Whats Comes After D1?

I think I'm going to give that whole universe a break lol! I actually picked up another "book" in that universe and, because I spent so much time on THIS one, started using THAT MC's name out of habit (muscle memory?). The MC's are totally different, but I keep typing the wrong name! ugh! (now I know how my mom feels when she calls my brother's name by accident, but really meant to call me )

Yeah... I'll move on to another project completely where I have no chance of mixing up characters...

 

You get good at it.

 

Always so helpful.

 

Do any of you use an alpha reader? How and when?

 

It's still the truth. As with any skill, the way to get successful is to become good at that skill. It's done through practice and hard work and it's rarely done by ticking off boxes on a checklist. Some people take to it faster than others. Some never get it at all. People have to have realistic expectations going into it. "Tell me how to do this quickly and easily" is not a realistic expectation. It's always going to be hard work. That's about as helpful as you can get.

 

As the estimable Doctor Peterson would remind us, a balanced approach must include the harsh father as well as the comforting mother. Either alone would be unbalanced. It's a scylla and... aw, you know the rest.

 

Yes, but the harsh father offers guidance. On another note, As a single father, I take offense in general to notions of the cold father and the nurturing mother. I actually don't know of this Dr. Peterson of whom you speak, but I disagree with the premise for his metaphor.

 

Think about it this way:

I'm an athlete and i notice coach isnt putting me in any races. I go up to him and ask him "what do I need to do to get in the race?"
He doesnt just say "do better." He doesnt say "you get good enough"
He doesnt give me the "quick and easy" way. Instead, he pulls me aside and explains how it all works and what i need to do to get in the race. Then the following day at practice, he puts me through the training i need to get to my best. He never says it is going to be easy. He never says that there is a shortcut-- there are not short cuts!
What he DOES do is answer my questions then provides guidance because he knows that the only way for me to get to my best and get me to my goal is to be there to provide guidance. An athlete without guidance is going to get desperate and is going to cut corners.

thank you for listening to my TEDtalk.

 

He can, but it's important that they be challenged. They need nurturing and also to be urged to meet life's challenges. Doesn't matter which parent does it, but traditionally it was the father's role. Harsh was really the wrong word. I won't comment on the rest, it's clear you were joking.

 

Well, yes and no. I was joking about the degree to which antiquated gender bias upsets me, but I still don't like it, and I do consider myself a nurturing father.

 

I meant the part where you criticized a position you were self-admittedly unfamiliar with.

He doesn't say it has to be the father, that's just who it was traditionally. It's the masculine role, whoever may play the part. And a supportive, nurturing father can also be challenging when necessary.

 

You get good enough to play in the big game by getting better. There is a certain level that you need to reach. Sitting on the bench pouting will never help you reach that level. The only way to improve is to get out there and practice and work hard and improve in your skills. That doesn't happen on a forum, it happens, in this case, by writing. A lot. It happens by reading a lot. It happens by putting thousands and thousands and thousands of words on the page.

The question that I answered was how to get to the point of getting a contract. My answer was absolutely accurate. It obviously wasn't meant to be a concise, complete walkthrough of how you do it. There are tens of thousands of people out there dreaming of getting published. Very few ever will. That's just the way this works. Wanting it doesn't mean earning it. The only way to get a contract is to write something that a publisher wants to publish. That takes getting good. It takes learning how characters work, how story structure works, how storytelling functions, how to properly communicate in your chosen language and understand what your prospective audience wants. There is no checklist that, if you follow it, you'll magically become successful. Far too many people spend their time looking for that and it simply doesn't work that way.

The other thing people need to realize is that nobody has a vested interest in your success except you. Whether you make it in this industry or not doesn't affect anyone else. People can try to steer you in the right direction, but it's ultimately on your head whether you're able to put those suggestions into practice. There are people on writing forums who spend all of their time trying to write by committee, wanting everyone else to tell them what to do instead of working it out for themselves and learning the lessons on their own. This isn't a group activity. It's one person sitting at the keyboard, pounding out thousands of words for thousands of hours, learning how to do things on their own. The average author writes six entire books that will never see the light of day before they ever produce something that might be saleable and that's average. Some might have to write 20 books first. Some might never produce anything worthwhile. Yet we still see tons of people on forums saying "I finished my first draft of my first novel, where do I sign up for my publishing contract?" That isn't how any of this works. It never has been and it never will be.

 

I've come kind of late to this thread.

As far as how long to leave it before you start editing (other than correcting SPAG errors, etc?) Well, obviously that's going to vary from person to person. But I'd say wait till you've forgotten what your thinking was when you wrote it. Wait till you can read it as if somebody else wrote it.

What you want to be able to do is look at what you've actually written—not what you wanted to write. When you start editing, it's just you and what is actually on the page.

There is no harm whatsoever in taking a long break, reading other people's stories, etc. Dive into a few novels you've been meaning to read. Maybe even start writing another one of your own. Get yourself away from that mental and emotional zone you were in when you wrote Draft 1.

You'll know when you've hit the right time, because you will not only immediately catch flaws in your prose or your story, but you'll be able to figure out how to fix them. It's amazing how the turnaround happens.

You find that 'killing your darlings' isn't hard at all, because they are no longer your darlings. They are just parts of your prose or storyline that don't work. It's easy to get rid of them. If they're well written but don't belong, save them in a separate file. You might find another way to use them in another story.

If it makes you feel easier in your mind, save all your previous versions (dated, etc) so that nothing is ever gone for good. Sometimes, yes, you might want to restore something you removed ...maybe it would belong better elsewhere. Do don't delete stuff. But do remove it.

I'd say don't overworry it at this stage.

My one BIG BIG caution is this: don't be in a hurry to query or publish. Just don't.

Once you have gone through the story several times with your editing hat on, then try it out on a few betas. But don't count on betas to edit for you. What betas are is your first audience. But what you're showing them is not a rehearsal. It's the first night of your performance, so make sure it's as good as you can make it. And work from there.

 

I do this with everything. Sometimes you read through an edit in a third pass and think, "Wait, there was something way better here before." So you look back, and sometimes you're right. Conversely, sometimes you remembered it as a moment of genius that it was not, so you keep the edit. I even do this with outlines. In fact, I find that very helpful, being able to look back at the original direction of a concept after it's been changed drastically several times.

 

I've also read in several advice blogs and the like that even one or two short story credits can be a huge plus in a query letter for a novel.

 

I restored an entire chapter to my story after a beta told me she had been expecting to see this event played out, and me just skipping over it to the 'it was done, and then we moved on' phase was disappointing. I'm glad I'd kept it! I pared it down a lot, but yeah ...I think it did need to be included. It was kind of a resting point for the story as well, after a lot of drama. And before more drama to come.

I think stories do need resting points ...where people can just relax and enjoy what's already happened and live the moment—which have, we hope, been earned. It's a good opportunity to draw main plot threads together and work on subplots, before moving on.

 

I agree with the advice to keep old versions. I learned this from painting in Photoshop, where often I'd discover that I had changed things for the worse but didn't know it until I compared side-by-side with an earlier version. I couldn't tell I was losing anything important until I did compare them, and sometimes I'd end up pasting part of the old painting back in or just scrap the new version and pick up from an earlier one.

When you make changes it always feels like it's for the better, and if you don't compare against the earlier one you'll go on smugly believing that. Of course comparing 2 versions of a painting is instant—make them smaller and put them beside each other. It takes a long time to read a draft, unless you're just comparing sections of it.

 

Yeah. Keeping copies not only means you have them if you need to get them back, but it makes you a LOT more willing to dump stuff that doesn't seem to be working. Just dump it ...into a saved file!