image credit: Pixabay.com
I'm so excited to welcome another guest blogger to my site! I asked a fellow author, Julie Holmes, if she could share her writer's process and yay her for putting this together in the midst of NaNo craziness, holiday busyness and, well, life!
So, without further ado, allow me to introduce the super awesome Julie Holmes...
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Julie Holmes, pen name J. M. Goebel, has been writing fiction since elementary school. A NaNoWriMo participant/winner for the past decade, she's been published in small press magazines such as "Fighting Chance" and "The Galactic Citizen", and won the 2014 Critique My Novel contest with her police procedural. Her novels fall into the adult genres of mystery, contemporary fantasy, and epic fantasy. As yet unpublished in the noveling realm, Julie is busy trying to garner agent representation for a police procedural with extrasensory elements, as well as a contemporary fantasy. A technical writer by trade, Julie shares a small hobby farm with her husband, two teen aged children, two dogs, two cats, and nine chickens, and wages a war for garden territory each summer against rabbits, chipmunks, and weeds.
Sue asked me to share my writing process. Right now, I’m working on a deep revision of a romantic mystery. Normally, I’d be writing up a storm of fresh stuff for NaNoWriMo this November, but I did a personal NaNoWriMo this past February. And yes, I hit 50k words in 28 days. After a decade of NaNoWriMos, I’ve got a system that works for me, at least for now. That sort of thing evolves, I think, as a writer gains experience and learns of new or different techniques.
A month or so before NaNo kicks off, I start brainstorming. Karen Wiesner, author of a number of romance novels, wrote Writing a Book in 30 Days, in which she shares the comprehensive method she uses for her own writing. In the back of the book, she includes a number of worksheets that walk through everything from character development to setting to story arc and timelines. Basically, the worksheets cover all the usual suspects when it comes to putting a story together.
I replicated the worksheets in Microsoft OneNote, so I could keep everything together and add new sheets when necessary. I could’ve used Excel, but OneNote works great for me. I spend the month before NaNo filling out character sheets, free-writing a summary, doing preliminary research, and checking story points. During the actual writing for NaNo, the worksheets come in very handy to keep things straight. I don’t consider the outline a rigid structure, though. The story evolves, the characters may change, and I make those tweaks in OneNote when I make them in the first draft.
Fast-forward to the end of the NaNo marathon--whew! I send the really rough and ugly draft on vacation for a few weeks and let the story ferment a bit. Then, I go back and revise, rinse, and repeat until I’ve got something nice and shiny to send to my writing group and CPs. Then the revision process starts again. After a revision or so, the first 20 pages of my current WIP went on a journey to my writing group. They shared their insight and suggestions at our annual reunion.
The great thing about good writing groups (and I have an awesome one!): we each have our own strengths. High-stakes plots are not always one of mine, but I got some much-needed help from my group. They helped me revise the storyline and crank up the stakes for the main character. Hence, major story adjustments. The changes they suggested are just what the story needed to take it to the next level.
I’m working on a deep revision now that takes major detours from the original story. Sometimes, as I’m working through new scenes, I wonder if it would be easier to just chuck it all and start over. Then I read a particularly well-written section, and decide I need to keep the good stuff. I’ve never done a revision this extensive, so to keep track of the new storyline, I chose to use a modified version of a timeline worksheet from Wiesner’s book for the initial rewrite, with columns for day, setting, character POV, and action/facts. I created the sheet in Excel, and printed out a bunch of sheets to use.
So, without further ado, allow me to introduce the super awesome Julie Holmes...
*******
Julie Holmes, pen name J. M. Goebel, has been writing fiction since elementary school. A NaNoWriMo participant/winner for the past decade, she's been published in small press magazines such as "Fighting Chance" and "The Galactic Citizen", and won the 2014 Critique My Novel contest with her police procedural. Her novels fall into the adult genres of mystery, contemporary fantasy, and epic fantasy. As yet unpublished in the noveling realm, Julie is busy trying to garner agent representation for a police procedural with extrasensory elements, as well as a contemporary fantasy. A technical writer by trade, Julie shares a small hobby farm with her husband, two teen aged children, two dogs, two cats, and nine chickens, and wages a war for garden territory each summer against rabbits, chipmunks, and weeds.
Sue asked me to share my writing process. Right now, I’m working on a deep revision of a romantic mystery. Normally, I’d be writing up a storm of fresh stuff for NaNoWriMo this November, but I did a personal NaNoWriMo this past February. And yes, I hit 50k words in 28 days. After a decade of NaNoWriMos, I’ve got a system that works for me, at least for now. That sort of thing evolves, I think, as a writer gains experience and learns of new or different techniques.
A month or so before NaNo kicks off, I start brainstorming. Karen Wiesner, author of a number of romance novels, wrote Writing a Book in 30 Days, in which she shares the comprehensive method she uses for her own writing. In the back of the book, she includes a number of worksheets that walk through everything from character development to setting to story arc and timelines. Basically, the worksheets cover all the usual suspects when it comes to putting a story together.
I replicated the worksheets in Microsoft OneNote, so I could keep everything together and add new sheets when necessary. I could’ve used Excel, but OneNote works great for me. I spend the month before NaNo filling out character sheets, free-writing a summary, doing preliminary research, and checking story points. During the actual writing for NaNo, the worksheets come in very handy to keep things straight. I don’t consider the outline a rigid structure, though. The story evolves, the characters may change, and I make those tweaks in OneNote when I make them in the first draft.
Fast-forward to the end of the NaNo marathon--whew! I send the really rough and ugly draft on vacation for a few weeks and let the story ferment a bit. Then, I go back and revise, rinse, and repeat until I’ve got something nice and shiny to send to my writing group and CPs. Then the revision process starts again. After a revision or so, the first 20 pages of my current WIP went on a journey to my writing group. They shared their insight and suggestions at our annual reunion.
The great thing about good writing groups (and I have an awesome one!): we each have our own strengths. High-stakes plots are not always one of mine, but I got some much-needed help from my group. They helped me revise the storyline and crank up the stakes for the main character. Hence, major story adjustments. The changes they suggested are just what the story needed to take it to the next level.
I’m working on a deep revision now that takes major detours from the original story. Sometimes, as I’m working through new scenes, I wonder if it would be easier to just chuck it all and start over. Then I read a particularly well-written section, and decide I need to keep the good stuff. I’ve never done a revision this extensive, so to keep track of the new storyline, I chose to use a modified version of a timeline worksheet from Wiesner’s book for the initial rewrite, with columns for day, setting, character POV, and action/facts. I created the sheet in Excel, and printed out a bunch of sheets to use.
image credit: Julie Holmes
I work through the timeline manually, because I think writing by hand helps the creative process. I walk through each scene, listing day, setting, POV, and a brief summary of what should happen in that scene. This way, I can track how often each character gets a turn in POV (I write in limited third POV), and get a good sense of how the story will play out. Then comes the hard work. Once I’m okay with the timeline scenes, I can work through the draft. Once my draft is revised initially to follow the new storyline, I can start the additional revisions that focus more on the granular stuff, like sentence structure, chapter goals, foreshadowing, character motivations, and so on.
My plan, once I’ve got the deep revision and a few polishing runs finished, is to ship the story off to my writing group for feedback. When it comes to feedback, the main thing I try to remember is this: writing is subjective, but if more than one or two people mention the same thing, that thing needs attention. Sometimes, if I’m not sure the suggestions are valid, I’ll find another set of eyes or two for a gut-check. That’s the importance of having a writing group, but also of having critique partners outside your writing group. Another suggestion is to make sure your critique partners read and/or write in the same genre you do. There’s nothing quite like reading a YA romance writer’s critique of your adult urban fantasy novel.
Once I’ve got something I feel is worthy, I’ll send it to a few beta readers for feedback from the reader’s side of the fence. More polishing, then a deep breath and rally of hope before sending my baby into the world of agents. Then back to the revision board for the next project to polish.
Thank you, Julie for sharing your process on drafting and deep revision! I truly appreciate learning more about another writer's journey.
If you’d like to read an excerpt of Julie's police procedural (and it's a wonderful, fast-paced, action-packed read!!), here’s the link: http://critiquemynovel.com/2014_contest_winners/excerpts
You can find Julie here:
her blog: http://facetsofamuse.wordpress.com
on Twitter: @jmgoebel2k13
Cheers to all of you!
Sue
I work through the timeline manually, because I think writing by hand helps the creative process. I walk through each scene, listing day, setting, POV, and a brief summary of what should happen in that scene. This way, I can track how often each character gets a turn in POV (I write in limited third POV), and get a good sense of how the story will play out. Then comes the hard work. Once I’m okay with the timeline scenes, I can work through the draft. Once my draft is revised initially to follow the new storyline, I can start the additional revisions that focus more on the granular stuff, like sentence structure, chapter goals, foreshadowing, character motivations, and so on.
My plan, once I’ve got the deep revision and a few polishing runs finished, is to ship the story off to my writing group for feedback. When it comes to feedback, the main thing I try to remember is this: writing is subjective, but if more than one or two people mention the same thing, that thing needs attention. Sometimes, if I’m not sure the suggestions are valid, I’ll find another set of eyes or two for a gut-check. That’s the importance of having a writing group, but also of having critique partners outside your writing group. Another suggestion is to make sure your critique partners read and/or write in the same genre you do. There’s nothing quite like reading a YA romance writer’s critique of your adult urban fantasy novel.
Once I’ve got something I feel is worthy, I’ll send it to a few beta readers for feedback from the reader’s side of the fence. More polishing, then a deep breath and rally of hope before sending my baby into the world of agents. Then back to the revision board for the next project to polish.
Thank you, Julie for sharing your process on drafting and deep revision! I truly appreciate learning more about another writer's journey.
If you’d like to read an excerpt of Julie's police procedural (and it's a wonderful, fast-paced, action-packed read!!), here’s the link: http://critiquemynovel.com/2014_contest_winners/excerpts
You can find Julie here:
her blog: http://facetsofamuse.wordpress.com
on Twitter: @jmgoebel2k13
Cheers to all of you!
Sue
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