FEEDBACK: A Great New App for Writers Coming Soon!

With three successfully published novels to her credit, mystery author, Kristina Stanley and her team have developed Feedback, an app to help writers navigate their way through the rewriting process. It’s a privilege to be able to introduce her new project on this blog! So, here’s Kristina, who asks,

Do You Need Help Rewriting Your First Draft?

Whether you’re a plotter or a panster, you’ve completed a first draft. Congratulations! Now what?

If you’re anything like me, you’re asking yourself:

• Where do I start my manuscript rewrite?
• How do I keep track of all the writing tips I’ve read and apply them to my story?
• What should I change to make my story better?
• Am I ready to share my manuscript with others?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an app that would help you through the rewriting process?

But First: What is Rewriting?

A comprehensive rewrite is the first step in the self-editing process. I’m not talking about copyediting or proofreading. You can do that after you’ve completed your rewrite.

Rewriting your first draft means analyzing your story from a high-level perspective and fixing any weak areas. You want to make sure that the story structure makes sense, the scenes are tense, there are no plot holes, and you haven’t left any subplots unfinished.

During the rewrite, you also take a hard look at your characters. How often do they appear? What are their goals? What gets in the way of their goals?  Characters will drive the tension in your story, and tension is what keeps a reader reading.

Finally, the rewrite should examine your settings. Do you make the most of your settings? How often do you use the same setting, and is it too often? Do your settings help with the tone of your scenes? Settings are key to keeping your reader engaged, so don't ignore them.

How can we help you?

We’re building Feedback, an app for writers that provides a guided approach to tackling comprehensive rewrites.

With Feedback, you can focus on plot, character, and setting. You can evaluate on a scene-by-scene basis or on overall novel structure. Feedback will show you the most important structural elements to work on first.

Feedback will guide you through the rewriting process by asking you questions specific to your manuscript, enabling you to evaluate your own story.

Once you import your manuscript, Feedback automatically captures information such as word count, number of scenes per chapter, character names, and chapter and scene breaks, using this information to create the first set of reports. Any updates to your manuscript will still need to be completed in the writing app you used to create your first draft.

Feedback helps you visualize your manuscript. Forget about yellow stickies or white boards. Feedback will draw character arcs, provide reports on scene evaluation, and show your rewriting progress.

Feedback is a learning tool. If you’re having trouble with a certain element of fiction, just click on the rewrite tip associated with that element and find out how to improve your writing. There’s no need to search through dozens of writing books to find the piece of advice you need.

On the technical side, Feedback will be a secure, web-based app. This means you will be able to access Feedback from any device you use.

Find out more:

Our goal is to launch Feedback in the spring of 2017. In order to create an app that is truly useful to writers, we'd like your input on building Feedback. By signing up to our newsletter, we’ll send you updates on the development progress and ask you the occasional question to help define the product. As a bonus, we'll send you rewriting tips available only to our subscribers.

Are you as excited about Feedback as we are? Show your support by helping us spread the word and share this post.

You can find us at www.FeedbackForFiction.com

Your support means a lot to us, so thank you!

Raising A Book From The Dead

Dragon Face by
Klaudia Németh
http://www.elfwood.com/~codex

The book was dead, Jim. At the suggestions of a series of agents, I had rewritten my fantasy until the heart fell out of it. It was time to reboot. But could I? How?

With paperclips, index cards, highlighters, a computer, a notebook, and floorspace, that's how.

I had at least three versions, plus bits I had removed and parked in a Bits file. I took printouts of all of them but the first and went through them. Any scene or character or line I particularly liked got highlighted, paper clipped, and noted on an index card that was coded in the corner: 1995 p27-38, for example.

Then I went back to my first version. Using that one as the template, I made a outline and wrote each element of that on an index card. Then I started stacking, arranging, and shuffling.

If I found similar "keep this" scenes in more than one version, I compared them to see which I liked better, or I combined them into one I liked best.

Taking the now-ordered stack of cards, I cut and pasted scenes into a new rough draft that contained everything I loved about all the versions I'd done.

I printed that out.

At this point, I was lucky enough to qualify for a writing retreat, and even luckier that I was the only one there at this particular time. It would have been hard to resist the camaraderie of fellow writers, especially if socializing would have taken me away from hard work.... Oh, did I say that out loud?

At any rate, it was just me and the manuscript. Notebook and pen at hand, I read through the entire book, trying to hold it all in my mind at the same time. It was kind of scary to read a line and think, "Didn't Darcy say that exact same thing earlier?", to grab a chunk of pages, flip them over, and be on the very page I was looking for. That, my friends, is total immersion! ;)

As I went, I made notes of questions that needed to be answered, discrepancies, questions that needed to be inserted, bumps, character names, and anything else that needed to be tended to.

When I got home, I tended to them.

Now the book is huge again. I just signed a contract on it, with the understanding that it will need to be published as a series, probably of three. I realize that there may very well be more rewriting to be done, but I believe I can do it without murdering the manuscript. If I do commit verbicide, at least I know how to undo it.

The title is SAGE.

Marian Allen
Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes

Rewriting is Fun! It's FUN! FUN!!!

Rewriting is hell. I mean fun.

I'm not talking about, "I need to make this sentence active instead of passive," or "This paragraph could be tighter," or "I need to show this scene instead of just telling what happened."

I'm talking about the kind of rewriting where you have a finished manuscript, but you realize something has gone terribly wrong. All the material is there, but it isn't put together effectively. It's like, "Yes, Dr. Frankenstein, you gave the monster two eyes, but one is in his armpit and the other one is inside his left nostril."

When that happens, you just want to take the manuscript out and dig a hole and bury it and plant roses and keep bees and forget you ever wrote anything.

But take heart! You really can rewrite that sucker and live to tell about it.

One way to do it is to organize by high-lighter. Read through, and every bit about Annabelle's inheritance gets highlighted in blue. All the bits about Sir Rodney's spaniel get highlighted in yellow. Every reference to Aunt Euphonia's little problem is highlighted in green.

You can also copy and paste related bits into bits files: a document just for Annabelle, one for Sir Rodney, one for Aunt Euphonia. Or, if you don't like computers, write the bits or their locations on notecards.

If the problem is scene order, print out each scene separately or fill out a notecard on each scene and arrange them, then cut and paste the document into that order. Have a good, concentrated run-through afterwards to make sure the continuity flows. I did this scene shuffle once, and an object kept turning up before it had been acquired, or was missing before it was lost. If you have a friend who is really good at catching inconsistencies, try to persuade that friend to read for you.

Rewriting isn't easy (speaking for myself, anyway), but it's highly satisfactory to have something that doesn't work, take it apart, put it back together another way, and have something that seems seamless and inevitable. And worth all the effort.

Marian Allen
Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes

Pre-Anniversary of A Spark of Heavenly Fire

Is there such a thing as an anniversary before something happens? A pre-anniversary? The first chapter of A Spark of Heavenly Fire begins on Friday, December 2, which means the year in which the story takes place will be 2011. I didn't specifically choose that year, but certain events needed to happen on weekends, others on weekdays, and the year ended up being 2011 by default. I never mentioned the year in the book, so it's mostly a trivial issue. Today is the two-year pre-anniversary of the onset of the story, however, and to celebrate, all month long I will be posting outtakes of the book on my blog.

Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Somewhere along the line I deleted the computer version of the first draft (or perhaps there wasn't a computer version. I wrote it before I had a computer). I dug out my handwritten copy and am retyping some of the deleted parts. And there are a lot of them! The original draft was over 118,000 words, the final version less than 95,000. At least 4,000 of those words were justs and onlys and thats and beginning tos, which I worked hard to eradicate, so I don't intend to bring them back, not even for curiosity's sake.

Still, there many scenes that I deleted in order to get to the action quicker. Like many new authors, I frontloaded the book with information that slowed the story. I kept thinking that if only people could get past the first fifty pages, they would like the book -- it's a solid story with solid characters in a disasterous situation that could actually happen. A real breakthrough in my writing occurred when I realized that no one would wade through fifty pages to get to the good part, so I needed to eliminate those pages.

Included in the eliminated pages was a substory about a real estate agent and a retired defensive back who had once been part of the legendary Bronco defense team The Orange Crush. The realtor was so sex-starved that she would do anything, even turn a blind eye when he started molesting her daughter, in order to keep him in her life and her bed. I was going to post the deleted scene here, but it's way more graphic than I realized. Whooo! It's one thing putting a scene like that in a book, and another to post it where anyone can take a peak. I've saved it, though, and perhaps one day I will find a use for it.

I also deleted many less than stellar scenes, but included a brief mention of the action in flashbacks or dialogue. It got the point across without the sludgery of the original version.

I never quite knew what to do with the handwritten draft, but I'm glad I kept it. And who knows -- someday I might be so famous (or even better -- infamous) and the thing will be worth a lot of money.

Read the outtakes of A Spark of Heavenly Fire on: Bertram's Blog
Read the first chapter of the published version here: A Spark of Heavenly Fire
Free download: get the first 30% of A Spark of Heavenly Fire free at Smashwords
Read blurb (or buy!) at Second Wind Publishing: A Spark of Heavenly Fire

Pat Bertram is also the author of More Deaths Than One and Daughter Am I.