Resources for Revision
To follow up on my series on novel revision, here are a few other great resources.
Doug Eboch, Sweet Home Alabama writer, has lots of great posts on his screenwriting blog and many of the techniques he covers apply to novels as well. Spend some time exploring and you'll find lots of gems. In terms of revision, I especially like this one on how to make romantic scenes (or any quiet scene where characters are getting along) tense. Check out his posts on structure as well. (You can view every post by clicking on the first link here, and then scrolling through the list of topics down in the right-hand column.)
Writers Digest has an online article on 4 Techniques to Fire Up Your Fiction. It includes prompts from literary agent Donald Maass on how to dig deeper into your scenes and pump up the intensity.
Cheryl B. Klein, senior editor at the Arthur A. Levine imprint of Scholastic, is known for giving great writing workshops. She's now collected many of her talks together in Second Sight: An Editor's Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults. She discusses both picture books and novels, with in-depth analyses of the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games, and a couple of humorous novels by Lisa Yee. It's like looking over her shoulder while she works! Along with advice on everything from opening lines to finding the emotional heart of your story, she addresses the business side of publishing by sharing an example of The Annotated Query Letter from Hell and an Annotated Query Letter That Does It Right.
Because these essays started with different talks Klein gave, the material is sometimes repetitive. That becomes interesting in itself, however, showing how ideas can develop and become refined over time, an example of editing. It's worth taking your time over each essay, letting it sink in and trying some of her techniques. This is one of the few writing books that seems to target intermediate and advanced writers far more than beginners. You'll return to this one again and again.
I'm also planning to pull together many of my own articles on writing into a low-cost e-book. Hopefully I'll have news on that within a couple of months! We'll have a first pages critique coming up soon as well. I have an idea in mind to give more critiques if more people submit their work, so make sure your friends know about this blog.
Happy editing.
Chris
Doug Eboch, Sweet Home Alabama writer, has lots of great posts on his screenwriting blog and many of the techniques he covers apply to novels as well. Spend some time exploring and you'll find lots of gems. In terms of revision, I especially like this one on how to make romantic scenes (or any quiet scene where characters are getting along) tense. Check out his posts on structure as well. (You can view every post by clicking on the first link here, and then scrolling through the list of topics down in the right-hand column.)
Writers Digest has an online article on 4 Techniques to Fire Up Your Fiction. It includes prompts from literary agent Donald Maass on how to dig deeper into your scenes and pump up the intensity.
Cheryl B. Klein, senior editor at the Arthur A. Levine imprint of Scholastic, is known for giving great writing workshops. She's now collected many of her talks together in Second Sight: An Editor's Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults. She discusses both picture books and novels, with in-depth analyses of the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games, and a couple of humorous novels by Lisa Yee. It's like looking over her shoulder while she works! Along with advice on everything from opening lines to finding the emotional heart of your story, she addresses the business side of publishing by sharing an example of The Annotated Query Letter from Hell and an Annotated Query Letter That Does It Right.
Because these essays started with different talks Klein gave, the material is sometimes repetitive. That becomes interesting in itself, however, showing how ideas can develop and become refined over time, an example of editing. It's worth taking your time over each essay, letting it sink in and trying some of her techniques. This is one of the few writing books that seems to target intermediate and advanced writers far more than beginners. You'll return to this one again and again.
I'm also planning to pull together many of my own articles on writing into a low-cost e-book. Hopefully I'll have news on that within a couple of months! We'll have a first pages critique coming up soon as well. I have an idea in mind to give more critiques if more people submit their work, so make sure your friends know about this blog.
Happy editing.
Chris
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