What in the World?

 by Charlotte Hinger

I'm going through a novel, tightening wherever possible, and discovered the strangest thing. I dislike the construction of "said he" rather than "he said." But the "said he" usage is throughout my book. I have no idea how that happened, or why I didn't notice it. 

Thanks to the power of global searches, I will simply ask Word to find "said" and look at how it's used. Of course, it's better if "said" is used sparingly. That is not to say it should be followed by an adverb, but unique vivid description of action or a character tag. 

In addition to "said he" I'm annoyed by long passages of unattributed dialogue. I find too many authors think their dialogue is so skillfully done that the reader can easily tell who is speaking. 

For that matter, I don't like fiction that has no quotation marks. Writers who omit them strike me as affected in some way. 

Now, I'm worried that my previously published books have some peculiarity that I was unaware of. Are my other novels riddled with "said he"? What else have I done? I don't have the guts to look. 

Writers who care about improving become much better craftsmen over time. Even if no one is coaching them. I don't know how this happens. To be honest, I don't understand how the writing process works. All I know is that I'm better than I used to be. 

I have a contract for the book I'm revising now. Word count is limited to 105,000. That's quite reasonable. It's easy to find 10,000 words that should be deleted. What's scary is that every paragraph is just terrible. They all seem bloated. 

Does anyone ever reach the point where we get right the first time?

What I Learned About My First Book

I'm about to complete a tedious project. I thought it would take a few days. With interruptions to do other necessary tasks, it has taken two months. But what I've learned has been both eye-opening and rewarding.

I mentioned at the end of last year that a new publisher was about to re-issue my Lizzie Stuart series in both e-books and print. I was really excited when I saw the new cover and then the first book in the series, Death's Favorite Child, was available on Amazon.  And then we hit a glitch. I looked at the excerpt on Amazon and discovered typos that had occurred in the process. I contacted my new publisher. He asked me to send him the list of typos so that he could contact the company that had handled the conversion process. When he saw how many errors were in the excerpt, he decided the book needed to be redone.

Good news, the publisher really cared about the quality of what we were offering readers. I offered to proofread. That was when the publisher explained that the process worked best if we could use a Word manuscript. Even better news when I found the original manuscript -- and even though the book had been done in Word circa 2000, I was able to upgrade.

Minor bad news when I discovered that the upgrade had converted all the opening quotation marks to "A" and that apostrophes had also changed to another symbol. The apostrophes could be fixed with a change and replace. The quotation marks had to be done by hand. Still not a problem.

But then I hit the major "ouch". I discovered that the manuscript was missing the last chapter. That was when I realized that the only version I could find on a CD was the last draft. This was the version that I had sent out to my beta reader who had been with me in Cornwall, England when I was doing the research for the book. Our meet-up vacation as she and her son were en route to her academic fellowship had inspired the book that I had written as a "writing exercise." She had read the manuscript and liked it--except for the last chapter. She had been unhappy that nothing had happened at the end between Lizzie Stuart, my criminal justice professor, who was vacationing with her friend, Tess Alvarez, a travel writer, and John Quinn, the Philadelphia police detective. I had added a final chapter to deal with that and to set myself up for the next book.

And there was going to be a next book because opportunity had come in the form of a tip from a friend about a new imprint, and I had sold a book that I had written when all I'd intended to do was try my hand at moving my characters from another book to a new setting. Fast, forward to 2017, and my discovery that this was not only the unedited manuscript on the CD, but my next to last version.

That's where the tedious came in. I have been reading and correcting the Word manuscript with the published book in hand. The amazing part is that aside from revisions I seem to have made in the final version to add to the book, the three rounds of editing the book went through were about my writing quirks. My excellent editor had made my writing better, but not tampered with the plot.

Reading every word of my first published book left me feeling pretty good. Death's Favorite Child was the fourth book I had written--counting the two romantic suspense novels I had written years earlier and my first mystery that was intended to be the first in the Lizzie Stuart series (and eventually became the much revised second book set back home in Gallagher, Virginia). I could see the rewards of having spent four years when I thought I was only spinning my wheels as I wrote and revised what I thought would be my first book in the series. I had known Lizzie by the time we got to Cornwall. I could hear her voice in my head.

And -- having no expectation at all that the Cornwall book would ever be published -- I had given myself the liberty to write exactly the kind of book I would like to read. I had written a book that was my take on an Agatha Christie mystery with an African American female sleuth and a diverse cast of characters -- from a Philadelphia homicide detective who was dealing with a "bad year" to an famous artist, who was a lesbian who challenged stereotypes to a Southern-born teenager who walked in and set a pivotal twist in motion.

What did I learn?  That there were some things I got right in that first book. I also rediscovered a minor character who is now going to make a return as the catalyst for a short story that I promised to write for an anthology. Sometimes even a tedious task can yield unexpected rewards.

Now or Later

Barbara's post on Wednesday reminded me again that I shall never a pantser be. Every time another writer describes the process of plunging in and powering through a first draft, I am stunned. Well, not as much as I used to be. But I am still struck by how different our processes are when it comes to writing a book. 

I think of myself as a hybrid, falling between pantsers and plotters in my approach. But the truth is, even though I don't put every scene down on paper before beginning, I do have a mental outline. That outline in my head evolves and changes as I get to know my characters. I need to know my characters pretty well before I can begin to write. I need to know what motivates them. I may be wrong, but I need to believe I know why they are about to do what I expect them to do. Of course, sometimes as I learn more, they do something I didn't expect. In fact, that often happens. But I set out with the sense that I know what is going to happen and why.

Instead of plunging in, I try out scenes in my head. I have gotten better at this over the years. But it is still a lengthy process. I have been trying to get past the first couple of scenes in my 1939 thriller for months. I thought the opening scene would be at Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. While I was at a writers retreat in Vermont last summer, I dashed off that first scene to share during our evening reading. I thought I would be able to move on from there. I had introduced my protagonist. I had introduced his foe. We were ready to be off and running. But here I am, months later, writing and rewriting that scene.

I've mentioned before that I need to warm up before I can begin to write. That first fifty pages that I write over and over. But this has been something different. Even though I thought I was beginning the book in the right place, it felt wrong. I tried going back to the train station and showing my protagonist, a sleeping car porter, rushing to get to Marian Anderson's concert. Stopping to help a woman find her grandchild in the crowded station, trying to get a taxi, arriving late and finding himself in the back of the crowd. Seeing his antagonist. . .

I thought I had it when I wrote that scene. It took me two tries and two failures to launch to realize that opening was wrong, too.

Then a few days ago it came to me. A scene involving my villain that was directly related to the title of the book and that neither he nor I saw coming. What happened scared us both silly. If my villain is on his own "hero's journey," he is now committed to his path. And that elevates the encounter with my protagonist at Lincoln Memorial -- an encounter that I can write from my protagonist's point of view with no words spoken between them. 

I think it's going to work. It feels right. But I still haven't put it down on paper because what happens in my new first chapter has given me information that I didn't have before about my villain.

A pantser would plunge forward. I'm deliberating. Hybrids and plotters are more prone to edit as we go along. To edit before we even start to write. To edit as we are writing. That doesn't suck the life out of the story for me. But it does mean that the first draft does take forever to finish.

On the other hand, when I write "the end,"there are revisions left to do but no major rewrites. My revision process begins with the chapter summaries I wrote as I was doing my preliminary work. I compare what I expected to happen in my book to what actually happened. I often do an outline of the first draft so I can look for gaps and gaffes. After a read-through I'm ready to send the first draft to my beta readers. I need to send it away so that I can take a break and let the manuscript set before I plunge into revisions. . . assuming I have the time to do that. The downside of taking so long to get started is that one has less time if a deadline is looming.

But I can't do it any other way. I need to ponder and back track and stare at the wall for days and weeks and months before I can start. I need to edit as I go. I think it has much to do with personality. Spontaneity is not my middle name. But I do enjoy planning.

It seems to come down to now or later. Crawl along, cleaning up as you go and tidy up later. Or, plunge in, get a first draft and then do a major clean-up. No getting around it. However we do it, writing a decent book requires writing and revising. Now or later.