Editing Novels: A Quick-ish Guide

March is National Novel Editing Month--NaNoEdMo, as the kids say--an excellent occasion for those writers who went through November's National Novel Writing Month to look back at their sprawl of pages and to make something of them, good novels being not so much written as rewritten, revised, re-envisioned, polished until your elbow gets tired, polished some more, then polished some more. And NaNoEdMo seems like an excellent idea to me...that's not just because of the work I've done as an editor but because I'm currently finishing my third--and final, knock knock--editorial pass through my novel The Strikeout Artist, from which I just gave a reading at Ohio's Heidelberg University, a sign I'm getting close. (Thanks for having me!)

If a writer spends months--optimistically--drafting a novel, she can spend whole years in the editing process: doing completely new drafts, trying out completely new approaches, voices, and structures, looking at and tweaking the pesky component parts until the components can't be separated from the whole, the macro editing giving way to the micro and the book finally, mercifully, appearing as a unified whole. It's an involved, trying process...a labor of love, certainly, but a labor nonetheless.

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NaNoWriMo Tip #11: Write a Novella

First, I understand that this is not NaNolaWriMo--I'm not sure there is such a thing, though there should be--and I furthermore understand that the stated goal of this month's work is to produce a novel, of which there's an allegedly clear definition right up front on the NaNoWriMo website: 50,000 words. (I say allegedly because it's a clumsy, imprecise, unhelpful definition...which is in no way NaNoWriMo's fault.)

Nevertheless, having said all that, I'd like to suggest something to you that I suggest to those students of mine who ask if I'll serve as advisor for their undergraduate honors thesis...for which they'd like to buckle down and (finally) try their hand at writing a novel:

Write a novella.

Typically how this works is, the student and I do an independent study in the fall semester, the first half devoted to getting an idea of what the student wants to explore, doing readings of other works which try similar things, and helping the student figure out the story he or she is interested in telling. (Generally the student has nothing more than a vague idea at first, which is fine, so this questioning and prep work is vital to pinning the idea down. And an important stage for the rest of us, too.)

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NaNoWriMo Tip #1: Combine Story Ideas

Maybe you have a novel idea that's essentially a coming of age story about a girl who enters puberty and isn't handling it well at school or home...but maybe the story seems to be a little unconvincing and cliche as it is, not much going on. Then there's this other story idea about a character who can move things with her mind, a horror story...but then what? She just moves objects around, and that's the whole story? Each idea has something interesting that catches your attention, makes you want to explore the idea further, and yet neither one really seems to have a full life of its own.

At least, not on its own.

But if you combined these story ideas--if you had a coming of age story about puberty, social awkwardness, the cruelty of high school kids, plus the character has the power to move things with her mind (or, say, destroy the senior prom)--then your two sorta interesting ideas might form one excellent idea that'd look, perhaps, a little something like this:



(Sorry, I'm still in Halloween mode.)

Combining two different story ideas--even mixing different genres--can be an excellent way to jumpstart your creative process and see your story and character more fully. Consider the several story ideas you've been kicking around lately, perhaps even making a quick checklist of them, and then see if any two of them might in fact be part of the same story. Then consider how combining the ideas into one might open up possibilities and allow you to do something unexpected.

National Novel Writing Month

It's November 1st, which can only mean one thing.... Well, it could mean any number of things, I guess--succulent turkey, I'm looking at you--but what I'm thinking of specifically is, It's the start of National Novel Writing Month.

I'm sure the project needs no introduction for anyone who'd be stopping by here--and if it does, take a look at the NaNoWriMo website--but the basic idea is, to use the month to complete (start to finish, or wherever-you-are to finish) a workable draft of a novel in just thirty days, with the combined manic energy and zeitgeist of your fellow NaNoWriMo-ers to help spur you on. It is, as the website suggests, "Thirty days and nights of literary abandon." And anything that helps keep you focused on--excited about, obsessed with--the work is a good thing.

For my part, I'm making a NaNoWriMo pledge to post, every day for the month of November, some small piece of advice on getting through your project and (hopefully) making the most of it. Sometimes the advice might be substantial--meaning, wordy as I sometimes tend to be--but most times it'll be just a prompt or tip to help you out. Some days I may not be able to post, but if that's the case, I won't beat myself up. Instead, I'll redouble my efforts the next day so that, by the end of the month, I have 30 tips for novel-writing archived on the website, dealing with whatever issue the spirit moves me to tackle.

So Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone. May the Scorpio moon bring out your inner artist, minus all the moody/brooding stuff.

Kurt Vonnegut on Short Story Writing

Of course this is just as applicable to novel writing...

Mark Twain on Novel Writing

A man who is born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

--from the preface to Those Extraordinary Twins