Re-writing Archives - Stacy Lyn Jensen

The Long Way: An argument for not taking shortcuts

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I think we’ve all come across a million videos about a shortcut for better bread, or a worksheet to help you outline in ten minutes. I was thinking about this last night, and it occurred to me that no one is arguing for the long way. So, I’m gonna do it. Here you go, an argument for not taking shortcuts.

When was the last time you read an inspirational sports story? Did it talk about the athlete–who has achieved so much in their life. That they decided to call it quits every day a couple of hours early; and how they didn’t show up sometimes? Or did it talk about their shortcuts? No, these stories are always about the amazing perseverance, grit, and endurance the athlete has to reach their amazing level of success.

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Author or Hobby Writer

The long way

When you think about your writing goals, are you the kind of person that is looking for a quick fix to put a bandage on a problem for the moment? Or, are you the type of person that is looking to master your craft? The difference in these two ideas is really the difference between the author or the hobby writer.

Mindset Differences: The long way

A person with an author mindset. When faced with setbacks on their writing journey; they will for solutions. For example, if they are mentally exhausted and cannot imagine writing to their 1000 word goal. They may decrease the goal for a time. So, instead of writing 1000, they are writing 200. This may not allow for fast progress. But it will be progress.

A hobby writer may decide to stop writing for a while, or maybe they’ll see if they can find some tips and tricks to help them. But since the writing is a hobby, it’s not that big of a deal if they decide to stop for a while.

Rejection differences

When facing negative feedback, or rejection, there is going to be a difference in mindset between the author and the hobby writer as well. When receiving negative feedback, and author will take some time to process and then look back at their work to see if the thing makes the piece stronger. It’s also possible, when faced with several pieces of feedback from different sources, they may sort through them to find the ones that work best with their overall goals.

A hobby writer may find feedback to be a difficult and painful process, they may feel personally attacked or ridiculed. It is not that an author doesn’t feel these feelings. It’s simply that the author can put them aside in order to make their work stronger. The same basic things happen with rejection. The author can take it as part of the process and then move onward. The hobby writer will have a hard time with rejection, and take it as a rejection of themselves as a person.

Finishing a Draft: The Long Way

Once the author has finished a rough draft, they will put it away, and then start the revision, re-writing process after some time has passed, and they have gained some distance from the work. A hobby writer, once they have finished a draft, they may be so excited to revise that they start right away, or they may want to start querying/submitting, or they may even self-publish right away.

Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone wants to use shortcuts/has used shortcuts. The difference between a hobby writer and an author is time, experience, and mindset. It is perfectly fine to be a hobby writer. It is perfectly fine to be an author or aspiring author. My point here is that the long way around is normally the best way to get to where you want to be.

There are no shortcuts for writing and reading. Is there a time when you couldn’t hit your writing goals? What did you set them at so that they felt attainable?

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Rewrite: Pancaking

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I recently finished a draft of my current work. I also changed computers and am not sure how to get my word processing program to work on my new one. Because I don’t want to worry too much about the draft I had. I knew it was full of problems.I’m going to be rewriting.

Awhile back, I went to a very small writer’s conference (I don’t know if it would really qualify) in my town. One of the classes there was about doing “pancake” drafts. Essentially, you do a full re-write with each draft.

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While I don’t want to re-write my project more than once. I will be completely writing the story over now.

Reasons for Doing a Pancake rewrite

I have a couple of reasons for wanting to rewrite the story instead of revise. They are:

One of my main characters is lacking motivation. In order to fix that, I need to change a bunch of stuff.
Sometimes, my characters are just talking, it’s a little boring. I think that I can make those parts more active.
My antagonist needs a better reason to act.
I’m thinking of pulling a POV character, and possibly changing the POV completely.

The idea of a pancake draft is you completely put away your previous draft. Meaning, you aren’t looking at the last draft. You aren’t checking on how things are working out from draft to draft. You are simply going to write again. The nice thing about doing it this way, is that you already wrote the story. You know how it goes; you are just ironing out the kinks.

I would suggest not using a pancake draft if you have a really nice draft that doesn’t have large problems that need fixing. I would also suggest doing it with caution, because writing an entire draft is a lot of work.

Finally, I decided to do a draft this way, not only because I wanted to try it out. But, because I feel like my work has some good things. It has many problems and will benefit from a full rewrite. Let me know if you’ve ever done a pancake draft. If so, what did you think of it? Did you feel like your next draft was stronger?

Stacy Jensen

Stacy has a Bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in Human Resources Management from USU and is currently working on her masters in Learning Experience Design. When she’s not busy with school or her home life, she loves reading all things horror and sci-fi fantasy, and writing, writing, writing.

Rough Draft Completed, What’s Next?

You’ve done it, all blood, sweat and tears have coalesced into the story that is (mostly) completed and told. Now, you’re wondering what to do now? What are the next steps to take in order to make your story shine and become its best self. Below, I will discuss those next steps, what to do after completing a rough draft.

I have previously spoken about editing and rewriting. These are both important steps to take after you have finished your rough draft. However, today I’d like to talk about two other important steps to take after finishing a draft, these are letting it rest, and finding a beta (or even alpha) reader or readers.

Let it Rest

This step is only valid if you don’t have any deadlines. This works if you are a person who hasn’t yet been published, read: a person who hasn’t broken into the field by being traditionally published, or independently publishing your own work somewhere, meaning you don’t have anyone that is looking forward to your work. It sounds a lot simpler than it ends up being. The idea is to put your workaway for a while. My suggestion, work on something else. For me, there is always a new idea waiting in the wings. Take the time after you have finished your rough draft, but before you pull it out again, to start outlining a new project.

Edit and Rewrite

Of course, the middle step is to edit and rewrite until you can’t stand to look at it anymore. Since I’ve already talked about these steps before, I am not going to into a ton of detail here.

Alpha and Beta-readers

After you have taken the story to the point where you can’t get it any more polished. It’s time to bring on outside readers. Alpha readers are people that you trust to look over your story and give you advice while you are in the rough draft stage. So, these are people who understand that the story is either incomplete or barely complete, and will forgive typos and plot holes. They are the people that you can go to who will get excited about the story’s potential, and who will help you make it better in the beginning stages.

Beta readers are the next phase, they are the people who will help you take the story to a level you could not take it to on your own. These are people who will be able to catch the things that you are unable to catch yourself, simply because you are too close to the story.

A word on both of these types of readers, DO NOT ASK FAMILY to do this. ASK FRIENDS with caution. You do not want to have people looking at your work who are close to you, personally. You want an outside eye. Not only that, but you want the type of reader who knows your genre, not a reader who thinks it’s great that you finished the novel. It is not helpful to have mom, whose so impressed by you, read it and tell you it’s lovely. That gets you exactly nowhere. You need a person who can tell you if they see the twist coming a mile away, or a person who can tell you when the story is boring; those kinds of things are helpful.

Thank you for reading! Let me know if you would like articles about different types of things, or more of this.

Showing Versus Telling in Writing

One of the first pieces of advice I came across when I decided to look at writing craft was the ever popular: show, don’t tell. It took me time to piece this advice together. Now I understand exactly what it means and why it keeps being repeated. Here is my take on showing versus telling in writing.

Showing Versus Telling in Writing

When to show, and what does it mean.

Showing is kind of a strange way to put it, when it comes to writing, since everything is written. It’s not as though the writer can somehow make a movie pop out of the book and allow the reader to view something. Showing is simply the act of allowing the reader to visualize what is happening, as opposed to summing it up or “telling” the reader (for lack of a better term) what you want them to know or feel.

Showing versus telling in writing Example(s)

An example of this: The grass was green and warm, the sun shone brightly that day. We sat on the damp ground, unaware that our pants were wet. We picked daisies, the heavy perfume of spring intoxicated our minds, and we drank it in, laughing, finally, our fingers touched, and it was as though sunlight shone from our very souls.

Showing allows the reader to get right into the action, or the emotional center of the story that you are trying to tell. This is a great method during those moments where you have an action scene, or you have a heavy emotional moment, and you want to make sure that your readers are right there with your characters their entire time.

What is Telling, and what does it mean

As you can imagine, telling is the opposite of showing. When you are in telling mode, you are summarizing events, or possibly talking about a person and just letting your readers know what they are like instead of showing actions that they are doing or have done. This is useful for moments when you need to sum up events that happened, or when you have a character that you need to quickly introduce. Also, telling is something that can help you get through parts that aren’t as eventful, but that have a moment you would like to get to.

Showing versus telling in writing, Photo By Mikhail Nilov — Photo by Mikhail Nilov

Showing versus Telling in Writing Example(s)

For example: The old woman was kind. It was apparent in her gray eyes.

Another example: I stopped listening to her yammer on, I’d heard the story so many times, yeah, she’d been through so much, we all knew about it.

In the first example, we are telling our readers that a person is kind, but we don’t have anything to “show.” In the second example, the POV character isn’t listening to the other character, and isn’t what you would call “in-the-moment.” In the second example, you could imagine that there would have been showing before, and showing to come after. But that little piece is telling.

Conclusion

Both showing and telling are important pieces of writing to use. Especially when it comes to storytelling. They say to show as much as you can, but there will be moments where it makes more sense to tell.

It doesn’t make sense to show dialogue for the openings and closings of conversations, you can just tell those parts. It doesn’t make sense to show the parts of the story that aren’t interesting, or don’t develop the character. I am saying that it’s important to be intentional on which scenes you choose to show and which are more tell. Understand the balance. Make it work so that the story flows well.

Editing: Rewriting

There are different kinds of editing. It’s safe to say that a writer will end up going through several different editing passes, and types when writing almost anything. Right now, I’m going to discuss one type of editing: rewriting.

Rewriting is something that I’ve done a lot of. Typically, when I wrote a paper, I would then look it over, and usually rewrite around 75%. I usually say that I write “into” my first draft. That I figure out what I’m trying to say after I’ve already started.

Editing:Rewriting Photo by Suzy Hazelwood

When you are going into your first edit, it is important to decide what kind of edit you are doing. If you need to do editing: rewriting, there are a few ways to tell right off the bat:

Did your point of view shift?
Has your protagonist changed?
Did you start with one idea and now you are working with a different one?

If the answers to any of these questions is yes, then you will be well-suited to go into the editing:rewriting mode, instead of a revision, or another type of edit that we’ll discuss later (read: line edit, proofread, or even beta read).

How do you go about a rewrite?

The first thing is to determine what you want to keep.
Then, take the things you are getting rid of (unless you are doing a complete overhaul, then just open a new document) and place those in their own document, so nothing is lost.
Go to where the story last made sense, and then you can start outlining from there, or you can just start your rewrite. Depending on what kind of writer you are.

The process can vary. There is a process for rewriting called pancake drafting. This involves making several drafts one after another. You don’t read any draft, and you just keep going until you feel you have it right. I haven’t ever done this, but I have started from scratch with only the story in my head.

Pancake “draft” Photo by Olenka Sergienko

At the end of the day, when it comes to editing: rewriting, there are many ways to go about it. The most important part is to identify that it’s necessary. Then, it’s up to the writer to figure out what works for them.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know if you want to know more about the pancake draft, or anything else! Thanks!