Tag: editing

What to Include in Your First Draft (and What to Skip)

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speed bump sign

Image by VeggieFrog

The “experts” say your first draft should be quick and rough, and that you fix it in later drafts. But when I first started writing, I didn’t get that. Why should I waste time writing a “rough” draft that I’ll have to correct later? Why not just take the time to make it perfect the first time around?

No. No. Nonononono.

If you’ve written anything longer than flash fiction, you probably know why this attitude is a problem: Part of fiction is planned – but part is discovery. As you work your way through the story, your characters and plot will change. So if you try to write in “final draft form,” you’ll waste precious time agonizing over just the right word – when you may end up cutting the entire chapter later.

But where do you draw the line? What do you spend time on in the first draft, and what do you save for later? Here’s what I’ve learned over the years.

The Rule of Thumb for Your First Draft

Write as well and in as much detail as you naturally can in the moment. Skip over whatever slows you down.

 

What that Means

  1. Don’t intentionally make it sloppy.

This may sound obvious to you, but as a young writer, I interpreted “first drafts are terrible” as “you should only worry about what happens, not how it sounds.” But it’s not about discarding grammar and style. It’s about writing what comes naturally to you in the moment. Make each sentence sound as good as you can without losing the momentum of the scene. Speaking of which:

  1. Keep your momentum.

First drafts aren’t about speed; they’re about momentum. Momentum is usually driven by action and dialogue, so focus on those, but don’t be chained by them. If a description flows out of you naturally, write the heck out of it. But if you’re struggling – maybe you just can’t picture the setting, or maybe you need to do a little botanical research – skip over it. Which brings us to:

  1. When you hit a speed bump, flag it and move on.

If you come across a speed bump, do not stop to fix it. You’ll lose momentum, and end up spending hours doing research for one tiny detail. Write a placeholder note and move on. I use all caps because they’re easy to type and to see. So, for instance, if I can’t think of the right word to describe something, I’ll just write ADJECTIVE where the word should go.

Speed bumps can include:

  • Names of places and minor characters
  • Descriptions
  • Tricky sentences
  • Tricky transitions between scenes
  • Single words you just can’t think of
  • Translations if you’re using a foreign or made-up language (I write the dialogue in English, and go back and write the actual language later)

Just remember – only skip these things if they aren’t coming to you naturally.

  1. Know the difference between speed bumps and plot issues.

Speed bumps are details that don’t affect the plot. Ignore them. Plot, on the other hand, is tide-changing. The trickiest area here will be research – deciding how much time to research before moving on. For instance:

  • Don’t spend hours researching semiautomatics to determine what gun your hero carries. That’s a speed bump. Write “He drew his GUN TYPE.” and move on.
  • Do spend five minutes researching how many rounds the average magazine holds so you know roughly how many shots he has in that big action sequence. That’s a plot issue.

  1. Use your writer’s block.

Say you’re blocked trying to write dialogue. You probably don’t want to skip over that, because it can affect the trajectory of the story. Instead, take a break to look back at your flags, like the descriptions and transitions, and work on one of those. By working on a character description, for instance, you might find some inspiration for his dialogue.

  1. Group similar tasks together.

Pretty much any list of organizational tips will tell you this. Every time you jump between tasks, it takes time to reset your brain. Minimize this time by grouping similar tasks together. So when you’re getting near your final draft, comb through and do all the character names at once. Then, do all the translations. And so on.

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If I had known this method when I started writing, I would have saved so much time. Every writer and every story is different, but the same basic rules of thumb apply.

What are your time-saving tips for writing?

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speed bump ahead

What to include in your first draft – and what to skip

When Editing Goes Too Far

  By , ,
measuring tape

Photo by Ciara McDonnell

I preach plenty about trimming the fat from writing. Strunk, White and Zinsser command it, and I’ve learned it firsthand from dealing with limited space in ads, radio commercials and billboards.

Efficient writing is better writing.

But this isn’t some professional writing secret. You’ll read it on all the forums, hear it at all the conferences and even in your local writers’ group. Cut, cut, cut. Maybe it’s the growing popularity of flash fiction, maybe it’s the waning attention spans of the masses, but whatever the cause, the fact remains:

Skinny writing is in.

We’re all shaking our pages till the adverbs fall out, beating the paragraphs till the parentheticals flee, ever striving for that low, low word count.

The red ink flows in our lust for trim prose.

And what are we seeing as a result? Leaner literature?

Or malnourished manuscripts?

Are we perpetuating a healthy word diet – or an editing disorder?

There is a point when the art becomes emaciated, with wording so simple you can’t differentiate the work of one author from another. Cut too deep, and the voice will bleed right out of your sentences.

Cutting words is one of those rules you have to learn first, to break later.

First you learn how to make each word count. How to construct clear thoughts. How not to waste your readers’ time.

But then you have to find your voice: that special way of writing you have (or your narrator has) that no one else has. And that voice may require a few “unnecessary” words.

Once you know the mechanics of writing efficiently, you can start learning the art of writing uniquely.

What happens if you don’t?

I took the red pen to the three wordiest excerpts from the 5 fantastic examples of voice I posted two years ago. Here’s how they came out.

Mr. Dickens: A Christmas Carol

There is no doubt Marley was dead. The clergyman, clerk, undertaker, and chief mourner all signed the register of his burial. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

I don’t know what is particularly dead about a doornail; I might regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But our ancestors’ wisdom is in the simile; and I won’t disturb it, or the Country’s ruined.

WORDS CUT: 60

Mr. Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small yellow sun.

Orbiting this at about ninety-eight million miles is an insignificant blue-green planet whose primitive ape-descended life forms still think digital watches are cool.

This planet had a problem: most of its people were unhappy. Most of the suggested solutions for this problem involved the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

WORDS CUT: 48

Mr. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You don’t know about me, unless you read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that doesn’t matter. Mr. Mark Twain made that book, and told the truth, mainly. He stretched some things, but everybody lies sometimes, except Tom’s Aunty Polly, Mary, and the Widow Douglas.

WORDS CUT: 55

Feel that? That something missing? How it seems rushed?

I could have cut even more: Dickens’s entire second paragraph; several of the adjectives from Adams’s piece. But honestly, would there be anything left?

Learn to write efficiently, by all means. But don’t cut so much that you lose yourself.

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Need help finding your voice? Sign up for Voice Week, November 4 – 8! You’ll have a chance to win a copy of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief!

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measuring tape

Are you over-editing?

Review: Ginger Software

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After my Grammarly review, another proofreading software company offered me a premium trial to do a review. This one I’d never heard of – Ginger, a startup out of Tel Aviv. This video shows it best:

Ginger specializes in helping people who are learning English as a second language). According to the website, it uses “patent-pending technology to decipher the semantic meaning and context of text input, by comparing it to billions of similar sentences from the Web.”

Ginger’s emphasis on semantics and context, combined with its home country of Israel, made me interested right away – as I understand it, Hebrew is a language even more complex than English, in that a single word can have many meanings (mah-kor means both “origin/source” and “bird beak”!) – therefore Hebrew-speakers are even more dependant on context than the average English speaker, and therefore presumably specially qualified to create a software like this.

AT A GLANCE

Ginger beats both Grammarly and Writing Dynamo right out of the gate for two reasons:

  1. Pricing model.
    • Free version (not sure the difference between this and basic)
    • Basic version = $4.90/month OR one-time payment of $39
    • Premium version = one-time payment of $89

What??? Nobody else is doing a one-time payment model! That’s awesome.

  1. Integration with MS Word

No cut/paste, no uploading documents. No restricting yourself to a few thousand words at a time. Download Ginger and it becomes a convenient yet unobtrusive button at the top of the window when you open Word, and reviews all your text in-doc with a click. FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS MY NEEDS! (This is currently available on Windows only. They are working on a Mac version.)

THE NITTY GRITTY

I ran the same tests I ran on Grammarly (which I stole from blog Grammarist):

  • Obvious Spelling Errors – Ginger catches them all, beating Grammarly.
  • Less Obvious Spelling Errors (like “form” instead of “from”) – Ginger catches all, beating Grammarly
  • Grammar and punctuation mistakes – Ginger is split. It makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did, but fails to catch some problems, including dangling modifiers.
  • Questionable Style Choices – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly.
  • Commonly Misused Words – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did.
  • Commonly Confused Words – Ginger catches two out of five, which is two better than Grammarly.
  • Redundancies – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections.
  • Troublesome Compounds – Better than Grammarly, but a little strange. For instance, for the sentence “We are already to go” instead of suggesting “We are all ready to go,” Ginger suggested “We are already going.”
  • New Words, Colloquialisms and Nonstandard Variants – Ginger loses to Grammarly by just a little – suggesting “computer mice” instead of mouses.
  • American English vs. British English – Ginger wins for being adjustable between US and UK English, though while it catches “odor/odour,” it failed to catch problems with some other examples. I ran a few more of my own tests for comparison – it caught four out of six issues. Not bad.
  • Grammar Myths – Ginger ties with Grammarly.

 

EXTRA NOTES

PRO: Ginger did catch some mistakes neither I nor MS Word caught.

CON: Instead of proofing all at once and showing you the problems all at once, it proofs one sentence at a time while you watch – you can see the sentences flash at the top of the screen – and only stops when it’s found something wrong. The proofer automatically shuts off when you click to another window, so you have to wait while it works, and you can’t do anything else on your computer in the meantime.

PRO: Since they gave me a Premium trial I got to try out the text-to-speech reader. While it lacked the inflection of a human reader, it did offer the options of male or female voice, US or UK accent, so I had a lot of fun hearing my words read aloud by robot Emma Thompson.

WEIRD: Ginger also has a “Sentence Rephraser” which suggests different ways you can say things (usually synonyms). Sometimes its suggestions were helpful, other times troubling. For “She wondered if they would invite her to play with them” Ginger suggested “She wondered if they would pay for her to flirt with them.” What?!?

 

CONCLUSION

This is a tough one, especially since, as a native English speaker, I’m not in Ginger’s target audience. I do think Ginger would be helpful for someone who struggles a lot with spelling and major grammar issues, thought they shouldn’t depend on it solely. Compared to what else I’ve seen, the price and the functionality are the best. In its current condition, it’s not much use to me, personally, but I would keep an eye on it for updates.

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How Long Should a Scene in a Novel Be?

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Goodness knows how many times I’ve advised you to cut the fluff in your novel. But there is such a thing as cutting too much. If your goal is “as short as possible!” you might end up cutting more than the fluff—important stuff like character development and symbolism.

So wouldn’t it be better to aim for a specific length—like a range of words? But what range should we aim for? What are successful authors doing?

I decided to find out. I pulled seven novels off my shelves for my research. I tried to choose a good variety: the publishing dates ranged from 1859 to 2012, and genres included Literature, Suspense, Science Fiction and Fantasy.

This is NOT an exact science, people, so don’t take any of these findings as gospel truth. But I did find a few things that could be useful guidelines for us. Check out my lovely redneck graph showing (approximate) average words per scene for the beginning, middle and end of each book.:

Graph showing average words per scene for beginning, middle and end of seven novels.

Numbers are approximate.

The Takeaway

  • All the books had a mix of longer and shorter scenes
  • Longer scenes tended to appear toward the beginning, when the author was setting up character and setting
  • Scenes were almost uniformly shorter (the action sped up) in the middle and end
  • There were still occasional long scenes in the middles and ends of these books—usually scenes that introduced new characters or situations (more setup), or were action-packed climaxes
  • One curious thing: though the number of words per page was different for each book, all the books seemed to have lots of scenes that were 2-4 pages long. This makes me wonder if publishers choose book sizes based on average scene length, to create the illusion of a certain pace. But I’m probably over-thinking it.
  • We can be confident keeping most mid-to-end scenes between 300 and 1300 words. Earlier scenes can be longer.

Here are the detailed results and more than you ever wanted to know about how I got them:

What Counts as a Scene?

Scenes in novels are not always rigidly defined. I tried to measure scenes that were mostly action and/or dialogue, and avoided long chunks of exposition (which usually occur at the very beginning of novels, in the setup) and internal monologues (which are often used to transition from one scene into another). I didn’t feel these were proper “scenes,” as they occur inside the mind. Where action was tightly mixed with exposition (again, usually in opening scenes, especially the one in Runaway Jury), I counted it all. The hardest to measure were the middle scenes in Old Man and the Sea, which were an ambiguous mix of internal monologue and action.

Items that marked the beginning or end of a scene included:

  • Chapter breaks
  • The passage of time, indicated by:
    • Formatting (*** or extra blank lines between paragraphs)
    • Narration (“As the sun set,” “he awoke,” “two hours had passed,” etc.)
  • Changes of setting

How I Measured

It might be more accurate to count every word in every scene in every book, but who has that kind of time? Instead, I looked at various scenes at the beginning, middle and end of each book, and multiplied the page numbers by the number of words on an average page (an average manuscript page is about 250 words, but paper and font sizes vary with published books, so I had to do sample page counts for each book—for instance, my copy of Old Man and the Sea has about 180 words per page, whereas my Fellowship of the Ring has over 500 words per page).

The Detailed Results

If I could confidently define one scene in the first few pages, I only measured that one (those that say “First ‘proper’ scene”). If heavy exposition or other factors made the opening scene less definite, I measured several scenes and counted a range (those that say “Opening Scenes”). Where you see a range followed by a parenthetical number, that means most scenes fell within the range, but I saw one that was the length in parenthesis. The marks you see on the graph are approximately mid-range.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
(1859, Literature)
WORDS/PAGE: 300
FIRST “PROPER” SCENE: 7 pages | 2100 words
MIDDLE SCENES:  2-6 pages | 600-1800 words
CLOSING SCENES: 2-6 pages | 600-1800 words
 
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
(1952, Literature)
WORDS/PAGE: 184
FIRST “PROPER” SCENE: 5.5 pages | 990 words
MIDDLE SCENES: 2-4 pages | 360-720 words
CLOSING SCENES: 1-3 pages | 180-540 words
 
The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
(1954, Fantasy)
WORDS/PAGE: 500
FIRST “PROPER” SCENE: 3 pages | 1500 words
MIDDLE SCENES: .5-4 pages | 250-2000 words
CLOSING SCENES: 1-3 pages | 500-1500 words
 
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
(1977, YA Sci Fi)
WORDS/PAGE: 300
OPENING SCENES: .5-2.2 (8+) pages | 150 – 660 words (2400)
MIDDLE SCENES: 2-4 (6) pages  | 600-1200 (1800) words
CLOSING SCENES: 2-4 pages | 600-1200 words
 
The Runaway Jury by John Grisham
(1996, Suspense)
WORDS/PAGE: 300
FIRST “PROPER” SCENE: 5.5 pages | 1650
MIDDLE SCENES: 2-3 pages | 600-900 words
CLOSING SCENES: 2 pages | 600 words
 
Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz
(1997, Suspense)
WORDS/PAGE: 380
OPENING SCENES: 2-4.5 (8) pages | 760-1710 (3040) words
MIDDLE SCENES: 2-5 pages (8.3) | 760-1900 (3154) words
CLOSING SCENES: 2-4 pages (10) | 760-1520 (3800) words
 
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
(2012, YA Literature)
WORDS/PAGE: 250
OPENING SCENE(S): 10.33-13.33 pages | 2582-3332 words
MIDDLE SCENES: 2-4 pages | 500-1000 words
CLOSING SCENES: 2-4 pages | 500-1000 words

 

Grammarly Prices and Review

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I recently got an email from the affiliate marketing manager at Grammarly.com. She’d seen my Writing Dynamo review and was offering me the chance to become an affiliate marketer for Grammarly.

That means I’d promote Grammarly on this blog with ads and/or text links,* and for every person who clicked an ad and signed up for a subscription, I’d receive a commission.

Affiliate Marketer Commission

  • $20 for a one-month subscription
  • $30 for three months
  • $50 for one year

Before replying, I did some research. The Grammarly site has an excellent landing page full of information – except the prices. You have to give them your name and email address just to access the price list. Of course I displayed it here for your benefit:

Actual Grammarly Subscription Price (2013)

  • $29.95 for a one-month subscription
  • $59.95 for three months
  • $139.95 for one year

{{ UPDATE: The Grammarly rep has informed me that the prices do appear in the FAQs section of the site. I’ll note that it is still difficult to find: you  have to scroll all the way down the very long homepage to find a small text link. Better than I thought, but still. }}

There’s a free 7-day trial, but you have to select one of the above subscriptions and give them your credit card number to access the trial.

So I wasn’t surprised to find negative reviews of Grammarly around the web: people who’d been charged before they could cancel after using their trial, or who said they’d tried to cancel, but had still been charged. Whether or not Grammarly intentionally charged these customers against their will, it’s still Grammarly’s fault for setting up the subscription system that way.

They were very kind, however, to set me up with a free one-month trial without asking for a credit card number.

So I tried it out.

First, I read a detailed review on Grammarist that had run a series of tests on the program last year. Their tests faulted Grammarly for (unless I miscounted) 42 errors, and praised it for 17 successes. Many of these errors were overcorrections, suggesting changes for all instances of passive voice, personal pronouns, and contractions, all of which are acceptable in creative writing (though passive voice should be used sparingly). Grammarly’s other faults were largely mistaken words it failed to catch.

I ran all the same tests for 2013. On the first run through, I counted seven former errors Grammarly had corrected in itself. They still had 35 uncorrected, and added two new errors.**

Then I noticed something: hover over the “Start Review” button, and you get a drop-down menu for the type of writing you want reviewed (Grammarist either didn’t have that in the 2012 version, or didn’t notice it).

Options!

Options!

Most of Grammarly’s overcorrections disappeared when I selected “Creative” vs. “General” writing, but then it missed even more actual mistakes.

I do like the way Grammarly separates the errors into categories, like Verb Agreement, Punctuation, etc. And how, for certain categories, it provides long and short explanations.

Long and Short

Long and Short

The worst thing I noticed was its “Commonly Confused Words” section. See below. Since when is a synonym a “similar word with different meaning”? I believe the word they are looking for is homonym.

What?!?

What?!?

So I clicked on the question mark beside “sent” and discovered this:

Srsly?

Srsly?

Am I crazy, or is that first definition actually for the word “cent”?

How does it hold up against Writing Dynamo?

  • Does not have the super cool repeat-word catcher
  • Handles more text at one time – 20 pages, which is about 5,000 words
  • “Upload Text” button works
  • “Add to Dictionary” seems to work
  • Wishy-washy on British spellings (allowed some in the Grammarist test, but not in my further tests)
  • Didn’t flag em dashes – yay!
  • Writing area still not adjustable

Conclusion:

I chose not to become an affiliate marketer. In some ways, Grammarly is better than Writing Dynamo and MS Word. I like the option to tell the program what kind of text you are editing. I like the way the reviews are organized. But it still has too many bugs to be worth the price. Thirty bucks a month, and two-thirds of that goes back to the person who told you to buy it? With significant programming updates (and changes to the subscription system), it may be worth our attention in the future. For now, I think good ol’ MS Word will suffice.

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* You’ve already seen some Grammarly ads on this site because I have Google AdSense, which scans my blog for keywords and automatically places relevant ads. I get paid a few cents per click. I do not get a sales commission, and I do not personally endorse any of the products advertised.
** Take these numbers with a grain of salt; I did disagree with Grammarist’s assessment for a few of them.