Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 5 Comments

Crutch words – WENT (part 1)

When drafting a story, a book, or a poem, we tend to use words that will easily allow us to convey what we have in mind. They help us get the words out fast. It makes sense; it’s a draft, meant only for the writer and only until revisions and edits start. Past that stage, it’s best (for our readers’ sake) to change these words in favour of better and more descriptive ones.

WENT is a word writers like to use often, but one that doesn’t paint a nice picture for the reader. Below are some alternative words you can use. Keep in mind, the list of synonyms for WENT is much bigger, and I will come back to it at a later time with more words. As always, please make sure you use the right replacement at the right moment for best results. Each synonym has a meaning of its own.

 

 

Also, I changed the blog’s front page a bit. It took me hours to get the image mapping to work and to figure out how to fix the html code (I’m soooooo incompatible with such things), but I think the result is better than the old one. The question is, do you like it?

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Crutch words – Smile/Laugh

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about crutch words and I focused on the word LOOK. Of course, look isn’t the only crutch word writers use. SMILE and LAUGH are two similar words. Keep in mind that the words I include below are not the only ones, but they tend to be used more often than others. Also, some of them are the product of onomatopoeia (Greek word, meaning to create names), and as such they describe a sound. As I mentioned in that earlier post, make sure you understand what each word means before you use them.

 

 

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 5 Comments

Published short story

I got published for the first time in 2014. That year was great for me, and totaled three short stories published in webzines. Loved them all, and it saddened me when two of those magazines ceased their operations. I think there’s a kitten whimpering with its head hung for every literary magazine that closes. For some of you, three short stories are nothing. Okay, maybe most of you craft that many in a day or so. But for me, short stories aren’t all that easy. I prefer coming up with longer narratives, stories where I can delve into some world building, deeper character arcs etc, so three were just fine 🙂 Lets not forget I had only started writing a year before that.

I had high hopes for 2015, and I kept whoring my stories left and right, as Faulkner once said. Alas, 2015 sucked! I probably collected more rejection emails from that year than a seamstress has pins in her arsenal.

2016 on the other hand, seems to be a promising one. “Seems” is the keyword, as always. Bride of Chaos will publish a short story of mine for its 9Tales Told in the Dark series, sometime around April. Have a look at them, and if you like horror, fantasy, or sci-fi consider supporting the magazine. I’ve already stated my opinion on literary magazines in a previous message, and I stand by what I had said back then.

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 2 Comments

The past 10 days or so

The past ten days or so have been a nightmare, with regards to writing.

Remember my post from a few weeks back when I said I had to delete a plot arc that stretched for 25 or so chapters? I thought once I rewrote these 25 chapters (keep in mind please that my editing process involves rewriting the draft in the first place, so that would be rewrite #2), every piece of the puzzle (for the sake of argument let’s call the puzzle, STORY) would fall into place. And it did. Up to a certain point.

The particular arc I had to remove, however, extended like a ripple in a calm pond. It occurred to me about ten nights ago (once again, just as I was about to fall asleep) that since that arc was out of the way, a certain character’s importance lost its value. Said character was supposed to be the big bad guy (in the original draft that evil character fooled the MC, and lead him right into the wolves’ den). Allow me to clarify something here: the adversary in my story was never that person. The enemy was my main character’s attitude and perception (spawned partly but not limited to his madness – another reason I had to shift the voice and style to more “literary” with more inner thoughts), and the environment which kills humans (the Darkening is a post apocalyptic story, in case you forgot). So the big bad guy was originally there to take my main character to the last location the story would unfold, and all the unresolved plot arcs would come to an end. He served shall we say, as a bridge. Lo and behold, said bridge was also part of the plot arc I wanted to remove. Which made the big bad guy’s existence rather unimportant.

In my attempt to guide my characters from one location to another, I had come up with a weak solution (don’t worry, I paid for it), instead of choosing the most obvious option, though not necessarily the one the MC wanted to take. It was there in front of me the whole time, and all I did was run away from it! DOH!

But I did mention of ripple effects, yes? And that is none other than the big bad guy’s presence. He is no longer needed. He no longer serves as a bridge to take the MC from location A to location B, he no longer deceives the MC of his role. Now all he has to do is just be at location B and be the bad guy, who has his reasons for being the bad guy (if he didn’t, he’d be a very flat character, and we don’t want that, do we?).

So the question I’ve been trying to answer is whether or not I should delete him altogether and how am I going to change the rest of the story. Can the bad guy (who, as I said is NOT the main adversary) have a reason to exist in a story, where he’s introduced in the third act, with such a small role to play, yes or no? To remove him completely would probably mean I would have to change the entire story and plot, which means delete the whole thing. At least that’s what I think. For the past ten days I’ve been trying to come up with patches that would fill in the plot holes the deletion of that one minor plot arc created.

I won’t lie to you, I was on the verge of mental breakdown. I even thought about giving up completely. Add this to a series of rejections for some of my short stories that knocked on my door (or rather came through email) and I certainly did not want to see, and you can understand why I doubted my ability to write.  Even when I step back from the story I still can’t see how it will work in the long run. I don’t want to have a story full of plot holes.

Despite all this, I think (and I stress the word think) I managed to patch things up. The problem is I won’t know until I finish everything and give it to someone else more experienced than me to read it. If I had a kingdom, I’d shout “my kingdom for an affordable developmental editor!” Preferably one that offers free patience lessons along with the feedback. Alas, I don’t.

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 6 Comments

The art of writing, is editing

For the past few weeks I’ve been editing my novel and three short stories. Though in the past I’ve always edited my short stories, only now that the stakes are high enough do I see how important, I mean REALLY important, editing is. In my mind there’s no doubt about it: writing is all about editing.

My editing process is somewhat… strange. Perhaps it’s because English isn’t my native language. Perhaps it’s just because my first drafts are in worst shape than the ones the well-known writers produce (yeah, I know I shouldn’t compare myself with them, but I can’t help it. I want to be traditionally published and to make it happen, I feel I have to be better than them. This is what I meant earlier when I said “the stakes are high”).

The first thing I do, is to restructure each sentence and each paragraph. I’m never satisfied with the way I write my sentences, even after several edits (language barrier and related linguistic insecurities apply here).

Once that’s done, I activate my macros. Yes, I use macros for specific mistakes I know I make, and yes, they’re more than one. I have one for filter words (which somehow still seem to make their way to my drafts) and another one for useless words (like “very”, “that”, “just”, “even”, “There was”, “there was”, “there were”, “There were”, “actually”, “practically”, “literally”, “suddenly”, “really”, “again”, “Again”).

The third step deals with how I use the word “as” in a sentence. That’s a tricky one to deal with. I often use it in a sentence when I shouldn’t. The following example is from http://blog.janicehardy.com/2010/04/re-write-wednesday-dont-tell-me-why.html (Bob ran for the cabin as the zombie swung at his head.) In this example the AS implies that both actions happen at the same time. The problem is that’s not the case. The second part of the sentence is the reason why the first part happens. The zombie attacks Bob and because of that, Bob runs away. Using AS here is wrong (though “wrong” sounds so strange when it comes to a creative art like writing, no?). Still, I not only overuse that word, I flood my MS with it. Hence, the need for yet another macro to evaluate each occurrence of that word.

The last editing step (for the first round of edits, mind you) is the worst of all; my incomplete macro for adverbs. I consider it an incomplete macro for two reasons: 1. some adverbs don’t have the -ly ending (https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/adverbs-manner.htm), 2. That last step should include adjectives as well, but given the nature of the words (they don’t have a special ending), I can’t include them in a macro. Which means I have to go over the entire passage and highlight every single word that’s an adjective. Why is that bad? I’m a perfectionist when it comes to doing something that I love. What’s wrong with that, you ask? Humans make mistakes! I often miss them because I either fail to identify them (oh, language barrier, if only you had a face I could punch…) or because my brain has turned into mush and I fail to notice them.

Once these steps are done, and I’m ok-ish with the results (I tried using the word “satisfied” instead of “ok-ish”, but alas I couldn’t! Not even for this post!), then I turn to beta readers and critiquers (if such a word as critiquers exists). And then a new round of editing starts, which includes the above but also their suggestions. Grand total of edits? As I mentioned in a previous post, between 9-12 up to this point.

What happens after that to my MS? Well, then and only then can I say it’s no longer in its first draft status.
Is it ready, you ask? A few weeks ago I would have said yes. But these past few weeks I’ve been reading Self-Editing For Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King (http://www.bookdepository.com/Self-Editing-for-Fiction-Writers-Second-Edition-Renni-Browne/9780060545697  or if you prefer Amazon,  http://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421593167&sr=8-1&keywords=Self-Editing+For+Fiction+Writers

Now I cry every time I finish the steps I mentioned earlier, because I realise there’s SOOOO much more that I have missed.

I was about to send my cyberpunk short story out to a well-respected, VERY well-paying, professional magazine. Who was it that said that manuscripts are never perfect but simply abandoned, meaning the writer refuses to work on it any more and considers it ready for publication? Yeah, I’m not ready for that yet.

Back for another round of editing. Yay!

P.S. See how I knew I’d fail point #1 from this post? Will there ever be a time I won’t have to compare myself to those better than me?!