Indie Life Wednesday-the art of revision

Today, for Indie Life, I'm talking about revision, that dreaded word, or not. As for me, I love it. I'd rather be polishing a draft than banging out the first, rough one. You need to learn to love it, ESPECIALLY as an indie author, because anything you put out into the world needs to be flawless--the plot, the grammar and punctuation, the characterizations.

Tools to help in this regard:

Scrivener: I love their virtual corkboard where you can endlessly rearrange a set of virtual Index cards that you create. If your eyes cross while staring at the cards, you can toggle between this and a more traditional line-by-line plot outline.

Upload your daily revision to your Kindle and read it with new eyes: It looks like a book, it reads like a book (well, an ebook), and you'll notice errors that you never saw when you read it on your screen or paper manuscript.

Nanowrimo: National Novel Writing Month, where you bang out a novel length manuscript in 30 days. It'll either break you or make you super strong (Or both?). You'll be amazed at how much you can write. No really! Now they even have July and August summer camp with virtual bunkmates.

Your writing group: get in one, trust them, and run everything by them. Only choose authors whose work you love and respect.

I'll leave you with a few awesome quotes from authors on the revision process:

“By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” — Roald Dahl

“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft. Begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in the edit.” — Will Self

“Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do.— Stephen King, On Writing

Wishing you a productive and creative revision process!
What's your most helpful revision tool?

Pros & Cons of the Omniscient POV

How many of you have tried omniscient point of view? That’s when the author can write how any of the characters are feeling, and what they are observing. Unlike first person POV, where the narration stems from one person, or third person limited, where the “I” becomes “he” or “she”, but is still limited to one POV, omniscient can wander, from one person’s POV to another, but also in camera scope, from an extreme close up to a cinematic long shot, which describes the action from a distance.

The omniscient POV, or OPV, was out of favor for a very long time, especially in young adult literature, which favored extremely close first person POV, in the style of Catcher in the Rye’s stream of consciousness rants. OPV is hard to write well, because in fiction for kids and teens you still have to make sure you are telling a story with a main character, who will remain the focus. Thus, you have to have a strong editorial sense of when to go into another character’s head—it must be crucial to the forward action, not simply because you want to “head-jump” as some editors derisively call OPV.

So, why use OPV at all if it’s so tricky? Will it ever shake its bad reputation? Or, on the other hand, is it coming back in favor? More and more YA books seem to be in OPV. Ursula K. Le Guin, a well-known fantasy writer defends the OPV when she says, “the voice of the narrator who knows the whole story, tells it because it is important, and is profoundly involved with all the characters. It cannot be dismissed as old-fashioned or uncool.” Why then, has it been so discouraged in writing workshops, and even in MFA creative writing programs? Perhaps, because it is so easy to do badly! The downside is that we limit our options from our automatic negativity and fear of it. As Gwenda Bond says in her excellent Vermont College MFA thesis, “By rejecting the storyteller's (OPV) voice, we lose far more than we gain… The omniscient narrator is no more intrinsically artificial than a first-person narrator telling the tale, or of a third person limited perspective that comes from a vaporous invisible teller.”

Some authors swear by the OPV when writing multilayered fantasy, or where it adds to the story to have a scene, let’s say, in a wizard’s den where one has access to his plotting and planning, independent of the hero being there. Again, think of it as using three or four cameras in various locations, instead of being limited to one camera angle—the eye of the hero or heroine. OPV is also a way to delve deeply and quickly into the characters’ motivations, and bring out historic information.

More and more authors are using OPV, to great effect! A favorite of mine is Nancy Werlin’s Impossible. She exhibits masterful control over when and where she switches viewpoint, doing so only when it is crucial to the plot. Other examples are Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and Marcus Zusaks’ The Book Thief.

For more information on this subject, check out Gwenda Bond’s thesis, Eye for a God’s Eye: The Bold Choice of the Omniscient Point of View in Fiction for Young Adults:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nSZMxWdqO50J:gwendabond.typepad.com/bondgirl/files/BondThesis.pdf+YA+books+using+omniscient+pov&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgBZwz0tnlllHzgPqzeO-76A5Bumoi8GlL_J2bgVS36eENo0tz9pJ4jJHJvA4L2gdX2TbEYXysdBletktLCQGbda8PBUNA06HjGbXe4Vv_p8TF1mi8DkQCHCNq5Hb4sQW-fJfjK&sig=AHIEtbSu2DnmyVLvSkrWr4DE5X153DuqWg

For another good post on OPV visit Justine Larbalestier’s blog: http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2006/11/16/theyre-just-techniques-people/

Or this helpful post from Five Editors & You:

http://writingonthewallblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/fashion-statements-and-omniscient-pov.html

Have you ever tried to write in OPV? Do you see evidence that it’s coming back in fashion? Any OPV novels you would recommend? What's your favorite POV to write in?