Jul 20, 2022
When we're going through our manuscript, whether we are doing edits or full-on drafting, finishing each pass and taking notes keeps us organized and gives us a sense of progress.
“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brigitte+devin+davis&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
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Get ahold of Krissy Barton with Little Syllables editing services. She does free sample edits to see if you and she would be the right fit. www.littlesyllables.com
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The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. I am on a mission to abolish the idea of the tormented artist by sharing what I know about writing, publishing, and just life in general, so that you can have the tools to produce the content that you have been eager to write. If you have this steps in place, you can produce a short story in as few as three months or a novel in as few as 18 months.
And hopefully through the ideas in this podcast, you will have the wisdom to adjust that timeline if you need to. I am Devin Davis, the guy who lives and writes in a tiny house in Northern Utah. Thank you for tuning in and please enjoy today's episode of Writing in the Tiny House.
Hello, [00:01:00] and welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am Devin Davis and here we are guys. We are over the hump of July. We have made it. We are more than halfway through the summer, I guess, or at least the summer break. And can you even believe that? So I have been diligently working on this pass of edits with the current work in progress, TIS that I have been working on for a while. And now that it has picked up and it has become kind of a bigger thing. It is definitely gaining momentum in my day to day. And that is exciting. It is so good to be excited for a work in progress again. And I think I have some idea as to why, or some idea as to how I got here to this point of being excited.
But first let's talk about TIS a little bit. Because of its length. So [00:02:00] TIS is a respectable novella. TIS is going to be between 25,000 and 30,000 words, which as a printed thing is about a hundred pages give or take ish, you know, and I believe, I believe that due to its length, I should be able to release it as a printed work in addition to an ebook. So with Brigitte being at 9,000 words, that is only about 50 pages of text, actually a little bit less than that. And because of that, it wasn't really plausible or really worth the time and effort or the energy to worry about finding a way to get it into a printed form. I mean, with a short story like that, Brigitte can always be part of a collection of short stories later on.
I'm certainly not going to rule that out and I'm not going to say that I'm never [00:03:00] going to write a short story again, it is certainly not this work in progress with ti and it is not my next work in progress. My next work in progress is going to be a full blown novel, but. Due to length. Sometimes there is not really a plausible or a logical reason, or really just a feasible reason to provide a printed version of that story.
But with TIS due to its length, I believe that I can release it as a paperback and a hardback. Which is kind of exciting. It's going to require some additional steps and some additional formatting on my end. And I'm going to have to get in contact with the guy who designed my cover art and have him expand it into a full wrap.
So an image that does the cover, the spine and the back, which is what you need for a printed book, but at a hundred pages as it being a [00:04:00] normal novella I don't see why not. And that's cool To have it available as an ebook and a printed book.
And of course, I'm going to turn it into an audio book. All of those things just makes it more accessible, which is cool because we all enjoy books in different ways. And so if all of the ways are covered, then that makes it more accessible to customers, which is cool. So that is already really good news, but I told you that this project has picked up some steam and it is becoming a bigger part of my day today. And I am eager to get this pass of edits done. And I believe that I have a secret as to why. So, this is a good rule of thumb when you are doing your developmental edits, which I call dev edits, or even if you're drafting.
And the little trick that I want to talk about today is don't interrupt [00:05:00] your pass. That means that if you are writing your first draft, make sure that you finish your first draft without going through and futzing over the things that don't need to be worried about right now. Or if you know that there is a big plot hole in your first draft, instead of worrying about going through and coming through that and figuring out where it is.
It is 100% okay. To simply take a note of it in your notebook or wherever you choose to keep notes and then proceed forward in your draft as if you already made that change. The thing is guys, it is so easy in these projects, just because everything here is self-motivated. Nobody has hired me to write this book.
I'm writing this book just because I'm awesome. Because I want to do it and I love to do it. That [00:06:00] can also mean. that because it's just me and nobody is standing there tapping their toe in order for a, in order to get a release date or in order to get pages of the manuscript to read or whatever, because I am on my own timeline and only have to respect my own calendar.
It is really easy to just not do it. And it's really easy to slow down and to lose some steam. So if you choose. To not interrupt your pass. So with your first draft or with your first pass of developmental edits or any subsequent pass after that, what it does is it gives you a sense of completion. It gives you a sense of progress.
And so. , if you have taken notes as to where those different corrections and those different holes need to be, then you can go back [00:07:00] when you are done with your pass. and make those changes later. Sometimes we can get so hung up on a word or finding the perfect word or trying to figure out how a scene needs to play out, even though, you know, what the very next scene is going to be, or as I'm doing with developmental edits right now, sometimes patting out stuff.
So I I just discovered. That there are some little things with the relationship between my main characters that needs to be more developed. It needs to be more mature and it just needs to be more right now, they are just kind of. They, they read as colleagues where in reality, they are lovers.
They share a house, they have a very deep relationship. And so I need to work in the more mature relationship stuff that I haven't done yet. And I can. Spazz out about it [00:08:00] and freak out and go through and interrupt what I'm doing now and comb through what I've already combed through to try to find all of those little places.
Or I can carry on with my pass and simply take note that I need to further develop and pat out their relationship. So that on my next pass, I can do that. The thing is guys, we forget sometimes that we are going to be reading. These works in progress like a hundred jillion times and , and sometimes we. Get impatient.
And we forget that this process takes a lot of layers. There's a lot of building with this. and so it's easy to lose focus and it's easy to become impatient. And so in doing that in interrupting what we are doing so that we can go back and do this spazzy little thing of filling in something or worrying about a word or better developing a relationship now.
It, it can create a lot of chaos and a lot of [00:09:00] disarray in the whole process itself, especially if you are really early in the process now it is important to go through and complete whole passes of your book. And to have a notebook or a place to keep notes so that you can keep track of where all of those changes need to be.
And you can write down where they are so that when you're done with your pass, you can relocate those locations and futz about them. Then also, when it comes to things like word choices or some of these other things where. We're hitting a wall and we can't figure out what's actually happening or how the perfect wording for how things need to happen to lead to the next scene.
Sometimes when we are already past the next scene, we have already finished our past. Sometimes we are in a far better head space to problem solve than we were when we were in the middle of our pass. and [00:10:00] so then we are better equipped to improve our manuscript in those little chunks. And once those chunks.
Our improved upon, we make another pass. That's how editing goes. That is how this whole process goes. You are going to be reading your work in progress a number of times. And so it is important to read it in whole passes. So that is the news for today. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode on developmental edits and whatever.
I've decided to do a little collection of episodes on developmental edits, because that's what I'm doing now. And I am going to be compiling another little clip show on how the developmental edit kind of looks like as I'm doing it. Like I did with completing. First draft with ti. So that will be coming later probably in August.
[00:11:00] And yeah. Thank you for tuning in and be sure to tune in to next week's episode as well. Have a good day guys.