HTRYN Week 6 Finished

Alright, finally, I am done with this part!  It actually took me 2 weeks, and I worked almost all day yesterday,  but I now have detailed info on all the characters that appear in the book.  Even those little characters that just open a door for one of the main character. And, like, random people that the characters notice passing by in the street.  Well, OK, no, not that detailed. (I luckily don't have any such characters because otherwise I would have to make not of them).  Yup, I was going kind of crazy doing this part of the How to Revise Your Novel course.  But it's done now and I sure as **** hope that it comes in handy down the line, once the real part of the revision starts. (Note:  the first few weeks are just diagnosing the different elements of the manuscript/first draft and seeing it for what it is.)

Week 6, or Lesson 6 of the How to Revise Your Novel course is all about answering the following questions:

• Who is each character?
  
• Why is he/she in the book?
  
• Is he/she Main, Secondary, Stand-in, or Redundant?
  
• Should you keep them, make them work harder...or delete them? 
• How does he/she matter?
  
• How can you get readers to relate to them... the way you WANT them to?

And believe me, it is hard work! It also gets quite tedious after awhile.  But I also desperately needed this lesson.  My characters, especially my main character, are just all over the place, as in cold and unfeeling one minute, and seething with teenage giddiness the next (and I'm not writing YA, nor is my story set in a high school).  And many such similar problems.  So I desperately needed this lesson, but I think I might have over done it, or done it not quite the way I was supposed to.  But, be that as it may, I do now have a much clearer understanding as to the progression of each of the main characters in my novel.  And many ideas on how to make it work better in the story.

And now I am off to start Week 7. I'm still going through the instructions, but it already looks like a lot of work.  I am really looking forward to it, though! 

HTRYN Week 5 Finshed

I have not been updating is blog very much in the past couple of weeks, I know, but I have been editing. I finished Week 5 the previous Sunday and started Week 6 on Monday. but I have not gotten very far with it.  I really should spend the entire day today working on it, but I am not so sure that I will.  I tend to procrastinate in this way and I have had a headache for the past couple of days, not a bad one just an annoying one.

Anyway, Week 5 of the How to Revise Your Novel course is all about conflict.  I had to find all the major conflicts in my novel and decide whether they were deep enough, good enough, barely there, or non-existent.  I also had to focus on whether the conflicts were resolved and whether they even matter to the story.  And CONFLICT doesn't simply mean two people arguing either. And I did notice that I tend to understand conflict as two people arguing, or that's how I end up writing it, anyway. Though I do have the other type of conflict, the more subtle one of the "something standing in the way of what someone wants" kind. 

But my book is, in so many ways, a first draft and all that it entails.  I did not develop the main idea fully, I left a whole bunch of important things out and I will have to rewrite and add a lot.  But at least now I have this HTRYN blueprint on how to go about finding problems. In other words, I have an entire editing plan.

The way the HTRYN course is set up, is that it breaks up the novel into manageable parts based on each important element. in this way you are not faced with a daunting task of editing the entire novel all at once, since you get to focus on only small parts of it.  And eventually, by the end of the course everything gets put together.  I really can't recommend it enough!

HTRYN Week 4 Finished

I am officially done with Week 4 and have already started with Week 5, but that's a post for another day.  Week 3 of How to Revise Your Novel is all about identifying the Plot and various Subplot, as well as the possible NotPlots.  I tried my best, but am still having a bit of a problem wrapping my mind around how the concept of plot applies to my novel.  Could be just that I am not thinking hard enough about it though.  I also have a tendency of wrapping several subplots in with the main plot in most scenes.  But I must say that the theory that Holly Lisle teaches is helping me to slowly unravel and get to the heart of what the important elements of each scene, as well as the novel as a whole are.

The other problem that I am facing, as I go through the novel is that it is only part 1 or 2.  As such, there are a lot of things hinted at, but not followed through on.  I also think that this revision might entail writing the second part as well, and possibly combining the two into one.  But I'm still trying to not get ahead of myself. 

I also might have breezed through Week 3 a bit to hastily and as a result have not really completed that task as I should have.  But I'm not doing it over.  And I sincerely hope that it doesn't become a problem down the road.

Done With HTRYN Week 3

I'm about a week behind (on the How to Revise Your Novel-HTRYN course) but I breezed through the rest of Week 3 over the weekend and am ready to start Week 4.  From the instructions, it sounds like it's going to be FUN.  It deals with plots and subplots and how to differentiate them in order to make you story interesting, readable and frustrating for your readers, by eliminating pointless asides that have no bearing on the main storyline and how it is unfolding.

But my problem is that I am just not sure what my main plot is.  I also really do have two main protagonists and a storyline that I have not managed to really flesh out to its full potential.   But then again, this is the reason why I am pursuing this course, now isn't it?

So, as far as I can make out, the Plot is supposed to be the main storyline without which none of the rest of the story's elements can stand.  This is my working definition as I get going on Week 4 of HTRYN, and I do hope that I am understanding it right.

As for Week 3, I had to go over my entire manuscript and find and describe every single scene.  I also had a slight problem defining what a scene is, but settled on the theatre definition of something that happens in a specific setting, between one or more people.  That's how I write them too, so they're pretty well demarcated and I rarely have more than one important element in a single scene.   Though I perhaps do not have elements to drive the story forward in every one of them.  I also tend to go over the same things in several scenes with different people, which is an annoying habit that I think I have carried over from my academic writings (you know, the ones where you have to hit a certain word count). I am an expert at saying the same thing in at least five different ways, but it does get boring after awhile.

Anyway, this part of HTRYN is still all about the big picture, so for the time being I'm not going to worry about all the stuff that I know I will have to fix, but have no idea how to fix.