Tag: critique

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

The book is complete, but there’s still one more thing to do: revise and edit! This final set of journals will follow the editing process.

Slow Going

When this post goes up, Razor Mountain will have been “in revision” for over a month. Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot to show for it. I’ve worked through the first few chapters, made some changes, and made notes for later.

In the past, I would probably have chalked that up to laziness and lack of a proper writerly work ethic. More recently, I’ve come to the understanding that if I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the writing, but not actually getting much done, it’s because I have some sort of mental block, and I need to work it out to move forward.

I suspect the problem here was a lack of accountability, or at least the lack of an audience. When I was writing chapters and posting them, there were reasons to keep up a steady pace. If I was slow with a chapter, my wife would often ask when the next one was coming. I would notice the longer-than-usual gap in my blog schedule. I had some feeling that the work was for someone.

Now that I’m revising, that dynamic has changed. I’m not reposting updated chapters, because it seems like a huge mess to track, and because they’re likely to get updated again in subsequent passes.

Luckily, since I came to this realization, I’ve gotten some new reasons to stay motivated and productive.

Progress

Let’s start with what I did get done. I spent some time reworking Chapter 2. This is the chapter that introduces God-Speaker. He has a very bad day when his mentor is unexpectedly killed by a stranger. This stranger is barely a character, and really has no clear explanation or bearing on the rest of the story. He’s just there to jump-start the plot.

No only is this not great storytelling, but it doesn’t really fit with what we know about paleolithic humans, which is that they generally worked together. War and infighting aren’t so much of a thing when everyone has to spend most of their energy just trying to survive for another season.

So, I did the obvious thing. I removed the stranger from the story, and I replaced him with a giant bear: Arctodus simus. The bear still serves the same purpose in the story, it just makes more sense and hopefully doesn’t leave the reader saying “why the heck did that happen?”

Chapter Zero?

There’s an issue that I’ve noticed in both God-Speaker and Christopher’s plot. In both cases, I wanted to start with some action and an inciting incident to drive the story forward. However, the reader hasn’t had enough time to form any attachment to either of these characters. There can only be so much tension when the reader doesn’t really care about the POV character.

One solution I’ve considered is adding earlier chapters to better show the lives of these characters before they’re knocked off-course by a cruel and uncaring universe. The challenge would be to create a new beginning to the book, still pulling the reader into the story without the benefit of all the big events that will happen in the current chapters 1 and 2.

I don’t know what I would put in those chapters yet, but I’m keeping it in mind as I work through the rest of the book.

Critiques

I got a lot of good feedback from Critters for Chapter 1, and after I was done with my bear business in Chapter 2, I submitted that as well. It takes a while to work through the queue, but the feedback came in this past week.

Additionally, I got a bite on my “request for dedicated readers,” which means I’ll have someone who can go through the whole book and provide feedback. This is much more appealing to me than slowly sending it through the standard process chapter-by-chapter, with no guarantee that anyone will follow the whole thing from beginning to end.

Along with that Critters volunteer, I’ve enlisted a handful of friends and family to serve as readers too.

Lighting a Fire

That’s all for now. Having more readers lined up lit a fire under me to do a quick read-through of the whole book and look for any high-level changes I want to make before getting that feedback. I expect that to keep me busy for the next week or two. After that, I’m sure I’ll have my hands full processing the feedback.

After taking a couple weeks off, I’m jumping into revisions on Razor Mountain.

Having done my best to forget everything about the book, I now have to identify all the parts that suck and make them better.

Critique

To get in the editing mindset, I reactivated my account on critters.org, and I’ve been doing critiques on other people’s stories. This is great practice for editing, because I want to approach my own stories in the same way that I’d approach someone else’s: as an objective reader.

The other reason that I’ve been critiquing is because I sent in the first chapter of Razor Mountain for critique. Critters keeps the whole system running by requiring everyone to submit a critique in 3 out of every 4 weeks if they want to send out their own work for feedback.

Critters also has an option to request “dedicated readers,” which flags your submission to say that you’re interested in having people read the whole novel. Unfortunately, about six submissions in a given week are novels, and I don’t think these requests tend to get much traction. It’s a lot to ask of semi-random strangers, even if they do get a bunch of reading credits for it. I haven’t gotten any takers so far.

I’ll be sending the second chapter through in the next couple days, but I haven’t decided how many more chapters to put in the queue. I suspect I’ll see diminishing returns on later chapters. Novel chapters don’t get as much feedback as short stories, and not all the readers will be following chapter by chapter, so the feedback is less useful.

The other problem is that it takes a couple weeks for a submission to reach the top of the queue, and each user only gets one submission at a time. At that rate, it’d take a year or more to get through the whole book.

The Editing Plan

I posted recently about making a novel editing plan, and I’m now doing that for Razor Mountain. I’m looking for big structural changes I might want to make, and trying not to get bogged down in small changes. This is always hard for me, because tweaking words and sentences is easy and satisfying right away. It’s much harder to see possible improvements at the chapter or multi-chapter level, and it’s harder to let the ego go and try a bigger rewrite when the story feels “finished” and set in stone. Even if it will result in a better story.

The only place where I have been purposely doing smaller edits is in the first couple of chapters, because I know I’ll be submitting those to Critters, and I want them presented in as much of a polished state as possible. I’m working under the assumption that better chapters will garner more useful feedback. Of course, the Critters feedback includes plenty of suggestions for low-level improvements, but I’m mostly tucking those away for use in later revisions.

Once I’ve made the big, structural edits, I’ll pass the book to a couple of real-life readers for more feedback. I’ll give them the guidance I outlined in my post about asking for critique. Then I can finally start looking at the smaller edits, cleanup and polishing. At which point I should be on my millionth read-through and ready to never look at the book again.

Making a List, Checking it Quite a Lot, Actually

To quiet down the part of my mind that wants to do little line edits, I’ve been compiling a running list of smaller things to go back and improve when the big edits are done. It’s going to be a long list by the time I finish rereading the entire book. So far, it’s things like this:

• Danger Words: I tend to overuse words like felt, seemed, mostly, some, nearly, almost, a bit, like, might
• Overused Punctuation: em-dash, colons, semicolons, parentheticals
• Overused Names: Don’t use a proper name when a pronoun would be just as clear
• References to “artifacts”: I originally thought God-Speaker would get his power from some objects that he found in the mountain, but then they morphed into the voices. I’m not certain all the references got updated.
• Adjectives and adverbs: They’re not strictly poison, as some writers would claim, but they had better pull their weight if they don’t want to get cut.

More to Come

I’m still not exactly sure how to structure these posts. It’s a lot harder for me to talk constructively about editing than it is to talk about coming up with ideas or writing the first draft. But I think editing is probably not discussed as often as it should be, since most first drafts tend to be pretty flawed, and it’s the revising that makes those mediocre drafts into excellent books.

For now, I’ll continue editing, and post again when something comes up that’s worth talking about.