Friday Feedback, Drafty First Drafts and Painting a Chair

Me, proudly sporting my Geneseo pride on
behalf of my son. 

Somehow, it's already time for another Friday Feedback. 

Hope you all had a happy fourth! Now, to slow summer down.

You heard me, Summer! I really, really need you to slow down.  

Yeah, yeah, I know. Time waits for no one, whatever.

At any rate, I finally returned from my sundry travels, the last bit to attend college orientation with our son. I was really impressed with the quality of things at the school and am excited for my son's future, which is not to say, come August, I won't be endlessly (endlessly!) weepy.

Meanwhile, I have another wonderful guest host today (the summer is chock-full of them, wait till you see!): my Class of 2K11 now "The Graduates" cohort, the lovely Alissa Grosso. . .

I asked Alissa for a photo. She sent this one and said, 
"this is a picture of me being goofy. If you'd prefer a more serious mugshot, I can comply."
Hmm. Sort of tempted to see the mugshot. Come on, Alissa, fess up!**

Alissa is the author of Popular, Ferocity Summer and . . .

releasing THIS MONDAY, her third amazing book, Shallow Pond.

"Everyone in Shallow Pond 

knows the Bunting Sisters. 

Nobody knows their Secrets.

From Amazon:

Annie is the oldest. The sickly one who gave up on her own life so she could raise her sisters after their parents died. Gracie is the wild child. She wants a man so bad, she’ll do anything it takes to get one. Barbara, the youngest, hates being constantly mistaken for her sisters. She wants nothing more than to finish senior year and get out of Shallow Pond—before she succumbs to her unwanted attraction to the new boy in town, Zach Faraday.

When Annie’s enigmatic illness takes a turn for the worse, Barbara begins to search for the truth of her family’s past. But Shallow Pond offers only lies and deceit. The one thing Barbara can trust is her halting connection to Zach—an unsettling bond that may be the answer to a mystery that doesn’t want to be solved."

*Gae tosses confetti and waves sparklers to congratulate Alissa on her THIRD book.*

Doesn't that sound SO good?! Alissa writes terrific stories with dark, troubled characters and plot twists galore. Like all my guest authors, she'll be spending lots of time here today and tomorrow, so please check out her books, and add them to your TBR lists, your classrooms, and/or libraries!

Before Alissa gets going, if this is your first time here, or you don't know the Friday Feedback Rules, please go read them HERE now. And, do please remember that your excerpts should be no longer than five (count em, 5!) paragraphs if short, three (3!) if long, and please don't post them after Sunday morning.

So, without further ado, here's Alissa:

I'm excited to be a guest on Friday Feedback this week, because I just finished the first draft of my current work in progress. From experience, I can say that means I am nowhere near done, but still this small milestone is a cause for celebration in my writer world. As I get set to knuckle down and turn this mess of words into something that more or less resembles a novel, I'm going to share some ideas on revision, and how I go about things.

First of all, I should explain what I mean by first draft. To me, a first draft is a mostly complete version of the novel that is very rough in some parts. It's at about 60,000ish words right now, and from experience I can say that number could change by 5,000 in either direction depending on the course of those revisions.

Once I type the last word of my first draft, I email a copy of it to my secondary email address for backup purposes. (note from Gae: I am constantly emailing copies of my manuscripts to my husband's and my own email address, at the end of most every day. He knows to just delete the last one and save the most recent one). Then I walk away from the manuscript. I move onto something else, maybe sketch out some ideas for another book or take a short writing break. 

In my case, I decided to paint a chair.   

Revision = a blue chair.

Why? Because I had an ugly one and I saw this project online. Of course, I decided to do this during the most humid week ever and so the paint won't dry, and I'm stuck with a half painted, wet chair. I should have sketched out some ideas for a new book.

After maybe a week or so, I'll go back through and try to fix up the gaping holes (I think she means in the draft manuscript and not the chair!) and the really glaring grammar problems, which abound. 

I know the difference between there, their and they're, but when I'm typing at a million miles an hour to complete a passage I'm not worried about these differences. I'll even do really goofy things like type won instead of one. There are reasons I don't like to share my first drafts with others. 

There are other things like things that just say Mr. X because in Chapter 25, I couldn't remember the name of the gym teacher I introduced in Chapter 1. (omg, I do this too! I feel so much better. Sometimes, I'll use an actual name not sure if it's the right name and then I'll think, Ooh, I like that name so much better!) 

Then there are the really lazy things that say, "INSERT SOMETHING FUNNY HERE." I'm not making this up, I actually do this to myself. (yep, yep, again, me too! Or, say, "google a cool fact about butterflies and insert here" or, just today,"insert what they eat in Hong Kong.") It's okay, though, it's a first draft. That's allowed.

Alissa's binders of printed manuscripts,
plus "glue from some other
ill-advised
project."

At this point, my manuscript is still just words on a computer screen, but that's about to change. The next step is to print everything out. I love 3-hole punch paper. I love my laser printer. I take my manuscript and put it into a binder.

Now, suddenly, it's a book!

(ooh, nice trick. I have about three unpublished manuscripts. Maybe if I just put them in binders, I could pretend...)

I grab a colored pen. Red's my favorite, but any color will do, and now I read through my book, this time with the aim of polishing things. Passages that are too clunky or don't make sense are refined or crossed out completely. Words are replaced, paragraphs are rewritten and new paragraphs are added. This sort of revision is intensive work, and is best tackled in small chunks. I usually give myself a couple of weeks to get through this stage of the revision.

Once I'm done, I sit back down at the computer and transfer all these on paper to changes to the computer document. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I could save a tree and the money I spend on toner not to mention the time that all this takes and just do all of this right on the computer screen, but the reading the book on paper is part of the process for me. I see things and catch things that I miss on the screen. I know some writers who swear by the practice of reading their manuscripts out loud. I urge you to try out different methods to find what works for you. (I do both the hard copy thing and, constantly, the reading aloud thing, but with the hard copy thing, what happens for me is that I make it about a third of the way through, begin to feel overwhelmed, start inputting my revisions onto the computer copy, and three weeks later find myself working straight on the screen without ever having finished revising the hard copy. Hey, it still works most the time!)

Once these changes have all been made, I usually do a quick on-screen read through to make sure things are in good shape. Then it's time for the scary part. I get to send this precious book of mine off to my agent, who will likely see some major issue that I missed completely and then it will be time for another set of revisions to fix this issue so that the book will be in good enough shape to be read by an editor.

You would think with all this revising and rewriting, that by now the thing would be flawless, but it's not. Editors will have more changes they want to see, sometimes before they're willing to accept the book for publication, and others that will come a bit later in the process. Then there are copy edits, and then proof pages before a book is actually ready for publication. So, that's why though I'm excited about finishing this first draft, I know it's a long way from being done.

Anyway, appropriately enough, I'm going to share a passage from this current work in progress with you. It's the very beginning of the book, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether it draws you in and makes you want to read more. 

(or, you know, as Gae says *ahem* 1. does it hook you? 2. What works for you? 3. what doesn't?)

This is from a YA contemporary with a female protagonist. If you'd like, I'd also love your thoughts on the tense. This particular passage is in present tense which is how I started out writing the book, but somewhere along the way I shifted to past tense and I'm still trying to decide which works better. (Ah, yay, a common issue for us writers):

1: October 30

     I can spot a carefully disguised write-my-term-paper plea from a mile away. The words, "Tutor Needed for Sophomore English" look like dollar signs to me. Nobody needs a tutor for English class. Some are even less subtle. "Need help with The Grapes of Wrath. Will pay." I mine the guidance office job board on a regular basis. It's a bulletin board filled with potential ways for enterprising students to make some extra money. Most of the jobs are astoundingly craptacular. Mr. Wertz, who teaches basic algebra has been trying unsuccessfully to get some poor schmo to remodel his kitchen for the grand total of $50 since at least last March, and if bagging groceries is your thing, you'd be in luck since there's two different grocery stores on the board seeking entry level workers, nights and weekends a must. I only bother with the term papers. It's easy money. I spot one that reads, "Tutor wanted. Must be familiar with aspects of the U.S. involvement in World War I." Bingo. I pull it off the board, and shove it in my pocket.

     Ryan Sutter, who would easily be voted least likely to succeed if the yearbook committee had that as a category steps out of one of the counselor's offices and gives me an idiotic sneer as he walks past. I've never written a paper for Ryan Sutter, but that's only because he's too stupid to realize he could pay someone to write the paper for him, instead of turning in a barely rewritten Wikipedia article that if his teacher is in a generous mood will earn him a D minus.

     "Nice mask," Ryan tells me. It's the day before Halloween, and half the school has decided to celebrate this fact by showing up in costume. I'm not wearing a costume. Neither, as it happens, is Ryan.

     "Right back at you," I say.

     "Huh?" he asks. Apparently, I was supposed to be so insulted that I ran off and cried in the girls' room or something. Ryan wasn't prepared for this eventuality. He doesn't know me that well. I shake my head at him and roll my eyes then head to Mrs. Banks' office.

----

xox Gae (& Alissa!)

** Okay fine, I left out the part where she stated, "I've never been arrested, but you know what I mean."