these things and leave them, since later I might find the issue will have worked itself out or is no longer valid. 

Hopefully this will give me direction on revisions.

Thoughts on Fair Use

I ran across this article today: $1,884 to quote 300 words from The New York Times in a book: Two authors try to stand up for fair use.

This highlights an issue that I have run up against myself as I have worked to get permission to use quotations for a non-fiction book.  I had a fairly short quotation--maybe 75-100 words—but the big-name publisher I applied to had contract terms for use that were just too much for me. 

1)   They wanted an amount of money far in excess of the proportion of words I was using from their work. 

2)   They wanted to restrict permission to just the United States, which would have effectively limited my ability to distribute my book.

3)   They wanted this contract to only last seven years, which meant I would have to renegotiate the whole thing over again in seven years. (I could just imagine them upping the price then and pulling permission if I didn’t go for it, which would require pulling the quotation from my book and going through publications stuff all over again.) 

4)   They also had a bunch of additional clauses affecting distribution through wholesale or book clubs or mail-order catalogs.

This contract was long, all for something I thought was relatively simple. Just let me use the quotation, darn it!

They were willing to give me permission to quote and distribute to English-speaking countries, but they would not budge on the re-negotiate-in-seven-years clause. 

That did it. I wasn’t going to have anything to do with that. I pulled my quotation.

But it made me think about the burden that charging others to quote an author’s work puts on new authors.  An author who creates their work out of nothing doesn’t have to worry about getting permission because they created it. Further, they may look forward to others asking them for permission. 

But what about scholars? What about the researchers who must link their work to other reputable sources and show how their ideas fit together with others? They need to use quotations. They may need a lot of quotations to support their ideas.  Are they to be burdened with charges to use those quotations? It sounds to me like a great way to ensure that only those with the deepest pockets are able to publish those kinds of books.

But on the other hand, what about the authors who did the hard work to write their books in the first place and whose work others want to quote? Shouldn’t they get compensated for use of their hard work?  In theory, yes. But I think that compensation needs to be at least proportional to the amount of work quoted.  The problem is that if you take a typical non-fiction book of maybe 60,000 words, sold for maybe $16.99 retail, then quoting 100 words or so is only going to give the original author something like 2 cents share of that work.

Publishers will try to get around this small number by calculating the payment to take into account the number of books expected to be sold. And then they add some on top of that too.  So the 60,000 page book with the 2 cent quotation is expected to sell 5,000 copies, then a fair bulk payment should be $100.  But if there are lots of other quotations to pay for, the cost of fair permissions could get steep.  And if the price is higher, then it’s even harder.

It seems to me that the hard part is paying it all at once. If the payment could be just-in-time on-demand, then it would be reasonable to ask for a proportional share.  Except our financial transactional systems are not set up to work that way.  Transferring 2 cents between accounts is a non-economical transaction.  If there were a system to set up payments for that kind of thing, then perhaps there would be a way to be more fair.

But looked at in another way, the author who quotes (call him Jim) is also doing a favor for the author who is quoted (call him Bob). Bob’s work might be totally forgotten and ignored over time, but gaining a foothold in another Jim’s work through quotation ensures Bob’s work will live on a little longer.  Call it idea stickiness.  Easy and cheap permission to quote enables ideas to spread and become more sticky.  Without easy and cheap permission to quote, good ideas can’t become sticky until they are more widely accessed, which might be when they move into public domain far after the author’s death.  (Thus, there is a very practical reason for artists/authors who are only famous after they are dead. Or 70 years after they are dead. That’s if they aren’t completely forgotten.)

In the meantime, it seems to me that I as an author can do something to make it easier for others who might want to quote me.  On my copyright page, I could place a notice stating that quotations of my work below a certain word count—say 100 words—would be free, with my permission still required.  Then I can state a fair rate for quotations above that word count. What this would do would ensure that those who use my work have the freedom to do so in small amounts and that those who might rely on it heavily would know right off what they can expect to pay if they want to use more.

Here’s an article that talks about the difficulties of creating story anthologies for children: The Perils of Permissions.

It is easy to see in this case that the story authors and their publishers want to profit off the reproduction of their work if it would be included in a children’s anthology. But yet, there is also the factor that being included in an anthology at all is a fabulous way to increase their exposure in the market, to increase story stickiness.  It’s a valuable a service to the author, increasing their distribution.  There’s a give-and-take here that has to be considered.

Here’s another article on the problem of permissions, fromanother scholar who needed to use work from authors overseas.

His main problem was difficulty reaching authors in the first place, let alone obtaining permission. (Evidently African authors can be an elusive bunch, especially if they’ve gone through a difficult experience such as imprisonment and torture in Apartheid.) The lesson here is that if you happen to want to approve permissions requests personally, then you’d better keep your publisher informed of your current address.  

In this next article, a biographer who wanted to write aboutShel Silverstein found his efforts to get permission from Silverstein’s estateto be stymied completely.  (warning: a little bit of naughty language)

This article suggests that there may be some very popular creators of works that do not get studied because their estates do not give permission for their works to be reproduced as part of commentary by scholars.  Just think about that for a second.  Shel Silverstein could be studied like the great poets of yore… but his estate won’t allow it.  (Of course, there is the little sticking point that Silverstein’s work was not just in children’s literature, but also in certain (cough) adult magazines (cough), and he also wrote some songs that were a bit profane, both bits of a curriculum vita which could certainly be a bit of a shock.  With that perspective, it is likely that Silverstein’s estate seeks to keep that unsavory bit of info from gaining wider currency.)

So it seems that one must be prepared to give appropriate permissions during one’s lifetime, but also give fair instructions to be used by executives of one’s literary estate. 

Making the formatting process easier for yourself

I’m working on my first attempt to self-publish a non-fiction book right now. It’s a spiritual-devotional work about how the strategies in the Book of Mormon can help us recognized how Satan is attacking us and help us find strategies to resist.  But I’m not going to rhapsodize over that.

This is actually my second attempt to get it ready for publication. My first attempt was stymied more than 6 months ago by an attack of anxiety and severe “what-if” –it is that sapped my motivation to deal with the issues that kept cropping up.  I suffered a further setback when my USB drive holding my edited files and my cover files crashed and lost all its data.  I had an old back-up, but I lost a lot of things.   So I was faced with the task of re-doing everything I previously did before to prepare my manuscript. 

This was very demoralizing.

But I realized a number of things. I gained some good lessons from it.

Lesson #1: Back-up your data. I think this is one that every writer has to learn, either from losing valuable files themselves, or from knowing someone else who lost valuable files.

Lesson #2: Make it easy for yourself to retrace your steps.  It takes a lot of effort to prepare a Word document so it looks pretty as a book for upload. Lots of formatting involved [insert grimace here]. At each stage I had to learn how to do something new. I realized that if I’m going to publish more books—and I’m pretty sure I will—I’ll be retracing my steps through the formatting and publishing process.  I won’t do it often enough to remember exactly how to do it, so I’ll essentially have to retrain myself each time. But if I document where to go and how to do things, I can make that retraining process a lot faster. 

Lesson #3: Publishing can go faster if you spend time while writing your book putting together all the supporting and marketing content, like blurbs and a marketing plan, and a synopsis, and a query letter, gathering category and keyword ideas, and so on. Sure, some of that might change by the end, but it’s easier to revise what’s already there than it is to come up with something fast.

Lesson #4 Make a publishing checklist and make it as granular as you can.  For a long time when I faced the task of reformatting my manuscript, I had this idea that it should be easy, but then I would try to work on it, and I’d get stuck because I’d run into something else that had to be done first, something that required more time or energy than I was prepared to give at the moment. So I’d pull back, feeling the task was really complex. Then after a few days I’d forget what stopped me before and try to jump into it again, only to get stuck again.

I finally decided to make a task list of everything I had to do. I wanted to make it is granular as possible, including in it all the things I had to research, all the bits of info I needed to retrieve from somewhere in my files, all the questions I had to answer, and so on.  I needed to break the tasks up into such small pieces that it would no longer intimidate me.  My task list turned into a 68-item monster, but at least I felt I had more of a handle on what I needed to get done.  I’m actually still refining this task list and it is up to 95 tasks, but each thing I add breaks it down further so I am less likely to get stuck.

If you’re an author, what do you do to make the publishing process easier and faster for yourself?

Writing climactic battle scenes (+ kittens)

I'm working on the climactic battle scene of my current novel, and as I was preparing for this, I realized the task was going to be complex.

Write battle. (I haven't done this before.)
+
Write climax of the story. (I haven't done this before either. This is my second novel, but the first in which that I have gotten this far.)

So what do I do? I research.

There was helpful hints out there, but they were scattered all over and embedded in articles about larger story structure.  So I had to collect them and chew on them and digest them.

I'm going to share what I found. (Whether I can implement all these principles in my own novel remains to be seen, but at least I can make this helpful to you, dear reader.)

*Ahem.*

How to Write a Climactic Battle Scene

Make sure each character has a goal. Make the goals clear, and make it really matter. If the character doesn't succeed, what do they lose?  Power? Control? Freedom? Wealth? Respect? Love? Loyalty?  Life? The lives of all they love? Their soul?  Will all the fluffy kittens die and no more rainbows will appear forever?

Also, point of view will need to be carefully chosen for greatest impact at various points.
Pay attention to each main characters’ internal and external goals for the scene and for the story.

Involve suspense.  Show the preparations of Lord Evil of Mount Doom-y Doom and how they will exploit the protagonist weaknesses so that they see something terrible is coming.  When the readers know more than the characters do, it creates dramatic irony and suspense.

Make the hero vulnerable. i.e. they can be killed, trapped, enslaved, destroyed politically or professionally, or ruined financially or socially. Vulnerability can come from the character’s own physical, mental or emotional shortcomings and conflicts as well as from the machinations of the adversary.

Threaten character’s safety, goals, morals, possessions, freedom, family, beliefs...  And their kittens.

Rack up the tension and suspense by making more and bigger promises about problems to come – disasters that will devastate the hero and his allies, shatter his plans and bring him so low that he might never recover.  Climaxes are where the consequences come after the hero.
(Show the dreadful kitten-gun that will be leveled at all the kittens.)

Create effects that spread the danger and damage early in the fight. Everyone should feel they are in danger, even the antagonist.

Focus on who is the largest threat to the villain and knock out a few heroes, but avoid downing them so early that they don’t feel like they can contribute. 
Make sure the hero appears as the underdog. (Or an under-kitten?) Or reduce them to underdog status quickly. However, avoid effects that completely neutralize character abilities or arbitrarily cripple them.

Being forced to compensate for a lost ability can be a good end for a minor arc, but for the campaign’s end, the heroes should be able to use everything they've learned and everything in their arsenal.  Even their kittens. (Rarr.)

There will be moments when the characters calculate chances and risks and analyze advantages and disadvantages of various courses of action. There will also be moments when they act on instinct and go by their gut.  (Like kittens.)

Consider when you can include a shift in tactics or calling for guards, or a transformation of the environment.  Negotiation turns to violence. Violence turns to diversion (like when the herd of kittens is released into the yarn factory). Success that is shattered by an ambush from the side.  Or mix these all up.

Remember to use scene and sequel. One act leads to a response, that leads to another.
With battles, efforts to destroy are "up to 11" on a scale of 1 to 10.  No punches are pulled unless there is a chance that the opposite side is weakening and may give in. (Punches may not even be pulled then.) For the antagonist, diplomacy is battle by words, and parley and peace is delaying battle for strategic advantage.
Try to avoid a fight of attrition.

Let your hero think he’s won – then tear victory from his grasp and turn it into absolute, crushing defeat.

Up to this point, the protagonist has been contemplating a transformation. Now she’s tested to see if she has changed.
Make your hero face his/her greatest fear – and risk losing the thing that matters most to him/her. (I hear you ask, "Like maybe losing their kittens?" Yes, maybe.) 

Expose protagonist to his greatest nightmare. (Kitten zombies?) Make sure to have warring emotions at the time of greatest decision.
Then tip it to one side with a little factor of deep meaning that offers a glimmer of hope or inspiration. (like kittens!) (The little factor has to be carefully set up and invested with meaning in the previous scenes for this to work.) Alternatively, if no hope of survival can be offered, offer a glimmer of hope that a sacrifice will not be in vain.
Make the peak moment of the scene run in slow motion with excruciating detail in description. Show it through all the senses.
Includes a moment of truth  -- The protagonist must realize ______.

The impossible task. The last stand against the enemy.  The kitten's back is against the wall, cornered by the wolves.
The hero must solve their own problems in the climactic battle. (Must define what the problems at the various stages)

Climax needs to resolve love plot and adventure plot.
The climax must fulfill all the promises of the story. (So you have to keep track of all the promises you've made about what the battle will be like or what might be used and prepare a way to keep them.)
It must also answer the story question.

The climax must settle the issue of whether the hero will or won’t achieve the goal.
1) The hero achieves the goal. Happiness ensues. Or,
2) The hero does not achieve the goal and realizes the goal was a false lead and he's better off without it. Happiness ensues. Or,
3) The hero does not achieve the goal and discovers a better goal and achieves it. (Best when the better goal was under his nose all the time.) Happiness ensues. (+ kittens)

Justice must be done.
There must be judgment, punishment, and restitution. If redemption can be worked in, even better, but it must be consistent with the character.
Dead kittens must be avenged as the kitten killer is brought to justice, wounded kittens must be healed, enslaved kittens must be released.. You get the idea.

Give a sense of what the hero’s life will be like after the story ends. 
What will life be like back at home for the protagonist? (Hopefully with kittens.)

Make sure the relationship arcs are resolving in the place they should. (There may even be a tiny relationship arc that is a mini-version of the story arc.)
Make sure minor plot lines are resolving in slower moments.

And hopefully everything ends up happily ever after, with kittens and rainbows and satisfied readers who buy more copies of your book to thrust into their friends' hands.

Learning about Scrivener: Compiling, Bullets, and Tables

I am in the middle of trying to prepare a manuscript for self-publication right now, and I want to preserve some of my learning for myself so that I won’t have to relearn it in the future.

Learning the compile function on Scrivener has been a stop-and-go process for me.  When I first looked into it, I was very excited about its potential, but as I read through books on it and tried things, I got overwhelmed at all the different choices. I also was worried about how it would deal with my footnotes, tables, and bullets.  I couldn’t find clear answers online to address my concerns, so I got frustrated and gave up for a while.  

Happily, I recently went back to it recently and suddenly it seemed perfectly clear, to the point that I wondered what had bothered me before. I wish I could have told my past self to take a chill pill and just try it out. 

Now for the learning:

1)   If you’ve already prepared a print-ready Word doc, putting it in Scrivener will be a step backward.  Scrivener does content creation really well, but when it comes to preparing formatting, they don’t give too much flexibility. If you're doing this for the first time, don’t even try to use more than one font through out your project.  To get the final formatting you need, you’re much better off compiling it to a doc and then messing around with the formatting there instead.  However, you can get all your front matter and back matter ready for that and export that too. It will save time. 

2)   You will not find out how many pages your project will be until you compile it for, say, a Word doc.  Number of pages is important info to give your cover designer if you are doing a paperback book.  Once you have set the number of pages, try really hard not to change that. (For instance, don’t do what I did and have your paperback cover design done before editing. Editing will probably shave some pages off your count.)

3)   Importing tables from Word into Scrivener will give you really wonky results.  Yes, you will get your tables, but they will have strange phantom empty cells in weird places. You may also find text outside the tables has a weird box around sections of it as if it were part of a table.    The way to get around this is A) Make all your tables into images and import them into Scrivener, or B) use Scrivener’s table-creation tool and redo all your tables inside Scrivener.  Both are extra work.  Pick your poison.  I do know that Tables generated in Scrivener turn out looking okay on the Kindle.

4)   When bulleted text is imported into Scrivener from Word and then compiled for Kindle, for some reason the bullets are doubled, which looks wrong. This is fixed by recreating the bulleted lists in Scrivener (much like with tables, as described in 2 above).

5)   Scrivener’s compile feature can make it very quick to make .epubs and .mobis and a number of different formats.  IF you know what you’re doing.  I look forward to that day.

An ideal work flow would be:

1)   Create document in Scrivener.

2)   For print: Compile document for print into Word doc. Tweak formatting and upload to POD vendor of choice.

3)   For e-book: Compile document for print into .epub and .mobi.  Test on previewing software.

Obviously, I haven’t done the ideal on my current project. But, eh, live and learn, right?

Writing Tool: Reverse Outlining

Just about everyone is familiar with the process of creating an outline and writing from that; it’s something taught in just about every English class at school.  However, the reverse outline is another writing tool that is just as useful as the pre-writing outline, although it has a different purpose.

What is a reverse outline?  Do you take your pre-writing outline and hold it up to the mirror?  (eye roll) No. 

A reverse outline is when you read through what you have written and summarize it in outline form in a separate document.  Happily, it doesn’t have to have Roman numerals and indenting.  (Who wants to fight with Microsoft word over that stuff? Not me!) The reverse outline can be as simple as a list.  In fact, the simpler, the better.

If you’re writing non-fiction, a reverse outline summarizes the main points you make and the way you try to make them.  Example:

Prairie dogs are good eating.

Story about eating prairie dogs when starving. They were filling.

Health benefits observed when eating prairie dogs. Lustrous hair and energy.

Story about imported prairie dogs saving the lives of malnourished Chinese children.

If you’re writing fiction, a reverse outline summarizes the events that happened in a chapter that are most important to your plot.

            Frank chases down heart-broken Wanda

            Wanda explains why she can’t trust Frank; she saw him kissing Charlene

            Frank explains kissing is part of normal Hispanic greetings.

            Wanda is skeptical because of the length of the kiss and storms off.

            Frank realizes he may lose the love of his life if he doesn’t get act together.

So how does a reverse outline really help?

Cognitively, we can only keep so much in our memory at a time, so making a reverse outline gives us a visual way to evaluate a lot of text easily.

While pre-writing outlines show us where our writing should go before we actually write it, a reverse outline shows us what is actually there once we’ve written.  Often the pre and post outlines don’t match. 

By studying your reverse outline, you can see if there are holes in your logic or missing pieces in your plot.

Not only that, but reverse outlines can become a tool for manipulating our long texts.  I can look at my reverse outline and see where I got off track.  I can see where the progression of my logic or story is out of order.  If I can move a few lines around in my reverse outline, that shows me where I can move much larger chunks in my long-form writing.

Story time!

I had to discover reverse outlining for myself. I was working on a religious book about applying the Book of Isaiah to modern teenage problems, and I noticed that as my chapters got longer and longer, I had a hard time making sure things flowed in a logical manner. 

I could keep about three pages of ideas in my head at a time, and keep those flowing, but beyond that, I just felt like I wasted too much time reminding myself what I’d written before moving anything around.  And if I wanted to insert new stuff it would break my beautiful linearity and then I had to wrestle with the whole thing again.

So I had to invent reverse outlining. (Yes, I know I didn’t really invent it; it’s been around a long time, but I had to discover-invent it for myself.)

I said to myself, “Self, you need a list of all the main points you’re trying to make in the order that you’re making them.”  So I made that list, and that was my very first reverse outline ever. 

Once I had it, I could see exactly where I needed to move things. I could see what arguments were duplicated. I could see where the holes were. I could see where I’d gotten distracted and gone off topic.  By using a reverse outline, my book became much more of a cohesive whole.

I remember I felt absolutely brilliant for having invented reverse outlining. It was like a shiny new toy that I played with.

More points about reverse outlines in fiction

“But Michaela,” you cry, “What about when writing fiction? I already have an outline I create from! Why do I need to do a reverse outline too?”

Again, reverse outlines tell you what you actually have in your story instead of what you want or plan to have.  They tell you the cold hard facts in the light of day.  And if a scene contains events but nothing that actually pushes the plot forward, then you know it’s unimportant and can be removed.

Reverse outlines for fiction can actually include much more than just a list of important plot events.  I use them to evaluate my scenes as I go. 

After I list events in the scene, I will then make a list of the conflicts that occur in the scene.  If you can’t figure out what the conflict is, then of course you’ll need to put some in.  I use a sign of >< to show what the conflicts are.  (Ideally these are conflicts directly related to the plot.) Examples:

>< The dragon wants Jessary to learn to read, but Jessary doesn’t want to.

>< Jessary wants food, but the dragon is unsympathetic.

You can also evaluate sources of tension in the scene, and naturally if you can’t find where tension is coming from, then you have to insert some ASAP.

            T Darkness in the cave and scary noises.

            T Fear of being eaten by the dragon.

            T Uncertainty of where to go from here and what life will be like.

Occasionally I will also evaluate the emotional direction of the scene, whether it goes from positive to negative or the other direction.  This helps me see where I am leaving my readers emotionally at the end of a scene, whether it is in a place of rising hopes or a situation of gathering darkness and trouble.   Emotional direction can be represented with +/-  or -/+. 

            -/+ Jessary escapes the dragon and is free.

            +/- The dragon realizes Jessary—his only hope to break the spell—is missing.

All these tools can help you evaluate the strength of your story as you write it and help you identify areas of improvement. That way, when you finish the whole darn thing, you know where you need to start revising.

 Bonus: If another author ever asks you to read their work and give them feedback, making a reverse outline can help you evaluate better.