Ah, the Joy of Playing around with a Messy First Draft

I used to hate revising. In school I wrote papers the night before. Revising, in my mind, meant looking over the spelling before turning a paper in. In college when I took creative writing workshops, I still didn't understand revision. I'd write my stories in a burst (typically, the night before).

There'd be talk in class about what could be done to make a story better. "In the revision, you could try this," the professor would suggest. "Or you might think about this." I'd nod and take notes, but I never bothered to try any of those suggestions. To me, the story was done. I was bored with it and ready to move on. Maybe I'd apply what I learned to the next story I had to write.

I didn't truly understand revision until I heard a talk about it at a writer's conference. The speaker, a guy named Andy Gutelle, pointed out that many beginning writers struggle with revision. They have their finished draft in front of them, and they start from page one and edit along, tightening up passages or cutting a few things, fixing punctuation and typos. But this isn't really revision, he said.

Revision begins by looking at the entire novel at once. It asks big questions like:

What is this story about?
Who is your main character and what does she want?
Do all of your scenes contribute to the arc of the story? Does each one develop your main character and/or move the plot along?

He suggested revising in layers. Read through the book asking the big questions and then read through it again, zeroing in at the scene level, and finally at the smaller sentence by sentence level.

I had never thought about revision in this way. I was used to writing short stories, where I could hold the entire picture of the narrative arc in my head at once. Scene, scene, scene. Character, conflict, realization.

I had never done that with a novel. It's too big! But it made sense. Writing a first draft is often an exercise in discovering what it is you are writing about in the first place. Your initial idea can change a little or a lot. Characters that seemed important disappear. New characters emerge. Strands and subplots fade away. Revelations plop in out of nowhere.

Starting from the beginning and zeroing in on grammar errors is not going to help you get your novel into shape. To do that, you have to see what you actually have on the page (as opposed to the initial vision of the book that you hold in your head).

It's not a pleasant experience to read your first draft through for the first time. The fear going into it is that it's going to be a horrible, unfixable mess. What ends up happening, I'm happy to tell you, is that it IS kind of a mess, but it is fixable.

If it makes you feel any better, other writers go through this too:

"All writing," says Jane Yolen, "is about the gap--no that chasm--between the expectation and final product. Expect it, sidestep it, move on."

How do you DO revision, though? How do you take a big thing like a novel and see it for what it is--all the characters and strands and scenes and meanderings?

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird describes printing out every page of a draft and spreading it all over her apartment.

Other writers write out their scenes on index cards.

(this is from YA author Nova Ren Suma--working on a draft at a writer's retreat)

They create elaborate maps.

(Check out Laurie Halse Anderson's revision road map. If you want to know more about Laurie's revision process, see her blog on her website Mad Woman in the Forest) 

They write on their walls.

(This is a wall in William Faulkner's house. Yes. Even Faulkner's novels did not spring from his head fully formed.)

Revising is like doing a puzzle. With your first draft complete, you've got most of the pieces out of the box and spread out on the table. You turn them over, examine what you have and think about how they might fit together. You chuck out the pieces that don't seem to belong to this puzzle. You assemble and realize which pieces are missing.

Uh oh. A character disappears? I'll rewrite the scenes at the beginning and take her out. A sub plot begins on page 100? Let's see if I can work that in earlier.

This can be fun or painstaking, angsty or exciting, depending on how you look at it. It takes time and work to put together a puzzle. Also, unfortunately, they don't come already assembled.

This is the truth about the work that is involved in writing a novel. It takes time. It takes logical thinking. It takes leaps of faith.

I heard David Wiesner speak at a conference this summer. He's an author/illustrator who's known for his award winning picture books Tuesday, Flostam, and Art & Max. He told us about his latest book, tracing the steps he went through from idea to development to revision. It was fascinating.

One day, he said, a very cool idea popped into his head. It was an image of a tiny spaceship landing in a child's sandbox. He immediately drew the picture and began to storyboard out the story arc. He showed us the sample and it seemed pretty good to me, but Wiesner said it wasn't right.

He drew the story out again, beginning with the spaceship in the sandbox. Still not right. And again. Again. He put the failed manuscript away. He wrote another book. He came back to it. Each time starting with the spaceship in the sandbox. That was the originating idea and he couldn't let it go. But for whatever reason, it just didn't work.

He quit on it again. He wrote other things. During a break he watched his cat not play with his toys. He wondered what a cat would do if he found a tiny spaceship. He drew out another story board. That story, after multiple revisions, became Mr. Wuffles. 

Check it out. It's clever and hilarious. It came to be because David Wiesner did not give up on his story. He let go of the original idea and took a leap of faith.

His parting words: Don't just think about an idea. Do the work.

PS. Anyone who would like my notes from Andy Gutelle's revision talk, email me at jodycasella (@) yahoo (.) com

Dispatches from LA: Random Notes, Inspiring Nuggets, and an Unexpected Brush with the Sharknado Set

Back from my whirlwind trip out to LA to attend the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators International Conference and I am still trying to decompress.

Short version of the trip: I laugh. I cry. I get sunburned. I gulp down coffee. I gape at famous writers and editors in elevators. I schmooze. I gush. I feel immense love for all writers and readers and everyone who has anything at all to do with putting stories out into the world.

Longer version:

Friday 

I am up at 4:15 a.m. The Starbucks at the hotel does not open until 5:30.

Many hours later my best writing friend Donna and I make our way into the auditorium. Fun fact: 1200 conferees are in attendance, representing 46 states and numerous foreign countries. Lin Oliver, one of the founders of SCBWI, kicks off the conference by telling us that we're all nut balls.

First of the many inspirational and thought-provoking speakers is Laurie Halse Anderson. I write in my notes: Laurie says, be brave. Embrace the sanctity of silliness. We are an antidote to the disappointing grown ups in the world.

Speaker number two, Jon Scieszka, orders us to be subversive and to support subversiveness in kids. Our books should not put kids to sleep, he says. Wake them up, for God's sake!

I go to a break out session on self publishing where I realize it's 4:00 Ohio time and all I have eaten so far are almonds that I've scrounged off the bottom of my purse.

Lunch: I eat a yicky, over-priced sandwich and have a cool conversation with a guy who is my son's age. He pitches me his book idea and I realize that I'm probably conversing with the next Rick Riordan.

Back in the auditorium for more sessions. I don't know if it's the jet lag mixed with the coffee and hunger pangs, but I cry during the next speaker's talk. Later, an editor gives a presentation on digital publishing and all I can focus on is her idea about doorbells. Apparently, the finger we use to press a doorbell indicates how old we are.

I use my index finger. Therefore, I am old.

A session on marketing and a kick ass session on world-building from 5 brilliant and cool YA authors: Veronica Rossi, Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Tahereh Mafi, and Ransom Riggs.

Night: Donna and I sneak mixed drinks into a wine and cheese party.

The evening ends with me looking like a total goofball. I am alone in an elevator with Arthur Levine and am so flummoxed I forget to press my floor button.

Saturday

I am up at 4:45! and first in line at Starbucks!

First inspirational talk that makes me cry of the day: Middle grade author Kirby Larson compares writing a book that gets overlooked to bringing a tofu casserole to a potluck.

The creative life can be hard and we should adopt a grandma--a mentor to help us navigate through the low points. The "grandmas" can be other books. She mentions the book of a writer I met at a previous conference, One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. I start crying. It just kills me to think about Lynda, this lady I sorta know, sitting at home wherever and not knowing that her book meant so much to Kirby Larson that Kirby Lawson is giving a shout out to it to 1200 people in LA.

Illustrator Mac Barnett is freaking awesome and hilarious and brilliant. Also, he makes most of the audience tear up over his true story about whales.

I go to a break out session where Printz Award winner John Corey Whaley and his editor Namrata Tripathi talk about the process behind the author/editor relationship. Takeaway: when you get the first detailed critique of your manuscript from your editor, give yourself a few days to rage and grieve before responding.

Presentation by Matt de la Pena where he asks us what our POV as writers is. He tells a story of a girl who knows what everyone wants to hear but doesn't know what she wants to say.

I go to Brodi Ashton's session on world building and take pages of notes. Best insightful nugget: The world must be in service to the story and not the other way around. She shares advice about prologues that makes me break out into a cold sweat:

1.Write a prologue with everything the reader needs to know about the world.
2. Write the book as if the reader has read the prologue.
3. Delete the prologue.

I meet my agent for the first time and we have a lovely chat down by the pool and the whole time I keep thinking: Hey! I am having a lovely chat with my agent down by the pool!!!

Sunday

I sleep in until 5:30. The Starbucks guy, Angel, knows me by name and order.

First panel is a group of high-powered agents. Lee Wind moderates and has the most tweetable bits of wisdom. There are other ways to define success besides money, he says. Like, the impact of a book on a single reader. Also, having your voice out there in the world.

David Wiesner gives us a glimpse into his creative process. His advice: always follow the story. Also, you can't just sit around and think about it. You have to do the work.

Lunch is a big lunch with everyone. Including Henry Winkler. Awards are given out and speeches are made, and I alternate between laughing and fighting back tears.

Richard Peck calls us to action. There are always survivors, he says, and we write their biographies.

The final speaker of the conference is Jarrett Krosockza. He cracks us up by reading a few of his bad reviews. His favorite: "Your book is clever and dumb," which Jarrett decides would be a good blurb for the back of the book.

On a more serious note, he reminds us that our stories can give kids an escape from an atrocious world.

That night I attend a party thrown by my agent in a cool bar on the 17th floor of some hotel. I look out at the smoggy LA skyline and I chat with other writers and artists and editors. I hold my wine glass and pass on scrumptious-looking hors d'oeuvres because I realize that it is impossible to drink wine and hold a plate and eat hors d'oeuvres at the same time. I have no idea where I am and I realize that I have no idea, in many ways, how I have made it to this cool bar on the 17th floor.

Monday

The conference is over but I've got an extra day to hang around. I write by the pool. I read. In the afternoon my brother, who lives in the area, picks me up and takes me down to the Santa Monica Pier.

He asks me how things are coming along with my book launch. I give him a rundown--the marketing, the signings planned, the party my neighbors are throwing--and the whole time I am thinking in the back of my head: I'm walking around Santa Monica Pier talking about a book I wrote--this dream I've had pretty much for my entire life--this dream that for years has been so clear, right down to the kind of pen I would use when I sign my books, is about to come true.

We eat dinner and look out at the ocean. I can't shake the hazy, jet-laggy, fish-out-of-water feeling that I have had the past few days. I've never been to the Santa Monica Pier but everything about the place feels familiar. The mountains, kind of Impressionistic-like in the distance. The beach. The Ferris wheel.

I've seen this place before, I tell my brother. I know it. And yet, I know that is impossible too. Until this trip, I have never even been to LA.

Maybe it's the set of a movie, my brother says.

It must be.

It's Not You. It's Me. (My Quest to Find a Book I Like)

Lately, I've had a rocky relationship with reading. For several months nearly every book I picked up was a big miss for me. I felt like I was on a string of bad blind dates (not that I've ever been a blind date. But I can imagine the feeling.) You hear about the person from a friend. Or maybe you meet him online. You have high hopes that you'll hit it off. You really really want to like him. And then you meet, and for whatever reason, you just don't click.

I am not a picky reader! I've read and enjoyed all kinds of books. Classics. Literary fiction. Lots of young adult stuff because I write YA books and I like to know what my fellow YA writers are writing. I also read non-fiction. Memoirs. Mysteries. Romances. Whatever. As long as there's a decent story at the core, I'll give it a chance. Confession: I read the Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy. I'm not particularly proud of this fact, but I'm telling you to prove that I have never been hard to please.

And yet, I was starting to reconsider everything I believed about myself as a reader. Books had become a struggle. I felt like I'd read them before. I knew where they were going. The characters didn't seem like real people. I didn't care what happened to them. The writing wasn't great or it was downright bad. I found myself revising passages in my head. Why did the author use the word "murmur" 13 times in the last five pages? Did she really need to include a particular scene? And why was there another teen boy love interest described as having "piercing green eyes"? Do I know ANY guys with piercing green eyes?

Book after book after book had me feeling the same thing: a flash of hope and then the inevitable letdown when it didn't live up to the potentially promising premise.

OMG, I thought. Was I losing my ability to enjoy a book? Had I read too many books over the course of my lifetime and therefore read every possible scenario? Or was this condition a result of my work as a writer? I know how books are put together now. I've seen the man behind the curtain. Questioning every authorial decision and editing paragraphs as you read, let me tell you, tends to pull a reader out of the story.

Or what if my problem was a change in my brain chemistry? My computer science-y son had shared a study with me about the impact of internet surfing on the human brain. Apparently, we're losing our ability to focus, to read larger chunks of material. It's all that jumping around we do from website to website. All that tweeting. I confided my fears to my husband and he laughed. "Your brain chemistry has changed in the last two months?" he said. Okay. Maybe that was a stretch.

All I knew was that I didn't like books anymore, that I couldn't seem to read without pausing after every other sentence. Maybe I needed to stop reading. Or at least take a break from it. Give my twitchy tweeting brain a rest.

And then I happened to pick up a book. This was one from my stack, a book I'd been meaning to read for months, the popular and critically acclaimed dystopian novel Divergent by Veronica Roth. I read it in one sitting on plane trip. Huh. It was good. From the very first page I was hooked. On the plane trip home I read another book, Ask the Passengers by A. S. King, which also turned out to be absorbing and thought provoking. At home I picked up other books. They were good too. More than good. I practically cried in relief. I hadn't lost my ability to read books. I had lost my ability to read bad ones.

It wasn't me. It was them.

Which sounds snotty, I know. So I'll say it a different way: It's not them. It's me. Apparently, I AM a picky reader. What I've realized the past few months is that some books do it for me, and some don't.

Here's a rundown of the ones that clicked:

Divergent, Veronica Roth. It's no accident that this book and the sequel Insurgent are on YA best seller lists. I've grown weary of dystopian lit, but this book reeled me back into the genre. Main character Tris has grown up in an orderly world where people are divided into groups based on the personality traits they value. There's an honest group, risk-takers, scholars, and Tris's group--which promotes selfless behavior. At sixteen you take a test and choose which faction you'd like to join. But what happens if you don't quite fit into any of these? Weeks later, I'm still thinking about the societal questions this novel raises.

Ask the Passengers, A. S. King. Still wrapping my mind around this one. Brilliant. Should've won an award this year. I don't know why it didn't.

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Carolyn Mackler. Not sure how I missed this one along the way. It won a Printz Honor in 2003. It features a self conscious and self deprecating teen girl's attempt to assert herself and figure out her place in a dysfunctional family. Funny and sad and ultimately inspiring.

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson. I love all of Anderson's realistic contemporary YA novels, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that I'd love this one too. I think I'd put it off because I knew it was about anorexia and it might be painful to read. It sort of was. But so beautifully written and heartbreaking and somehow hopeful too.

Try Not to Breathe, Jennifer R. Hubbard. Absorbing story about a teen boy dealing with the ramifications of a suicide attempt and his relationship with a cool quirky girl who's looking for her own answers.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn. I read this one for my book club and it was a total page turner. Told from two points of view. A man's wife goes missing and he's the main suspect. You get the feeling he's keeping secrets as he tells his side, but his wife has secrets too. The reader gets HER point of view from the pages of her diary. Brilliantly plotted with shocking twists and unlikeable characters that you somehow root for anyway.

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart by Deb Caletti. A spot-on description of toxic love. Ruby's mom struggles to let go of charming but irresponsible dad. Ruby struggles to let go of Travis, a charming rich boy who draws her into his reckless and dangerous world. All the characters are complex and realistic, including the dog, Poe, who has got to be one of the most adorably destructive dogs in YA fiction.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan. If you're having trouble, too, connecting with books, this might be the perfect antidote. It is a book with no words. It's shelved as a children's picture book or graphic novel, but it transcends any genre. It's the story of a man who leaves his family behind to start life in a new country, a country that sort of looks like America at the turn of the century. Except it's not. A few pages in, you will forget there are no words and fall under its spell.

Which--and I don't care how picky this makes me--is the only thing I ask for in a book.

Holiday Book Shopping for a Teen? Look no further:

I read a ton of YA books this year and in case anyone’s on the lookout for a good read for the 11 to 16 year old girl in your life, here are some of the best:
(note: most of these are not NEW books. I just happened to read them this year.)

In no particular order

1. Feed by M.T. Anderson. This is a must-read for a teen (or anyone) living in our consumeristic/plugged in society—the characters walk around with computers literally attached to their brains. Buy this for the teen boy in your life as well. Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. And contains one of the best first lines ever: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

2. Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han. The trend in teen fiction lately seems to be love triangles, as in, teen girl torn between two cute boys. In this book, they’re brothers—the funny, cool friend and the older, brooding guy—who is of course the one the girl longs for. Well-written and funny. There’s also a sequel.

3. Graceling by Kristin Cashore. I’m embarrassed to say why I picked this book up (okay. I’ll tell you. When my book(s) get published, they will be shelved beside Cashore's). Not too shabby placement, because this book is great. It’s fantasy (not usually what I’m drawn to) but so absorbing. Page turner. Great girl character. She’s got the gift of being able to kill people. And there’s a boy. Will she kill him? hmm. Read to find out.

4. Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Not too often do you get a well-written page turner. This one’s a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Part Surviver. Part Fahrenheit 451. Two boys and a girl. (again) Strong, resourceful main character figures out how to win a game that’s rigged against her. Everyone in my family read this book. Husband. Teen boy. Teen girl. None of us could put it down. (And there are two sequels that are just as riveting)

5. Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson. Main character is a cross country runner, perfect child, daughter of a minister, trying to run the household while obsessing over getting into MIT (where her mother went). Very cool contrast between her ordinary world and the "catalyst" that blows it all apart. Also want to put in a plug for Twisted and Prom by the same author. Anderson knows and understands teens better than pretty much any YA writer around.

6. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Starts with a kind of flaky 16 year old girl and then an asteroid hits the moon and all hell breaks loose. Very interesting how the family copes. This book will seriously make you consider stocking up on canned goods.

7. Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. The only zombie book on the list. Totally could not put this one down. My heart was pounding as I read it. Also has a love triangle. (told you this was a trend) Just so happens that one of the guys ends up turning into a zombie. Drat.

8. Thirteen Plus One by Lauren Myracle. This is the fourth book in a great middle grade series. Other books are Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen and all follow the life of the sweet main character and the ups and downs of her middle school years. If you have a middle school aged child, it’s a must-read for both of you. She’ll get a how-to guide to surviving, and you’ll have a nice flashback to your own middle school years.

9. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. I’ve already blogged about this book. Not sure how to categorize it. Fantasy. Post-apocalyptic war story. Love story. Brilliant writing. Won the Printz Award for best YA several years ago, deservedly so.

10. Fallen by Lauren Kate. Pure fun read for the Twilight-obsessed teen who’s sick of Twilight and needs another obsession. This time: fallen angels, another new trend. Bonus: it also includes a love triangle. Strange girl and the competing fallen angels who love her. I read this in one sitting and was relieved to learn there’s a sequel: Torment. (LOVE that title, by the way)

Happy Reading!