Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Update

I got most of the beta’s feedback and I’m currently into heavy editing mode. I mean I was in heavy editing mode ever since I finished drafting it and decided to re-write The Darkening (twice, mind you), but now I’m really into HEAVY editing mode. I feel like this, this new round of edits is the real deal, the “make me or break me,” kind of thing. This is when I will actually WRITE the book. After all, writing is editing. And while I should be more than excited, not only for getting constructive feedback (every one of my betas pointed out things I had missed completely and they all reached to the same conclusions), but for finally being a few steps away from the final stretch (of this round, of course), alas I lack the motivation to do it. It’s as if I flipped a switch at some point in my head and I considered the work done and done, even though I consciously reminded myself time and again that it was only the beginning. The funny thing is that I’m at the point where I have to read the whole book and do only yet very important two things: reduce the excessive explanations (aka overwriting) and tame some of the descriptions. Once I hurdle over these two things, it’s the minor, though even more important, details I have to fine tune. I already managed to condense the first 7 chapters into 4, and I reduced the total word count by 6K+ words (and every writer knows how hard it is to have to murder our darlings). And I did it with no problem or hesitation, only to find myself unmotivated to cut back on the unnecessary fluff. The fluff! Sometimes I really hate the way my mind behaves. I’m telling you, if I hadn’t developed a daily writing/editing routine by now, I would have abandoned and shelved the Darkening (shame on you, Chris, for even thinking about it!).

No, I can’t do that. It’s my baby, my firstborn. I want to see it reach perfection 🙂

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Status update

Very little is going on at the moment. Heat is picking up and without A/C, I will soon be forced to edit my manuscript on my phone.
I’m a stressful person, and I can’t help but feel that even the smallest delay from my part will be a near-apocalyptic event in the long run. I’ve already been working on The Darkening for a little over a year (gosh, has it been that long? Time does fly, huh?) and I want to hold an edited version in my hands as soon as possible before someone outside myself sees it. Of course that doesn’t mean said edited version will be the final product. Far from it. But I also have two wonderful people waiting to beta for me (once again, thank you both!) and I really really REALLY want to hear their comments, particularly the negative ones, which are vital for my improvement. It will be a milestone of sorts, an indication I’ve actually produced something tangible, and the entire endeavour has moved forward. It will boost my morale. Working at the same novel for so long has made me feel like I’m in a stalemate. Thank God I don’t work on one solid 300 page long MS, but on separate scenes/chapters, each in their own individual folder. That way I get to see every week how much I have progressed. If not for that, I would have been overwhelmed.

OK, enough ranting and raving. Time for me to get back to work.

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

Worldbuilding

When the idea behind The Darkening formed and I visualised the story’s details, I thought it would be best to spend as much time on world building as possible. The basic rules of my post-apocalyptic world took shape at that stage, as well as the time frame for the main event. But a lot of the world and the problems it would create took shape as I started writing the story.

My main character lives away from the city, in an abandoned farm house, in its basement. If one could walk in broad daylight (not that it can happen, given the peculiarity of the world) and stood at the top of the house, a nearby city’s skyscrapers are the first thing that would catch the eye. I knew that from the start. I had a clear picture in my head about its appearance. All that remained in my head and none of it appears in the story. I had stories for a few of the residents as well. All these remain in my head and notes. Background story about the world.

Another thing I knew from the very start was that John would have only one prolonged memory, a tormenting one, and it would be of his family in another place. There was no reason to have him in a different place than the one he lives during the events of the novel, other than it just made sense, so I went along with my gut feeling, and I haven’t regretted it since.

However, John’s (my main character’s name) proximity to the city was a last minute addition as I wrote the first draft. I hadn’t thought about it at first, but then a question popped into my mind: what drove him there? If he survived, why leave his house, which had a basement, therefore shelter, to risk going somewhere else? Keep in mind that John has no memory of his past, aside from that one memory. He doesn’t know how he ended up there.

But I somehow had to come up with an answer, so I wouldn’t have readers going: “Hang on! If he had a basement in his home in the city, why is he now in another place?!” I’m doing my best to avoid questions like these, and that’s one of the things my brave beta readers will assist me with. Anyway, this led me to come up with a problem, in order the current state of my main character to appear as the solution to it. Kind of like reverse engineering. And the problem was, lack of food. Deprive a living being of either one of sustenance, water or safety and the environment becomes hostile for that organism. At least that’s what he has surmised so far. Ask yourselves this: should a catastrophic event was to take place, and pockets of survivors endured in the big cities, where would they get food from? Raiding half-demolished supermarkets is one thing, but how long would that last them? What would they do afterwards?

Based on that, I now have an even clearer picture of what the world looks after The Darkening. It no longer revolved around my main character and what happened to him, but at the back of my mind I have the idea of what is happening at the same time in that nearby city, and the rest of the world.

What do you think? What is the mental picture you get when someone tells you “post-apocalyptic world?” Do you think of a nuclear wasteland stretching for miles in every direction? Do you see a lash jungle with no humans because of a lethal toxin or a virus? Or perhaps a pockmarked planet from a meteor shower? What do you think the problems each event would create to the survivors, if any? WIll it be sustenance related or not? Let your imagination run wild and comment below of how you imagine something like that. Don’t be afraid to try a different approach. You might be surprised by the outcome and end up with killer shadows 😉

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?!