I do some editing as I write, kind of a four-step process that I learned from thirty or forty years of professional technical writing. 1. When I hit the enter key to end a paragraph, I go back to check spelling and grammar, make sure the right speaker is tagged, the sentence makes sense, no repeated words or phrases 2. When I finish the chapter, I re-read it, slowly, looking for various little things like flow, dialogue, and speakers tagged correctly. 3. I give it to my wife @K McIntyre, who will find all my run-on sentences that span half a page, that I inexplicably missed, and make other recommendations 4. Make her changes, then put it away move on to the next chapter. And as she is also a writer, I return the favor on her WIP, catching all her misspelled or misused French words. So it is not quite editless writing, my first drafts wind up pretty clean, but I stay away from altering the story line. Like @Elven Candy said, that will lead me down into numerous rabbit holes. There are many ways you could have told this story, you chose one, so stick with it. You can make major revisions on the first edit, and probably will. And I also recommend what @Elven Candy also said, never delete a draft. In my writing folder, I have a sub-folder called archive. When I make a revision, I save it under a new filename with the date attached 'story rev 1 24 Apr 19" and put the old file in the archive, where I can recover it and unwind my changes if they don't work out. I have taken stuff that was completely cut out, and reused it in a totally different context in a different chapter with just a few tweaks. My two Roman soldiers sparring with swords in China, which was first draft Ch 1, a flash forward to them in China before they got there, was cut out. It had served its purpose, it got me started on the story, sparked my imagination, but it would have been confusing to the reader. However, about halfway through story, I needed a sparring match between the centurion and a very formidable barbarian woman, and thwock, just had to make a few changes. Even the knocked-over piss-pot remained. Whatever you have ever written has value.
You won't love editing after you have reread your same story 40 times and still find nits in it. Mine was published and out for a year before someone noticed that I had changed the name of a character halfway through his time in the story, then back again! Fortunately, they were both Greek names beginning with D and the same number of syllables so nobody but she had noticed! or @jannert's catch, my dolphins "doing slow roles beside the ship." Thank God for Print-on-Demand, correction was easy and free. I went through seven major revisions, one professional edit, and innumerable re-reads and minor corrections, then the finally layout scrutiny before publication, between Oct 15 when I finished the first draft, and Feb 17 when I published. Then three post-pub revised uploads for those things that still slipped through
this is some really good advice, thank you so much, but, oh man, i can't stop focussing on how cool your life sounds. you are a plane-lander writer who writes about roman soldiers and has a writer wife. this shouldn't fascinate me as much as it does, but...
It's fun. Remember no matter how bad you feel about your writing, you can't kill yourself writing, like you can flying. But it has been decades since I was last at the controls. Karen is doing a WWII story, a sequel to her Ruby, about Jacob Boone, a fictional American VA doctor and friend of Ruby, who in 1939 joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was assigned to the 51st Highland Division in the British Expeditionary Force in 1940. He is now trying to get out of France, holding onto his ass with both hands, as the 51st did not get out via Dunkirk. General Fortune surrendered at St. Valerie to an as-yet unknown German general commanding the 7th Panzers, Irwin Rommel. However, Jake and many others got out through a ratline through Marseilles into Spain. Fortunately he had paid attention in his French class in high school, and is at least able to communicate, and on occasion pass himself off as a Belgian refugee. Check out our four books on Amazon: Come, Follow Me, a Story of Pilate and Jesus (Horrible cover but my canary-in-the-coal-mine first self-published book) and my flagship The Eagle and the Dragon, a Novel of Rome and China. Her books are Parham's Mill , a light and fun fantasy, and Ruby, a kick in the gut story of woman who in 1932 loses her job and heads home to her family in Roanoke, but winds up in her worst nightmare, a story of survival, endurance, escape and recovery. Hope the mods will allow me to say this!
One thing that struck me as I read through this entire thread again (it's a pretty good thread, in my opinion) is the fact that without having written (yet), you're not really going to know what people are talking about when it comes to writing well, or correcting mistakes, etc. I think you have to actually make mistakes before you understand: a) why they are mistakes b) how to correct the ones you've made c) how to avoid making them in future. So go ahead and make mistakes! Then, when you are finished with your first draft and do some reading from good writer how-to books, you will start to recognise those mistakes. And then you correct them. And if you do that, you're unlikely to make the same mistakes again. Over-use of passive voice. Once you can actually recognise passive voice in your own work, it's easy to change it—although sometimes you'll want to leave it alone because it can serve a useful purpose. You'll be hyper-aware of passive voice next time you sit down to write, and you won't fall into it as a default storytelling mode, however. Identify weasel words (somewhat, a bit, rather, very, quite, really, kind of, possibly) and you'll be less likely to sprinkle them around like salt and pepper next time you start writing from scratch again. Unless you wander into specific story construction hell, I suspect the most editing you'll ever do will be on your first draft of your first novel or story. You learn from those initial goof-ups, and then you don't make the same mistakes again. Or at least not very often.
Hovering Mod here, thinks that's perfectly okay! You're not linking to another site. You're just telling us about your book. (And Karen's.)
thank you so much for sharing this with me! beautiful writing from what i've seen, and lovely to know you're into amateur radio
The difficulty with this (you know I'd respond when you said 'passive voice', right?) (and 'this' being even thinking about passive voice) is that a huge percentage of writers seem to be genuinely unable to recognize passive voice--it's like the "where's Waldo" of grammar--and so they use rules for detecting it that cause more harm than good, like "avoid 'was'!" and "avoid forms of the verb 'to be.'" I know you're not advocating those rules, but if a person gets worried about passive voice, those rules are out there causing trouble. And people don't naturally use passive voice that often. I'd say--and I'm making up a statistic-- that the average writer who doesn't understand passive voice uses it less than a tenth (maybe less than a hundredth) as often as those rules make him think he does, and that most of those times are times when passive voice is actually appropriate. So my advice, and I realize I don't get to set advice for all the world, is to forget the concern with passive voice altogether, for a very very long time.
You're right, of course. I get just as hot under the collar as you do, when some writing 'expert' sanctimoniously suggests that all writers should 'eliminate passive voice.' Or to never use adverbs, or makes any other blanket suggestion that eliminates writing tools, rather than trying to teach people how to use them effectively. However—trust me on this—over-use of passive voice was one of the most egregious mistakes I made as a first-time writer! I don't actually know why, but everything was 'being done by.' The horse was being ridden by—. The ranch was being run by—etc. Of course it's totally grammatically correct to say these things, but ho boy, they didn't read well. As I've said before on another thread somewhere, my very first beta rewrote my whole first chapter (as it was at the time) and took out all these instances and made them active. What a difference! Till then, I hadn't realised how this default passive voice—used especially while I was setting up the story—was making my writing sound stodgy. Of course passive voice has its place, but not every third blinking sentence! And the word 'was' is NOT the marker for it!
The passive voice is vey simple, some form of the verb to be, plus the participle of the verb. The subject of a verb in the passive voice is the object acted upon, not the actor. "The door was shut" (by some unidentified person) is passive. The door is the subject but it is the object acted upon, not the actor ... it didn't shut itself. The active voice of the verb would be "Somebody shut the door." Somebody is the actor, and the door is still the object acted upon. Technical writing avoids passive voice like the plague, because it hides responsibility. "The radio must be thoroughly checked out after changing the tubes" (by whom?) vs. "The technician must thoroughly check out the radio...." In general, avoid it for the same reason in fiction, but on occasion you can use it heighten tension. "The door had been left slightly ajar." (By whom? Someone who might still be lurking inside?) Remember there is a difference between a gerund -ing and a participle -ed. "He was shutting the door (when something else happened)" is just an action in progress, still in the active voice. "The door was beng shut." would be the passive equivalent. Everybody enjoy the grammar lesson? There will be a test on this at the end of the period.
Well, or it's descriptive. In this, for example, I agree that it's passive voice: The lights were extinguished. The door was shut. The plates were carried away. However, in this I argue that it's not: The kitchen was empty. The air smelled of onions. The pantry door was open. The back door was shut.
Interesting. OK, that gives me a better idea of how the concern for passive voice got to be so widely communicated. I would still put it the way that you did indeed put it--to watch out for overuse of passive voice. I think that most writers barely use it at all. I find myself wondering if some writer that you either liked or were forced to read tended to overuse it, and thus inserted it into your original writing style. Huh.
I read somewhere that new writers often do this because they are trying too hard to sound writerly. I was trying to think back to how I felt when I was writing all this stuff, and that could well be it. Until a person gets confident enough to just step up and tell the story straight, they might try to duck it a bit, and sound lofty instead. Weird. Anyway, I stopped overusing passive voice after that excellent session with the beta (who is also a writer) and it's not been my default voice since. He could have spent pages explaining why passive voice doesn't work in the way I was using it, and I might or might not have 'got it.' But instead he just showed me how it could be different. That's why I'm a huge fan of re-writing as 'example,' to illustrate points in critiques. I think @Lew's example of the door 'left ajar' is an excellent one. In general, passive voice works when whoever—or whatever—performs the action isn't known, or isn't important. "The truck had been left on its side in the ditch."
Thanks for the lesson on passive voice @jannert @Lew @ChickenFreak I had someone try to wipe out all the passive in my story. Because they heard that pass it was a no no. Does going to get clarification on what passive is and when and when not to use it
It's always possible that they really found passive voice. But from the trends I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if they went on a killing spree against the word "was" in lots of non-passive-voice sentences.
Right, some cases it was legit course. But they also kind of went a little crazy too. I had to restore some of it, but I feel like I have a good balance of passive and non-passive now And a better idea of it now.
Ever feel like your real world is falling apart and struggle to write? These are some hard times I'm going through which make me not even care about writing. I'm not sure how to get back to normal or even think straight to really care about fiction. I wish I could just throw myself into my work, but I just can't get there mentally. I'm not sure what to do about this or even what to do about myself. Writing is important to me. Getting paid for my writing is important to me. That's what I thought or I think, but I'm not so sure I can do it now or anymore. I don't know. Ever have your life in pieces and still pull off writing or caring about writing?
I've had very similar issues and don't have much advice as I struggled too. But what I will say is that you are probably experiencing very strong emotions right now so if you can transpose those into your writing, you may end up with something quite powerful. Wishing you all the best.
No, I can't. I have to do a lot of self care to keep my mind right normally, and normally take breaks when things are messed. I hope you can find a way to make peace with whatever's going on, so you can do what you want to do.
Sorry, but I'm going to digress little here, but I assure there is reason. My entire life went on a downward spiral for a few years as I struggled mentally on my own. I took up drinking and smoking to "help" with mental stress I put on myself. My writing turned to basically garbage, and my life much worse. I became addicted to both and lost much of who and what I was at the time. I can tell you from experience, the spiral I was going down led me to believe my life would get better if I continued the path and pressed through, but the fact is it wouldn't. I had lost something I didnt even know i needed. Direction. Something to focus on and improve. I desperately wanted to be an author at the time. I was on this website as a young writer, but was hardly of any note or worth because of my massive character flaws from the downward spiral. I was horrendously depressed that my writing wasnt improving, since that was what I dreamed of doing. But I wasnt improving because I was too distracted from my other struggles. I, like you, lost the will to write. I realized nearly too late (almost died twice from alcohol), and finally understood what I needed to do. I left the whole life I knew behind. Everything. I couldn't write because I couldn't find reason or ways to enjoy anything. It lost its luster and became "just another task" in my laundry list of to-dos that burdened my mind. I quit writing for nearly seven years. Then my work had a short story competition, and suddenly I felt excited to write. I ended up writing what I perceive as my best work, and winning it, which was exciting because it got me on a trip to work in a government think tank in DC for a short while. I'll tell anyone who asks about it, it was awesome. Now I write fairly actively, and I enjoy it tenfold of how much I ever did. The dream is still there to be a fully established author, but it isn't the only thing in my life. I believe that if you delve to deep in the hole, and put too many chips down on one pot, you're likely going to lose. So now that my digression is finished, maybe you'll see this response a little more clearly. You probably need to do something else for a long while. I radically destabilized my life after quitting writing. In the time between then and now I became a US Marine, married, gained a wonderful little boy, landed a phenomenal job at a multinational company, and found the will to resume the dream. In other words, you can still pursue goals and writing as a professional, but you probably need to work on yourself first. At least that's what experience has taught me.
This thread is as long as year of famine. And I'm not gonna read all this to see if this is here. But... There is this similarity between gate guardian character and writer's block. You could almost think your block as a separate side character - a gate guardian - who tests your ability, morale and persistence. "I'm not going to let you pass this point before you prove that you are worth it." Says Gate Guardian character name Writer's Block. "You can prove it by showing your morale stance, your agenda and your commitment." Says GG WB. "I'm gonna test you. If you fail, you will not go forward. If you succeed, I will become your ally." Says GG WB. "You have got yourself to this point through these methods and procedures. But now you must show that it's not all you got. You must show that you have new tools and skill to use them. That is the way to show your worthiness." "Now.... Show me!" Says GG WB. And if you do, WB will become your loyal ally. If you don't, it will block your way. I find this way of thinking useful and fun. It's inner battle from outside view. And it might help to seek those new, worthy ways to bypass that gatekeeper. (Inspired by Eric Edson's views to Gate Guardian characters.)
That's a creative way to look at it! Mind you, I suspect some Gatekeepers are better at their job than others. Mine is relatively inept. All I have to do is point and say, "Oh, look, a squirrel!" and my Gatekeeper's attention is diverted and I just sneak past.
This way of looking block gives a lot of new tools and perspectives. Block blocks your view. That means you can't see what is blocking your way. You can't see behind the block. If you can take an outside view, you can see more. And that gives you maps and tools and... (I focus on importance of self reflection in writing a lot. This is one part of working where that is important.)
Just ran across this, literally a few minutes ago: 'The War Of Art' by Steven Pressfield I think it's something that could be of interest to anyone who suffers from 'block'.
