Lesa Howard's Blog - Posts Tagged "rewriting"

Phantom's Dance has been on blog tour with Xpresso Book Tours this week. And once I got past the jitters of the first few days, what some of the bloggers were saying about reworking/rewriting a classic started to sink in. So I thought I'd jot down some of the things that led to my interpretation of the Phantom

I was first a fan of the many movie versions, including the wonderfully cheesey 70s adaptation Phantom of the Paradise, and then the novel. And, of course, there's Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera the movie and the play. Then at some point, I read Alex Flinn's Beastly and absolutely loved what she did with her rendition of the Beauty and the Beast and became inspired. This niggle started in the back of my mind, a desire to write a YA Phantom. I ignored that little niggle for a while though, not sure how it could be done. But my imagination being what it is (impossible to turn off or ignore) I eventually decided to go for it. I had no idea just what a ride it was going to be, though.

To start with, Phantom's Dance, as it is now, bears little resemblance to what I first envisioned. Originally, my Erik was going to be a young homeless man, living in the tunnels beneath the streets of Houston. His face was damaged in a gang fight, and he wore an over-sized hoodie, keeping it pulled low to cover the scars. I wanted him to be a hip-ho dancer who would bring Christine, a ballerina who'd lost her way in her craft, into the world of hip-hop. That was how I saw it in the planning stages, and some of that made it into the first draft. But as sometimes happens, when I started writing and the characters emerged, especially Christine and the choice to tell her story form the first person point-of-view, I found there were a lot of things I'd need to change about my original plan. Consequently, Erik became an entirely different character than I'd anticipated. Truthfully, the entire book became something I hadn't really anticipated.

So that's a part of how Phantom's Dance came about. And as the last day of the book blog tour approaches, I'm breathing a great sigh of relief because overall, avid fans seem okay with the changes I made to their beloved Phantom. Phew!

THINGS WRITERS DO
(The Short List)

Write
Research project(s)
Practice writing (yes, this is different than writing)
Read about other writers
Follow other authors' blogs
Follow publishers' blogs
Tweet, post, and blog about writing
Submit, submit, and submit manuscripts
Cry alone in the shower after rejection from publisher you just knew was THE ONE
Research agents, because the publisher you want doesn't take unsolicited manuscripts or is closed to submissions unless via an agent
Cry in the shower because agent rejected manuscript
Read—even the books that you know you could have written better
Attend writing conference to polish writing
Attend online webinars to polish writing
Write
Send query letters
Upgrade computer and writing software
Learn how to use that new software
Listen to dialogue in the grocery store, doctor's office, church, etc.
Filter through the copious amounts of craft/writing information out there to find what suits your style or voice
Cry in the shower because you can't figure out what your style or voice is
Enter writing contests
Never hear a single word on your status in the writing contest
Bite off nails before opening that email from the publisher reading your thousandth rewrite of that stellar manuscript
Write
And, yeah, this is the short list