Manuscript

Can you use dialogue to speed up your character?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 3 Comments

 

I think so. #writetip I discovered one way to do this while I was proofreading the German Version of my novel, Fracture Line.

My character enters a scene and says two short sentences. Both are five words long. The only punctuation is a period after each sentence.

The translation turned the two sentences into one connecting them with and.  It’s only one more word, but it changes the from two simple sentences to a compound sentence.

When I read the translation I realized the longer sentence was slowing my character. I wanted her to rush in and blurt out her news, not take her time to be articulate.

The German sentence sounded more eloquent, but it didn’t give the impression I wanted.

Do you have other ways to give the impression your character is in a hurry?

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The Final Proofread

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 11 Comments

#writetip

I’ve discovered the final read of a manuscript is not much different in English or German. Yeah, so they are two different languages, but once the writer is ready to submit their manuscript to an agent or for self publishing, there are a few things to check that don’t depend on language.

To make this step easier, I:

  • change the font to anything other than the font I normally type in,
  • increase the viewing to %175,
  • turn the invisible characters on,
  • AND, read slowly.

This step takes time. For an 80,000 word manuscript, I need 40 hours to do this properly. That’s 40 hours of intense concentration without interruptions.

What do I look for? At this point, I’ve already proofread for spelling and grammar mistakes so I want to check for:

  • extra spaces,
  • double periods,
  • quotations marks that don’t have a matching partner,
  • extra lines between paragraph or page breaks,
  • consistent heading format for chapters,
  • consistent headers, footers and page numbering.

Before you send of your manuscript, don’t forget to:

  • remove bookmarks,
  • accept or reject any changes,
  • and turn off markups,

Your story may great, but you give yourself an edge over other submissions if your manuscript is technically perfect.

If you have any tips, let me know.

Public Versus Private Writing

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 6 Comments

#writetip

To write well, you must experiment. There might be those who can write genius without practice, but who really believes that?

I get nervous when I present new work for the first time to readers. The advanced readers copy is a special piece of work. It means the first comments from someone who doesn’t live in my head. The work becomes public.

So I started thinking about public versus private writing. Private writing stays hidden in the basement of my computer. A room where only I have the key. Okay so it’s a password, but what the hey.

This is the place where I can write whatever I want without worrying about whether someone else will like it. I love this place. It’s a fun place to be where the imagination can soar.

Without private writing, I don’t think I would ever have finished a novel.

Do you have secret writing?

Discoveries

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

#writetip Blogger and writer Kirsten (Blog: Write a Book with me)  got me thinking about where ideas come from. She wrote the following in a comment on my blog about themes:

In my current revision, I began by exploring secrets we keep and what it might be like to really see what is inside the minds of those we love, and ended up writing about how everyone has a talent, whether hidden or explored, that is unique to them and no one else.

Two things jumped out at me.

First: Everywhere you look someone is asking: Where do ideas come from?

For me, it happens when I sit down and start writing. I don’t mean thinking about writing, plotting, or researching – although ideas pop up during any of these activities – I mean actually typing in words. I think this is what happened to Kirsten. Time in the seat and all that.

Second: The more I write, the more ideas I have. A minor character in my first three novels made his way into my heart. Ten thousand words into my fourth novel, I discovered he was going to be the main love interest. The fourth novel takes place in a different setting and with different characters than my first three, but there he was waiting to appear.  He needed his own book. 🙂

How Often Do you Back Up Your Manuscript?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 10 Comments

So I woke up one day and my computer didn’t turn on.

Nothing.

No satisfying noises, no flashy colours. Nothing.

Before I started to cry, I thought about when I’d last made a backup of my work.

Three days. Three days of irreplaceable words. Could I find them in my mind again? Maybe. Maybe they would even be better, but maybe not. Now I’m wondering why I don’t print anything.

Three days is too long. What was I thinking? Lucky for me, I think my computer got damp from dew. A day later, after I hadn’t touched it – and that was hard – it worked. All my writing was there.

What did I learn?

  • I back up every night now.
  • I back up onto a separate hard drive.
  • In case we take a lightning strike on our boat, I also back up off site. I use a server somewhere out there on the Internet and put my work there once a week.

How often do you back up? Enough to keep you 🙂 ?

Starting A Novel Scene

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 9 Comments

This week I’ve been thinking about starting points. On Monday, I blogged about when to begin your novel. But what about a scene?

Once you’ve decided when to start your scene, as in before the action, in the middle of the action, or after then action, what about how to start your scene?

There are different ways to do this. These include with:

  • Action
  • Dialogue
  • Thought
  • Narrative

To choose which one, I think about what I want to accomplish with the scene, what happened in the previous scene, and what’s going to happen in the next scene.

For example, if the previous scene was high on action, I might want to start the current scene with narrative, perhaps describing where the POV character is. This slows the story and gives the reader a break.

When a first draft is complete, the next step is to check whether the scenes begin in different ways. If all the scenes start with dialogue, the novel might be tedious to read.

As usual, I keep track of scene starts with a column in a spreadsheet. This allows me to quickly glance and check that I haven’t been monotonous.

What’s your method for deciding how to start a scene?

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The Novel Spreadsheet

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 9 Comments

After completing three novels using my handy-dandy spreadsheet and being 10,000 words into my fourth,  I discovered I was lacking a column.

This far into the game, I thought I would have had my spreadsheet nailed. The joke’s on me.

My first three novels take place in a fictitious ski resort (Stone Mountain) in British Columbia. I needed one location column when I had one town and a bunch of locations within the town. All I needed to note in the location column was where the scene took place within Stone Mountain. That meant on the ski lift, in an office, on a trail, in the forest, in a car, etc.

My fourth novel starts out in Kingston, ON, moves to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and then makes its way through the Bahamian island chain.

Now, I need to keep track of locations within the new locations. The new column lists the town or island where the scene takes place. The existing column still works and lists where in the town or island the scene happens. This means on a beach, at anchor, in the dinghy, etc.

I guess my spreadsheet will continue to evolve as I write more novels.

Where do Characters Come From?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 9 Comments

Do you plot or do you let the characters do the plotting?

Each writer is unique in how they create a story. I don’t like to plot the entire story before I write. I find it boring. Once I’ve plotted it, I’m no longer interested in writing the novel.

I don’t want to give the wrong idea about how I write. I’m very organized. I keep track of everything in a spreadsheet. At the end of a day of writing, I make myself update the spreadsheet. It’s not the most exciting thing to do, but since I haven’t plotted the story, it’s important for me to keep track of it.

Sometimes when I update the spreadsheet, the next scene magically announces itself to me. Then I jot a few notes, leave it for the night and have a starting point the next morning.

I have a general idea of what the story is, sometimes I even know the climax, but I never know when or where new characters are going to appear. I don’t base characters on people I know. I find this hard to do as it is restrictive, and again, not that interesting. I like to make them up from scratch.
For me new characters usually appear when I take my protagonist to a new location. Somehow that stimulates my brain.  Mostly, it’s the nastier characters that appear out of nowhere, so I don’t know what that says about me.
Where do your characters come from?

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How I Signed with a Literary Agent

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 7 Comments

I signed with Margaret Hart of the HSW Literary Agency last July (2011). We met at the Humber School for Writers Summer Workshop.

Sounds easy, but it was a long journey to get there.  I attended the Humber School For Writers correspondence course with Joan Barfoot as my mentor. At the completion of that program my novel wasn’t ready to submit to an agent.

Throughout the course I compiled many tips from Joan and used these to improve my writing.

After spending a week with Mary Gaitskill at the summer workshop in 2010, Mary introduced me to Margaret, and she kindly agreed to read Fracture Line. I spent another month updating the manuscript, this time based on comments from Mary Gaitskill, before sending it to Margaret.

Margaret’s first feedback was that she liked the novel, but I had to pick up the pace. I asked a few specific questions about what she meant and then got to work. Four months and a lot of rewriting later, I resubmitted Fracture Line. This time Margaret was happy and she offered me a contract.

There are many ways to sign with a literary agency, but getting connected through the Humber School for Writers sure helped me. If your interested, the summer workshop is starting July 7, 2012.

Driving Across Canada

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 5 Comments

Ottawa to Winnipeg: 2000 Km of writing time – except when it’s my turn to drive.

The views are spectacular, the roads winding (until you hit the prairies), and there are ample passing lanes.  But what do you do with your time, hour after hour, in the car?

I find my mind wanders and with time to think, I get inundated with ideas. I keep a notebook handy to capture my thoughts. If I’m driving, my husband has to write them down. If only I could get him to write neatly.

Living is such a big country and having family in several provinces, along with the crazy notion that driving is the right way to get there, gives me lots of hours to write. I’ve written entire scenes without noticing what town we passed through, or that maybe we should stop for lunch, or that we are arriving.

As this is posted I am somewhere between Wawa, Ontario and Winnipeg, Manitoba hopefully coming up with some great ideas for my fourth novel.