Begin with the End in Mind

It's time again to learn how to apply the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to our writing! If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

Habit #2 is called Begin with the End in Mind. Now, before all you pantsers out there start jumping down my throat, relax. I'm talking about editing.

I've been asked before how to go about editing once you've finished a first draft, and I think this principle sums up the most effective way to begin your editing. Once you've typed "The End," it's important to be sure that what you've written in the beginning of your novel appropriately leads up to the final action. This means leaving clues for the big reveal, making sure your main character's emotional arc is aligned for a big payoff, and filling in plot holes that may have occurred along the way.

When you begin your editing, do so with the ending in mind. Now go forth and polish!

R is for Reactive vs Proactive #AtoZChallenge

The #AtoZChallenge 2017 Theme at Operation Awesome is the Publishing Journey.

For our R post, let's examine the difference between writing and editing Reactively vs Proactively in the first of my 7 Habits of Highly Effective Writers series.

Like many people, I enjoy making New Year's resolutions. I'm not great at keeping them, but I sure do love making them. This year I resolved to read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey, with the hope of using it to improve my life.

It's been life-altering, to be honest. Eye-opening. It makes change seem possible. I really love this book. And as I've been reading, I've seen ways that the 7 habits could apply to my writing as well.

The first habit is Be Proactive. To understand what it means to be proactive, let's examine what the opposite is: being reactive.

Remember the post I wrote last month about waiting to process feedback? I had a knee-jerk REACTION to the feedback I received, and made a poor choice because of it. I made my editing decisions reactively instead of proactively.

When we make decisions proactively, we base them on internalized principles and values as opposed to our reactions and emotions. Had I been proactive about my revision I would have done things differently:

-I would have waited before processing the feedback because I have been told to do so by people whose advice I value.

-I would not have sent the revision off to an agent without one of my CPs vetting it first. I would have been sure to send the agent my best work instead of rushing.

What principles and values related to writing do you use to make proactive editing decisions?

C is for Confidence! How to Write Big, Bold, and With Authority #AtoZChallenge

The #AtoZChallenge 2017 Theme at Operation Awesome is the Publishing Journey.

At Operation Awesome, we strive to provide writers and readers with the resources they need to succeed, at every stage of the publishing journey. With that in mind, let's discuss how writing with Confidence can transform your work-in-progress!


Let's start with an example:

Character 1: "I mean, um, I think there's probably a good reason for why Stan cheated on the test."
Character 2: "Stan had a good reason for cheating on the test."

Which character are you more inclined to believe? If you ask me, Character 1 is hedging. By using words like "I think" and "I mean" and "um," she's showing that she's not even sure she believes her own words, let alone helping the reader believe her. Character 2, on the other hand, is leaving no room for doubt. Sure, he may be lying. But isn't it easier to believe him when he speaks with such confidence, such certainty that his words are true? And aren't you more interested to hear the reason for Stan's cheating from Character 2 than you would be from Character 1?

As you're writing dialogue, keep confidence in mind. Whether you're creating a bold, self-confident character or a shy, uncertain character, the way characters talk should reflect their personalities.

An interesting tidbit: Studies have shown that in business settings, women are more likely to voice their ideas using 'I think' or 'I believe' than are men, who tend to just state their ideas without the hedging language. Keep that in mind too, if you're trying to distinguish characters using their speech patterns. Here's another example:

Character 1: I think the company should donate money to the children's charity.
Character 2: The company should donate money to the children's charity.

Two tiny words, but they make a difference, don't they?

You can also use confidence to subvert readers' expectations. For example, if you have a main character who's bold, blustery, and no-nonsense, and she's being questioned by the police in connection with a murder, why not have her use hedging language to show she's ill at ease? Sprinkle some 'um's and 'I think's in there and see how that helps show how she's feeling.

On the other hand, if you've created a character who's timid and unassuming, but you put him in a scene with his younger brother and he suddenly starts making statements without using hedging language, that gives the reader a lot of information about his relationship with that brother.




How do you incorporate confidence into your writing?

Wednesday Debut Interview - BEYOND THE RED by Ava Jae

DON'T FORGET! Today's the last day to enter March's #PassOrPages. If you have a contemporary YA novel to query, enter HERE.

Today's Wednesday Debut Interview features Ava Jae, author of the debut YA sci-fi novel, BEYOND THE RED.

First off, tell us a bit about yourself!

Hi! I’m Ava, author of BEYOND THE RED, which just released on March 1st! I’m a college student (graduating sooooon), blogger, assistant editor, and YouTuber with a mild tea addiction.

Congrats on your graduation!! Tell us about your book. What's your elevator pitch for BEYOND THE RED?

BEYOND THE RED is a YA Sci-Fi about a violent uprising on a distant, alien planet that threatens the reign of a teen alien queen—Kora. It’s also about Eros, a half-human, half-alien rebel soldier whose life collides with Kora’s when her people attack his and he’s taken captive.

One of the most interesting things for me about science fiction is the worldbuilding. Tell us a bit about the alien world you created for this story?

Safara is a technologically advanced extrasolar planet—meaning that it’s in a different solar system, but the same universe we live in. BEYOND THE RED primarily takes place in the southern deserts, where the sands are red and white under the heat of the twin suns. Safara is inhabited with humans, who are descendents from explorers from Earth, and Sepharon, the native species to the planet—but the two don’t exactly get along...

What kind of research did you have to do in order to make a believable world where humans and aliens coexist?

Honestly, a lot of it was just paying attention to how we coexist and interact with different races and cultures—which is to say, not very well. The humans and Sepharon have a lot of animosity between them, and much of the way they treat each other is, unfortunately, not unheard of in our reality.

Let's talk a bit about your publishing journey. How long as this process taken for you, from the first draft until publication date?

I started the first draft of BEYOND THE RED in May 2014, officially signed with my agent in February 2015, sold RED to Sky Pony Press in October 2015 and just saw it published on March 1st of this year—so we’re looking at nearly two years from first draft to publication. However, BEYOND THE RED is actually the tenth manuscript I wrote, and it took me nearly eight years from first draft of my first manuscript to signing with my agent—and roughly ten years to RED’s publication.

Every writer experiences some rejection and setbacks along the way. How did you learn to cope with them and move on?

Honestly, after a while I just kind of got used to them. It was getting pretty discouraging by the time I started getting rejections while querying RED—it’d been my sixth time in the query trenches and I was starting to wonder if maybe the results would be the same as the first five times I queried. But I learned to distract myself with new projects and I frequently read testimonials from authors who took a long time to get published (Beth Revis was a major inspiration in that area—her debut was her eleventh novel, and now she’s a NYT Bestselling author!), which helped me power through it.

What makes Sky Pony Press and your editor(s) there a good fit for you and your book?

Sky Pony’s been great to work with—and I especially loved how much say I got not only in the cover, but in the interior design. It was such a fun process, and the result is one that I absolutely adore. My editor, Nicole, has also been nothing short of wonderful to work with. :)

Tell us about your cover. I love how it immediately tells the reader that this story is taking place on an alien world. What else did you want it to convey?

Thank you! Conveying that the book doesn’t take place on Earth was definitely important to me—I also wanted to convey the vastness of the desert the book primarily takes place in, which I think the cover does an incredible job with. It’s basically exactly like I hoped it might be when I’d daydreamed about potential covers.

Was BEYOND THE RED the original title you'd had in mind for this story? If not, tell us about how it came to be titled that.

Ha ha ha ha ha nooope. RED’s original title was SLAVE & SIRA, which wasn’t a great title for various reasons. From there it took me a really long time to brainstorm new title ideas with my agent, her team, and my critique partners. Ultimately, it was a suggestion from one of my amazing critique partners who came up with the title that was tweaked into BEYOND THE RED—to this day I continue turn to her to help me choose an evocative title!

Can you tell us about some of the things you been working on between signing a contract for BEYOND THE RED and its release? What about the post-book-deal process been most surprising for you?

For a while I focused on a YA Fantasy I really love and hopefully will one day be able to share with everyone, now I’m working on a sekret thing I can’t talk about, but they’ve both been great distractions! As for most surprising, it’s been kind of interesting to see how very different the pre-pub process is depending on the publishing house. I sort of imagined the timeline and processes would be similar, but it can vary a lot.

How does it feel to finally have your book out in the hands of readers? Do you have any events planned you want people to know about?

It’s amazing! It’s been so great to see pictures of people with their copies of BEYOND THE RED and it’s been equally wonderful to see pics of RED in the wild. I’m very happy to finally have reached the “published” marker. :)

As for events, I’m preparing to head off really soon to the DC/VA/MD area for a mini book tour with some other debut authors and to speak at an SCBWI conference, all happening from 3/16-3/22, which should be fun!

Is there any other advice you'd like to pass on to others pursuing publication? Anything you would have done differently?

My biggest mistake with my publishing journey was putting a deadline on myself—I was thirteen when I decided I wanted to be an author, and for the longest time I put a *ton* of pressure on myself to be a teen author (spoiler: it didn’t happen). Putting so much pressure on that arbitrary deadline made the first several years of my journey that much more stressful and difficult, and I had to learn that time is actually on our side. Take all the time you need to improve your craft and get your writing skills publication ready—your future self and readers will thank you.

Great advice. And for what it's worth, I think you're the youngest author we've had on Wednesday Debut Interview thus far!

And, just for fun, which other YA hero/heroine do you think your main character Kora would want to invite over for dinner?

This is *such* a fun question! A lot of my favorite heroes are thieves, for some reason, and Kora would not invite them over, but I think she’d quite enjoy Nikolai Lantsov’s company. They could talk politics, and his easygoing personality would be a refreshing change for her.

Thank you so much for your participation in this Wednesday Debut Interview!

Thank you for having me! :)

Revise and Resubmit

After sending out queries, we all wait for responses. Sometimes they don't come. Sometimes we

receive rejection letters. Sometime we get a hopeful, "Send me more," and then we wait again. We hope for a phone call and not a polite "no thank you" email. A yes, and we're flying. A no, and we're plummeting.

But what about that other response--the R&R. If you're new to the term, in the publishing world it does not mean rest and relaxation. In fact, it might mean just the opposite. The R&R we're talking about stands for revise and resubmit.

For today's post, I'm taking off my writer hat and replacing it with my publisher hat. I'm going to tell you why I ask for an R&R, what I hope you'll do, what I hope you won't do and about the negatives of R&R requests. 

Why I ask for an R&R: 

This is pretty simple. I really liked something about your manuscript. I saw something there that caught my interest, and not just a little. If I only liked it a little, I wouldn't bother with the R&R. I get this excited inner niggling when I come across something I really like--an intriguing premise, a strong character voice, a unique plot or setting. When I find this, I get excited. This excitement combined with well written sample chapters leads me to request a full manuscript. When the manuscript has problems, but I see great potential, I'll request an R&R.

What I hope you'll do:

I hope you'll take the advice I gave when I requested the R&R and dig into your manuscript, that you'll edit with new eyes. This is a second chance, so take full advantage of it. I hope you'll make global changes and then get new beta readers to supply feedback in light of what I've asked.

What I hope you won't do:

Simple--rush. If I ask for an R&R, it does not mean there are only minor tweaks to be made. If the

changes I wanted were minor, easy changes, I would've just proposed offering a contract and making those changes during the editing process. An R&R means the manuscript needs significant changes that exceed what Rebelight Publishing will undertake in the editing process. If you send the manuscript back to me within a week, I'm going to be pretty suspect of the quality of the revisions. As always, take your time and make your manuscript the very best it can be.

What are the negatives of R&R requests:

• I move on. A week after I send you an R&R, I may find something that I like equally, but doesn't as much revision. We may sign that author and by the time you send me your revised manuscript, I may no longer be interested. All the more reason, to rush, right? No, because I may still be interested, and if you don't bring your manuscript to where it needs to be, you've just blown your second chance. I won't give a second R&R. I'll just assume you're unable to do what's been requested.
• I may still decline the manuscript. Perhaps you did what was requested, but it went in a different direction than I'd hoped. This doesn't mean it was bad, just different and not something I felt fit with our publishing goals. However, with the manuscript newly revised, it may catch the attention of another agent or editor.
• You may not want to make the changes I requested. I'm a strong advocate for authors telling the story they felt compelled to write. Whether or not you attempt the R&R is totally up to you. Take some time to think about it. If you don't feel comfortable taking your story in the direction I suggested, then don't do it. Keep searching for an editor or agent who gets your vision for the manuscript.

I encourage you to take full advantage of the R&R. Work hard to show the person who offered you the second chance that you're just the type of professional they'd like to work alongside. 

Have you ever had an R&R request? Tell me about it in the comments.