Jade Young was kind enough to invite me to write a guest post on her blog, The Educated Writer. Hop on over to her site to check it out and read my post on “10 Ways to Meet Your Daily Word Count for NaNoWriMo.”
Please join me in welcoming guest blogger Janell E. Robisch to The Educated Writer! So, you’ve decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. You’ve committed to writing 50,000 words in thirty days. If writing every day is new to you, you may quickly find yourself overwhelmed.
National Novel Writing Month, known among the in crowd as NaNoWriMo or just NaNo, starts November 1. Does writing a whole book (a.k.a. 50,000 words!) in thirty days sound tempting? Does it intrigue you?
Maybe instead it overwhelms you. You like the idea of completing a book that fast but are not sure how you can get everything else done and write 1667 words a day (1667 × 30 = 50,010 words).
Fortunately, although you need to write each of those fifty thousand words in November to officially win NaNoWriMo, there are plenty of things you can do now to get ready.
1. Sign Up
Go to nanowrimo.org and create your account. Then, create your novel (oh, if it were only that easy!). Fill in your title, synopsis, and genre and add a nice cover. This makes your project real, and you can jump right in on November 1 with actual words!
FYI: You can make a quick, free cover for NaNoWriMo with Canva or Adobe Spark.
2. Find Some Writing Buddies
Your tribe is everything! Accountability is everything!
Fortunately, finding your NaNoWriMo tribe is just a few clicks away.
Ask your writing friends if they are doing NaNoWriMo. You’ll be surprised at how many of them have been doing it under your nose for years! Poll your followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Get these authors’ NaNoWriMo usernames and use the search bar on your NaNoWriMo dashboard to find their pages. Then, simply click Add as Buddy. Don’t forget to ask them to add you as well. You might even find local groups to meet with in person for NaNoWriMo write-ins.
The NaNoWriMo website also has community forums—a built-in tribe—and there are also plenty of NaNoWriMo groups you can join on Facebook and thousands of people tweeting about NaNoWriMo. Try searching the hashtags #NaNoWriMo2017, #nanoprep, #preptober, or simply #NaNoWriMo.
3. Write an Outline and/or Pick a Story Structure
Preparation can make or break an author during NaNoWriMo. Sure, you’re high on excitement for the first week with a new book, new characters, and so many possibilities.
Then, week 2 comes, and you’re stuck in the murky, muddy middle. This is when your preparation comes into play and keeps you going.
Your outline can be as basic or as complicated as you want, but if you have a roadmap, signs telling you at each stage where you’re going next, your chances of giving up midmonth because you’ve run out of ideas decrease dramatically!
If you’re not a big outliner, I’ll let you in on a little secret. On October 31 of last year, I decided to do NaNoWriMo for the first time. No time to outline a whole novel, right?
My solution? I picked out a well-known story structure, the hero’s journey. It covered each of the steps I would need to get my hero from her ordinary world, through her journey, and back home again.
There are other possibilities out there, including Freytag’s pyramid,save the cat,three-act story structure, and more. Be as detailed or as skeletal as you want, but sketch out enough landmarks to get you through to the end.
4. Set Up Your Book File
Once you’ve got an outline or story structure, open up Scrivener, Word, or your favorite word processor. Then, go ahead and enter your chapter or scene titles.
With the hero’s journey last year, I entered different scenes into Scrivener, such as “Call to Adventure” and “Refusal of the Call.”
Every day, when you sit down to write, your map and landmarks will already be there on the page, waiting to guide you.
As an added bonus, this makes it much easier to write out of order if that is how you roll. Write your ending first? Stuck in Act 2? Got a perfect idea for a foil at the beginning of Act 3? No problem. Skip ahead or go back. The map is still there, so you can fill in the rest later.
5. Build Your Characters
Use your favorite method to create some sheets or profiles for your main and secondary characters. Nail down their backgrounds and, most essentially, their motivations.
What do they want and what are they willing to do to get it? If you know the answer to this question, it will help you every time you get stuck wondering what happens next.
6. Build Your World
Don’t wait to name your characters, establish your settings, and draw your fantasy maps. Do it now, before NaNoWriMo. Again, the bigger the foundation you have in place under the water, the easier it will be to finish the tip of that iceberg.
7. Do Your Research
In the same vein, once you have an outline or structure in place and have ideas for your settings and characters, you’ll know what information you’re missing. So, do your research now and take notes instead of getting stuck down a research rabbit hole and falling behind on your word count in November.
Preparing for NaNoWriMo will make it easier for you to get those words in every day.
Do you prepare for NaNoWriMo or just jump in head first on November 1? If you plan, what are some of your favorite steps? Tell me in the comments! I’d love to hear about them.
Welcome to the first episode of Ask the Editor, a feature where I—the editor, of course—answer your questions on writing, editing, and self-publishing. I’ll be doing this via YouTube but will be posting all of the videos here on the Wordy Speculations blog as well.
Our First Question: What Kind of Editor Do I Need?
Do you ever get confused about all of the different kinds of fiction editing that are available? Do you wonder where in your process you need each kind, if at all? I answer those questions and more in this episode. Enjoy!
Have an Ask the Editor Question?
You can send me your questions and comments in several ways.
Episode Transcript [a.k.a. Not Grammatically Correct. I think I need a Speech Editor. ☺]
Hey, writers! My name is Janell, and welcome to Ask the Editor!
I am a fiction editor, and I am here to answer your questions about writing, editing and self-publishing.
Today, we’re going to start out with a very common question among writers and that is: What kind of editor do I need? Everybody tells me I have to get an editor, but what do they mean? I see a billion names out there for editors, so I don’t know where to start.
And did you know that edit is a very hard word to say? Especially editor and editing.
Anyway, let’s get to the point. There are three main types of fiction editor you’re going to be looking for.
The first one is a developmental or structural editor, and they all have a second name, so just forgive me. Sometimes a third name because one of the issues in editing is that a lot of times people can’t decide which name should be which.
So bear with me, and when you’re looking for an editor, always check their web page or even send them an email or a message through their Facebook page and say “What does your developmental editing include?” That way, you’re always clear, and you don’t get back something you didn’t expect.
So, we have developmental editing, we have line or copy editing, and we have proofreading, so let’s get into each one of those.
#1: Developmental or structural editing. This is story editing. It’s big picture editing. It’s saying, does my story work, are my characters flat, is the ending believable or does it feel contrived? And what can I do about it? “My timing is all off.” “My readers hate my flashbacks.”
So those are the kind of questions that a developmental or structural editor will approach, and they will give you suggestions. They should give you resources. They cover pacing, chronology, characterization, plotting, all of those things, theme, if those are the problems in in your book or your short story. (Editors edit short stories too.) If those are your problems, then you need a developmental editor.
So the second kind of editor is what most people think of when they think of editing, and they think, “It’s the grammar police!” They’re talking about copy editing. Line editing is often wrapped in with copy editing, and it’s sort of a more deep sort of copy editing, but I’ll get into that.
So, copy editing is grammar, punctuation, style, things like that. A lot of people use the Chicago Manual of style as their guide because they give you answers to questions like “Should I capitalize captain here?” and they’ll say, yes, capitalize captain if it’s in front of a name like “Captain Murphy” but not when it’s all by itself. So that’s copy editing.
Now line editing is a little deeper because it includes fixing sentences, not because there’s something
technically wrong but because they sound better, so fixing flow. [Making sure that every] like maybe this sentence would go better at the top of this paragraph than in the middle.
So those are things that a line editor would cover.
And lot of editors, including myself, usually do them together because it just works, you know. But you should definitely ask your editor, so you know if you just want copy editing: you only want the very—you like your sentences just the way they are, that you don’t care what they think about your flow—and you just want to make sure that you don’t have typos or actual errors in there.
Okay, so not to get too deep into that, but the third kind of editing (3) is proofreading. Proofreading is probably the most misunderstood type of editing. This is a good way to remember: proofreading actually means reading the proof, and the proof is your formatted book. It is formatted for ebook, or it is formatted for print, and it is almost ready to go. You know, you have a cover ready and everything.
So proofreading is reading that proof to check for last-minute errors like, you know, maybe the copy editor missed something. It does happen. Because your copy editor can make twenty thousand, a hundred thousand changes to your manuscript because we’re talking about commas and spaces and all kinds of things, but they might miss one, or maybe [errors were introduced] when you were putting corrections in from the editor because you should always have a choice whether you accept a change or not.
That’s why I always use track changes. So maybe you’re putting in those changes, and you make another mistake. It happens to the best of us, so proofreading catches those kind of things. They should be last-minute light edits.
So, if you ask somebody, if you finish your first draft, you haven’t done any revisions, you never sent it to a beta reader or anything, and then you send it to somebody, and say “I need a proofread.” And they’re thinking of what I was just talking about, but you’re thinking of actual copy editing or even story editing, then you’re probably gonna get it back with a note about “Excuse me, but you really need a copy editor, not a proofreader.” That’s what they mean. Yeah, it’ll catch little things like, you know, typos.
So, those are the three types of editing you’re most going to commonly see for fiction books or short stories and even memoirs. They pretty much cover creative nonfiction as well. So there’s developmental and structural editing, line or copy editing, and proofreading.
So, I hope that helps you to clarify what the stages are. Often, people will have all three; sometimes they’ll just have one. Sometimes, they feel like most of the edits were caught during copy editing. They can’t afford another stage, or you know. Sometimes people have all three. Some people just have one. It’s up to you, really, and where you want your story to go.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video and to find out more about me please see the links in the description. And also you can find out more about my own book because you know, we all have one. We’re writers; that’s why we’re here, right?
But my nonfiction book is Saving Money on Editing & Choosing the Best Editor. It’s actually one of my nonfiction books, but the other one does not apply to writing, so this book will help you clean up your manuscript, just make it a better manuscript before you send it to the editor. Because we all want our books to be the best they can but also how to find an editor without getting scammed because, in the age of the internet, you know, [we’re] there’s a lot of people out there hanging up their shingle and saying “I’m an editor,” which means/translates into “I got an A in English,” which, you know, does not mean that they’ve been working for publishers and authors for 20 years or something like that. You really need to find out who your editor is, and this book is a great guide for that.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email or hit my contact page or send me a question on Twitter or Facebook. I will leave all those links below. Thanks for watching! Bye-bye.
Romancing the Beat is a concise book on story structure for the romance novel by author and editor Gwen Hayes, who herself confesses to loving “kissing books.”
As an editor, I read a lot about writing, so when I picked up Romancing the Beat, I sat down with paper and pen, ready to take notes. What I did not expect to find was a funny little book that made me laugh out loud while still actually learning something.
What I love about Hayes’s book is that she distills the elements of romantic story structure down to their very bones and gives the reader/writer specific advice for creating the plot of a romance novel in a book you can finish in one evening.
Romance novels, unlike most other genre novels, have a pretty specific formula.
Now, don’t shoot me for saying that, but it’s true, and maybe that’s why romance novels are so successful. Readers expect certain things to happen, and when they happen, they’re happy. Without those things, readers are unhappy. They will be quick to tell you that what you have written is not a romance novel and shouldn’t be marketed as such. For example, if your lovers are cheating, you haven’t written a romance novel. If your lovers don’t get their happily ever after or at least happy for now, you also haven’t written a romance novel.
Hayes doesn’t give you tips on crafting sentences. She doesn’t give you ideas for external plot lines. She doesn’t tell you how to create the perfect hero or heroine. She focuses on one element of the craft in one genre.
Romantic story structure is all this book covers, but it covers it extremely well.
Breaking It Down
Gwen Hayes breaks down romantic story structure into bite-sized chunks: four phases, each with five beats. I won’t tell you what they are—you’ll have to read the book for that—but she goes through each phase and beat in its own mini-chapter. Then, at the back of the book, she provides an entire outline with these beats from one of her own stories. To be honest, I flipped to the end first and read this outline.
Good, complete examples are often missing in writing books. You can call beats or moments in the story anything you want, but unless the reader knows what you’re talking about and can apply it to his or her own writing, it’s all sort of abstract, hard to pinpoint, and thus, useless.
After reading Romancing the Beat, I honestly feel I could sit down and use it write an outline within an hour or so for a romance novel that would fit reader expectations. And with Hayes’s approach, it would probably be a lot of fun.
In the meantime, this book is going to serve as an important resource any time I sit down to edit a romance novel, and I’ll have no compunctions about recommending it to my writer clients and friends.
Go read it yourself.
Please note: This post contains affiliate links. This means that I receive a small percentage of sales through these links but at no extra cost to you. My editing, design and consulting services are paid for by clients, but affiliate links help me to provide free blog content, videos, and writing and self-publishing resources for all of my readers.
