Creating Space

So I’m in the middle of revisions for my last completed MS and I had to not only rethink elements of the story but elements of how I’m creating the story. I needed a soft, welcoming place to put myself through the ringer again. And what with the timeliness of my favorite season’s arrival….

My side of our home office.

Revamping my office space! Pumpkin and book-scented candles, soft lighting, new chair, new atmosphere. I figured to change the work, you change the workspace.

It’s hard to think about changing something from the inside out, really. Revision has always been an unwieldy word for me because the scope of it can be so large. But I’m no stranger to it. We did it all the time back in MFA land, back when profs told you there was nothing to salvage but the characters’ names. (Ugh.) You get through it.

My agent gave me tons of extremely helpful line notes in the doc itself and also a long write-up. From there, I went into my notebook and wrote out in bullet points the main changes suggested, and then wrote a side of it that were the main changes I wanted to make. Then, I circled everything that needed to change for it to work.

The hard part about getting revision notes from anyone — whether they’re your agent, editor, critique buddy, prof — is that you’re not always going to agree. You, as the creator, have to examine why you don’t agree.

Is it because you really think it’s fine?

Is it because you’re being lazy?

Or is it pride?

And it’s a new ask every time you look at a problem. At some point, the revision verges, carving its own path. You can think of it a lot like building a person; the first time you built that person, when they rose from the workbench, and you told them to walk, they almost fell down because their legs weren’t strong enough to carry them — low muscle mass, or the heart isn’t pumping enough blood. In this case, for this MS, the limbs seem to all work, and the face is cute, but there’s a real problem in the heart.

The heart of the story changes a lot. If you go in and fiddle with the heart, you’re also fiddling with arteries and blood flow. So many new things pop up. The great part is this is more about building than tearing down, so it is in scope easier than if I had to, say, cut 20,000 words. (Always low-ball the first time around.)

I find myself playing Can You? daily, too, which tells me I’m going in the right direction. What also makes me smile is seeing the story get better in front of my very eyes. A second go-around gives you a chance to embolden characters and let them go off and do things they may have been too scared to do the first time, or you were too scared to let them do.

There’s a fine line — for the changes you know the story needs but may not actually be fun to do. The challenge then becomes: you need to make them fun to do. You’ve almost got to. If you aren’t having fun writing it, no one is having fun reading it. Slog for you is slog for everyone.

There are a few things I hold back on, because I know I’m right about them. It’s certainly possible I didn’t express them correctly, and it’s also my duty to say them more clearly. But when I heard those words the first time, I knew they were true by the way they felt.

Wish me luck! We are 100 pages in and counting.

100 Pages

There’s a couple milestones for me when I’m on a new project.

1. 50 pages - a testing of the waters. Does this idea suck giant monkey dick? Well, you’ll know it within fifty pages, trust me. Some things just won’t be able to be smoothed out or over and if things don’t work out, best to cut the losses. But if I do make it here and feel strongly or stronger, that’s a good sign to keep going. Around this spot is when the world of the story starts opening up, I can see my way forward and realize some things I did wrong in the beginning.

2. 100 pages - woo! A real save point if there is one. Now I’m really into it and trying desperately to keep momentum going. If I were to stop here, for any amount of time, it would probably go downhill like if I stopped rolling a boulder up a mountain and tried to take a breather. Just got to push.

Right now I’m on that second milestone. My new project is breathing steadily and I’m working everyday with a minimum word count of 2k. See, here’s the thing.

I was talking to a budding young writer yesterday and she asked me how I draft, as she was having trouble managing drafting one chap at a time. I don’t know how they do it elsewhere and, to be honest, I don’t care. Don’t edit chapter by chapter, you’ll be driven insane. It sounds like a lot of work.

As I told her, I write out the whole first draft, ugly bumps and plot holes and all and I really don’t care how bad it is. Everything comes out in the wash. The first big edit, I start from the top and smooth out plot holes, missing scenes, all the big stuff. When that’s done, the third paving is for texture and smaller faux pas. When I say how many times I tend to go over things, it sounds like a lot of work but it’s waaaay less work than attacking it piecemeal.

The best part about considering the manuscript in save points and drafts is that it’s like standing at the summit, surveying the mountain trail you just climbed. There’s a clarity about it. Next save point is at 150 pages. See you there.

Cover Letter Tips and Tricks!

Look. I’m gonna make this short and sweet. I’m currently on each side of the submission game: writer and editor, so I get that every time you send something out there’s this ITCH to tell the faceless noodnik on the other side of the screen that yes, this is the piece you’ve been waiting for, and no, you’ve never seen fiction/poetry/nonfiction like THIS before. Like, I get it. But submitting is like dating. Don’t put your heart in the game and fuck everyone you can, raw.

Here’s some rules of thumb from your friendly neighborhood pervert:

Don’ts:

• Don’t tell me your life story. Cute facts in your bio is one thing but I don’t need to know your 3rd grade teacher thought you were a Stephen King in the making.

• Unless the mag specifies to give a summary of the story, don’t give one. You’re gonna make the story sound boring.

• DON’T TELL ME YOUR AGE. Seriously, this will never go well for you! If you’re 15, I’m gonna be like, “Welp, this is gonna go great.” And if you say you’re 95, I’ll probably be looking out for slurs.

• Don’t brag about how you’ve edited your piece to perfection because WHEN I find a typo, hoo boy.

• Don’t say anything controversial in your cover letter. Come on, man, you have no idea who’s reading this, and if you paid money to submit, you’re wasting it by pissing people off. If you didn’t pay, I guess, then whatever.

• Don’t try and shame editors into publishing you because you’ve had a rough life. Seriously, what the fuck.

Dos:

• Open your cover letter with the editor’s name! It makes us pay attention at least a little more!

• Tell us your story’s word count, name, and if it’s out on submission with other places. This is standard but sometimes people just leave that out in lieu of telling us their cat’s name.

• KEEP IT BRIEF. I’m not gonna read a two page cover letter anyway so you’re wasting your air.

• ACTUALLY WRITE A COVER LETTER. Don’t just send shit with no preface, that’s rude!

• Include your website, previous publications, etc. Hell, couldn’t hurt, right? Unless you’ve linked to questionable porn. Plus, if you don’t plug yourself, no one else will.

• Include contact info!

For your pleasure, I’ve included a template that I’ve made and always use! I get rejections just like everyone else, but I also get acceptances, so it can’t be too awful, right?

Dear [editor],

My short story, [TITLE], is complete at [X] words for your consideration. I have most recently appeared in [PUBLICATIONS]. This is a simultaneous submission.

Thank you for your consideration.

Robyn Ritchie

robynritchie.com

[CONTACT INFO]

Nice and painless. Try out these tips!

Also, a short story of mine is forthcoming in Crack the Spine so be on the look out!

Christmas Oofs

I'm sleepy, goddammit! It's Christmas, goddammit!

So I haven’t been doing too much lately due to all this goddamn coziness. I don’t think I have winter depression yet, like I usually do. Maybe it’s waiting around the January corner after the holly and spice of the season has washed away and nothing is left but an endless tundra. Who knows. What I do know is that I do need to find SOME motivation for the following things:

• Sending out thank you cards.

• Editing my novel, which I have been doing but only in spurts.

• Cleaning out the fridge.

• Getting the house in order to leave for a week.

So I’m off for my honeymoon for a week in about… a week or so. You won’t hear from me much during that time, but I do hope to get one more crafty blog post out before then. On Insta, it was voted that I do one about sex scenes and I’m still trying to compile it in my head. It’s really such a VAST thing to talk about, filled with twists and turns, but what it comes right down to is: don’t be unsexy. That’s all. But of course I’ll EXPOUND. Anyway, more on that in the actual post.

Send me good wishes for the editing. More than anything, send me willpower.

Saying Goodbye to the First Draft

Picture it: Boston, 2016. There was a young female—in fact, 3 years younger than she is now. She was in the midst of an MFA in fiction writing at Emerson College and, like most arts-focused people, had very little to do outside of her chosen art and playing video games. There were definitely times in that young girl’s life where she had forsaken writing for the aloof hobby that it is, but when she was in the MFA she was all in. She wrote in that year alone about 300,000 words on various projects both for professors and in secret. She drank coffee and Red Bull all the time. She feared the oncoming of carpel tunnel.

Readers, that young girl was me. And one of those projects… just got edited.

So what do we talk about when we talk about editing? See, the thing is, this whale started at 95,000 words when I picked it up, dusted it off, and said, “You know, this can be something. Just because it was an idea formed by my younger self, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit.” (And if we’re being honest, a lot of my ideas were formed by my younger self — my sense of humor never grew up.)

I took the project on a long journey of hacking, tamping down, molding. Basically editing. It went from 95K to 80K throughout this journey and that son of a bitch is looking lean and sexy. I didn’t take out that much of the sex though, let’s be honest.

15K words of superfluousness. 15K words of didn’t need to be said. 15K words of what was I thinking.

Everyone likes to talk about killing your darlings like it’s such a big deal and, hell, it is, but only when Time has not tempered your love. Think about it, when you knock out a first draft, ratty as it may be, you see a newborn. A baby you made yourself without any pesky sperm getting in the way. Something your own. You’re not going to want to kill that.

But let’s do what my prof said once: Put it in the drawer for six months. If you’re on a time crunch, you could probably wait a bit less but you have to give yourself a substantial amount of time to love it less. That’s just the bottom line. Because when you pull it out again and read it through, like I did with my project from three years ago, you see that your child is a bit ugly.

Let’s talk about my child’s blemishes for a second.

For example, I spent a lot of this second draft paring down my wordiness and, basically, changing the narrative’s voice which not only took away a great repetitiveness but made it seem cleaner immediately. I’m a great proponent of setting the scene and I like to know where and what characters are doing, so stage directions are used often, and I continue to, but there was an overwhelming amount. I had to trust that my reader has enough imagination and willingness to use that imagination to fill in the gaps.

15K sounds like a lot, and it is. But it’s the difference between so much fat it doesn’t taste good to just enough fat to make you savor. If I had to say, between writing the first draft and writing the second, writing the second is probably even my favorite. Yes, the first draft can be ballistic fun and it’s private and doesn’t have to even make much sense, but the second draft is where your brain starts understanding what your heart was trying to do.