In this weeks episode, Crys and JP talk all about the editing process. They discuss how their process changes depending on which genre they are writing and who they are writing with.
Show Notes
Three Story Method: Foundations of Fiction by J. Thorn and Zach
5 Commandments of Storytelling on Story Grid
The Dialogue Doctor by Jeff Elkins
How to Write Manga Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling by RA Patterson
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is the July 22nd, 2021, as we are recording this. I am Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: How’s it going, JP?
JP: It is going well.
I’ve had a pretty good past week or so. Just kinda getting edits in for the book three of my cowriting project and then also for Vella stuff. Lots of editing. And also because I’m going to plug it anyway, the serialfictionshow.com, we are like booked until mid-October, which feels pretty good.
So we’ve recorded about half of them, but yeah. So if you are an author who is doing Vella projects you may want to email us shortly so that we can schedule you in. Cause we’re probably going to start scheduling recordings in like September or October time, because there’s just too many people. Which is great. I love it. I love it so much. There’s a lot of people.
How about you?
Crys: I’ve had one day of writing. Friday was my first day of writing in two weeks and then I have not written since. But I did get my house packed up and loaded into a van. And I definitely had this moment where I looked at all of my stuff and I own so much stuff. And yet I know that it would fit into someone’s sub closet in the US. And that’s not being rude to people who have more stuff than I do. It’s just a weird place for me to be, because I have not had that much stuff for a really long time.
And a lot of it is because I have the kid and he has a lot of stuff. They like toys. But I also know family members who’ve had entire rooms stuffed to the brim full of choice for one child. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I’ve got like three containers full of toys, like that’s a lot. And it was very overwhelming just to have that much stuff. But then we loaded all of my stuff, all of my nanny’s stuff into the van, and then hit up the ATM and a bakery in less than an hour. I remember what it was like to move in the US, it took a lot longer than that. So that was reassuring.
So dropped all that stuff off, then yesterday had the most beautiful drive of my life. Google tells you, Hey, would you like the fastest route? And I’m like, no, actually I don’t want to go the fastest route. I want to go this other route because it’ll take me through the area that I’m planning on moving to. And I just take opportunities to do that so I can get more familiar with it. And I literally drove up into a mountain, and it was so beautiful.
First of all, I cross this bridge and I see this car parked several yards away from the bridge but stopped. I’m like what’s going on. And then I see that there is a critter. They’re watching a critter outside their window, and I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s so cool. So I pull over, and the critter is in front of their car, so I pull over and I get out and the critter starts running at me. And at first I’m like, oh no, crazy critter. But then it turns out that he just was used to tourists, which is sad. But I have a video of him and it is on TikTok and I think it’s on my Facebook. So @itscryscain is my handle anywhere if you want to see this. It’s a coati, C-O-A-T-I, I dunno, it looks like a weaselly raccoon. It’s a really cool, it’s really cute. It really wanted to get in my car and steal my snacks. So that was amazing.
And then I’m just driving and there’s just a casual, fucking hundred-foot waterfall off the side of the road. And of course there’s 15 cars parked there, taking pictures and stuff of it. So I just had to wait for them to cross the bridge. And while I’m parked there, I took a beautiful video of it. And then like we just switch backs up into the mountain, driving in the clouds, it’s a cloud forest for a reason. And then coming out of the clouds and they were like, oh a mile out there, like the clouds are on eye level. Just gorgeous.
And I told my friend, I was like, you know what? I have a feeling like all the errands that I’m going to do this afternoon, they’re going to go wrong. It’s Costa Rica bureaucracy, something always goes wrong. You never get done what you want, but it’s okay because this drive, this beautiful drive, has cushioned it for me. And everything quickly went to chaos.
So my mom calls me up, she’s like, ” Hey, can you forward me your flight info when you get a chance?”
I was like, “Yeah, I am driving now. But I will when I get home.”
She’s like, “so you’re getting in early Saturday morning, like Friday night, but like early Saturday morning, like 12 midnight?”
And I’m like, “No, no. I’m getting in Friday morning. I leave Thursday. So I’m getting in Friday morning.”
She’s like, “your sister forwarded me what you sent her, and it looks like you’re getting in Saturday.”
And I’m like, “I’m not getting in Saturday.” So I pull over on the side of the road and I checked my calendar, and I’m like, “Hmm, looks like you’re right. I check my original booking, and I’m like, ” it looks like you’re right.” And I’m so careful about my layovers. I was not careful about my layover.
I think it was like, the flight was like $150 versus I don’t know, $200 or $300. And I’m like, I’ve had two flights to buy for, I’m just buying this one. And I just was not as careful as I should have been. So I’m going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina for over 24 hours. I did book the hotel yesterday, and I was like, oh, that’s just silly. And it’s cheaper to book a hotel than to change a ticket. So that’s exciting.
Then I went to do my errands to sell my property. There’s just like this one, last tax ID I need. And we tried to get it on my side of the country. The lady was completely unhelpful. She was like, ” Nope, we can’t do that, you need to do this.” Blah, blah, blah. It was all wrong information. So I was like, whatever, I’m going to go to San Jose and do it. And so I did, and I waited for an hour and then the lady was like, okay, you don’t have all the information you need, but here’s the list of things you need to do. She sent me to the bank to do them, got them down.
I’m going to go back to her this morning and hopefully get what I need. So that was at least like expected delays. And then I had a snafu with getting to TASM meeting on time but I was only five minutes late, which is shocking. Only five minutes late. Managed that. Wonderful conversation with our crew there. The Author Success Mastermind, if you’re not sure what TASM is.
And then I’m like, okay, so I’ve got to schedule my COVID test. So I look at it, I look at what time it is, I map in my head how much time I think it takes. I’m like, oh yeah, it takes me like an hour to get there, so I’ll give myself an hour and a half. We’ll set it at 6:30. It’s 5:55. That’s not an hour and a half. And so thankfully, Costa Rica is used to lateness and they don’t really care. As long as I had it scheduled, and I already paid, they didn’t care.
So I get there and they’re like, “passports?”
And I’m like, “Oh, that would have been a great thing to bring with me.” Thankfully, I have pictures of passports. I found one of mine, my kid’s dad was able to send me one of his.
This whole day, I just had this feeling of wow, I’m really rocking it. Like even with all of the upsets. This is my life. Like people are like, oh no, you can’t be like ADHD, you’re successful, like you get so much done. I’m like, no, I get so much done in spite of my ADHD. I have systems because I forget everything. I make stupid mistakes, all the time.
JP: But you got there, right? I remember one big trip I had a couple of years ago. We went to Europe and I had bought everything in advance and I felt so organized and perfect.
We get to the train that goes from Belgium to London and I show them that we’re supposed to be here or whatever. And then he’s like, these tickets were for this morning. It was 7:00 AM, not 7:00 PM. And it wasn’t even military time stuff, because I, at the time especially, was working somewhere where we worked in military time.
I just stupidly was like, yes, seven, bam, done. And he was just like, yeah, we can’t refund these. So I had to buy new tickets and they were so expensive. But yeah, so that was my like big snafu mistake after feeling like, yeah, I’ve got all these systems in place and then beeehhh.
Sounds like madness, but I’m glad you are where you are and that your van life tour is about to begin.
Crys: Yeah. It’s getting some repairs on it. They ended up being less than half of what I was budgeting for. So that’s exciting. And we’ve got about two weeks in New York with my fam and fixing little things up in the van. And then we go!
Do we have any comments, JP?
JP: Yes we do. We have one from Lon from the 13th that we didn’t get to for book club. It’s for How Do You Deal With Under And Overwriting? Lon is definitely an underwriter. Every draft he has to build and build. However, he’s also perfect, which is correct.
But in all seriousness he knows that he needs to work on it a bit and he thought that it was a great episode. Yeah. You know your method, right? So I think as long as it works for you, it works.
Crys: Perfect. That makes me giggle, but I’m not saying anything. Because you are in editing land hardcore, we’re gonna talk about editing today. So JP, since you have been developing this very intensely lately, what is your editing process?
JP: Yeah. So now that I have been like the backend editor for both co-writers, for Abe, Jeff Elkins, and then also myself, I’ve noticed that I have a pretty solid pattern that I do with all of them, regardless of who I’m working with.
And it’s almost at minimum three pass throughs before I feel comfortable with it. First pass through is coming at it through a discovery phase, which even if it’s my own work, I force myself to view it as if I’ve never read it before. Which I don’t know why it works, but it works for me.
I think especially using tools like Microsoft Word reading it back to you has helped try and make it otherly to me. But I think that’s the first step for me is to feel as if this is a piece I’ve never seen before. And then I’ll pass through it, and there I will clean up a little bit more on the line by line for parts of it.
So I’ll read dialogue and I will play it in my head. And because I am such an egregious consumer of media, I can play things out as if I’m watching it on screen. And so if that makes no sense to me, which happens a lot with dialogue, I will reform it and try to change it into something that I have been familiar with when it comes to like media, because I really like my dialogue to reflect what would actually be said in terms of what I would see.
And little bits and bobs here, I don’t really focus heavily on grammar because I know that there are some pieces to grammar that I’m not the best at. And so I’ll leave that to the end. Cause right now I know that I might be doing big changes and I don’t want to worry about grammar pieces at this point.
Second pass through. Now that I’ve passed through it and I’ve got a better grasp on what the story is, I will take a pause between edits one and two, and I’ll make some notes as to like what things need to change around, what bigger pieces need to be reshaped and reformed. And that is really useful when I use like a Kanban system, which we can talk about in a little bit.
And then my third step through is using tools like Pro Writing Aid and whatnot, to point out pieces. I’ll also read through as I’m using it to just make sure that it makes sense, that the flow makes sense. And if I spot any grammar stuff, I know I’m not amazing at it, but especially when it’s going to more people, I’m not super concerned until we’re getting to the part where I’m like giving it freely to the public.
Crys: Yeah. So for my romance, it’s pretty simplistic. And I think that’s something you need to know when you’re getting any kind of editing process in play, you need to know what level you need. For instance, if you’re just doing a short story as a freebie, you probably don’t need much more than a grammar pass.
You might have a couple of friends read it to make sure that the story works the way you think it does. Or JP sends it to me, so I can be like, a weird word here, put a weird word here. But then you just need somebody to check your grammar after that. And with the romance, we each write a chapter then the other person goes through our chapter and edits it.
Sometimes we will catch any grammar stuff that we see just to cut things down for our editors, because the less errors there are, the cheaper it is. And we’ll add flow things, delete anything that doesn’t make sense. And this is actually different depending on who I’m co-writing with and what they’re comfortable with.
So for one of my co-writers, they are really only comfortable with me changing something if I feel really strongly about it, as far as deleting. Like adding, I can add all I want. As far as like changing something, like it’s gotta be like a big effing deal or they feel personally attacked with it.
Whereas other ones are not attached to the words at all. And so we will read line each other’s chapters to pieces and both work really well. And it was definitely a learning process with each of those.
And then after we have completed our first pass through, sometimes we will use beta readers. We use them particularly if we’re worried that a favorite character is coming into play and we want to make sure that we give them the attention that the readers want. And so we’ll have five beta readers come through and just see how they respond to things. Or if we’re running really short on time and don’t have time for one of our consistent editors who’ve been with the whole series to go through and really check on the continuity stuff, the readers will always catch our continuity. Then it goes to the first editor who’s a bit more of a line editor and we’ll do more in depth stuff.
And then after we go through their stuff, it’ll go through a proofreader and our proofreader will often catch continuity stuff. She’s been with us, I think basically from book one. And we have a couple of continuity checks along the line. And continuity is something that I’m that I’m terrible with. I screw that up all the time. No memory. Yay.
Now, when we get edits back from the editor, only one of us really goes through it. We tried both of us going through and like verifying edits and that was just not feasible. It takes too much time. There’s too much worrying about stepping on each other’s toes.
So for any particular book, one of us will just be like, I’ve got the edits. And so for a while it was generally my main co-writer, she did almost all the edits and then she got really busy. So I was like, oh, I’ll take them over.
And then we had this negotiation on the newest book that we’re going to do. And she goes, okay, our editor that we were going to use because we keep putting this book off, isn’t going to be available. She has an editor she uses consistently for her stuff outside of our stuff. My editor is available, and this is the one where I disagreed with her so much on grammar stuff, and I was like, I will never use her again.
She was like, can we use her if she’s available? I’ve told her to give us a lighter edit but she is available. And I was like, I’m fine with that as long as I don’t have to go through the edits because I will disagree. And my co-writer, she does not have an opinion on grammar and that kind of stuff.
She’s just oh, sure, accept it all. Which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re not a grammar person and you want that kind of edit, there’s nothing wrong with it. If you are the kind of person who loves grammar and reads grammar books then you don’t want an editor who’s going to trump over your style and impose theirs on top of it.
That’s my editing process with romance. Now for like sci-fi fantasy, it’s going to be completely different and I don’t yet know what that’s gonna look like because I am going to care a lot more about flow in depth and consistency. And not because it’s “better” than the other work, it’s a different kind of work. It’s me getting to play with words far more than I get to with the romance. And getting to play with magic and making sure like a lot of that is consistent.
You mentioned having Microsoft Word read your book aloud, and last night in our conversation, one of the things I mentioned was I love reading aloud.
I love reading other books aloud. I love reading my work aloud. And that is a pass that I really look forward to having time for, because I think you catch so much there. It’ll really give me the sense of the flow of my work before it goes out. And it’s just fun for me.
JP: Even using tools to hear it back. It is insane the amount of just, not necessarily misspellings or grammar, but even hearing how someone talks the dialogue that you’ve written down, like how someone is saying it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t flow the same way that you had it in your head. And so being able to hear it, even in a robotic voice, you’re like, wait a minute. No.
Crys: And something that struck me last night as we were talking, just as writers, when you learn new tools and we’ll focus really hard on that tool for a while, whether it’s three-story method and learning how to construct your scenes that way until it kinda just becomes natural. I was also thinking about, Jeff Elkins dialogue tools, and he has so many, and that can be really intense. But I think one thing that we all forget is we don’t have to use the tools all the time, like every step of the way. Something I do often is if I get stuck and I’ll pull out different tools and use them to get me unstuck or through a problem.
So I think that’s something with editing as well. Because we, I think, both started out learning about story grid because of J Thorn being involved in it and talking about it a lot. And Story Grid is an editing tool and it’s a really intense editing tool. And you can get Story Grid editors who will do a full diagnostic of your work and give you, I think it’s pretty consistent report, they all have a similar way that they do it. The things that they see are going to be unique to them. But I would never do a full Story Grid diagnostic on my work because that’s not useful to me. But I’ll absolutely pull out different tools in the Story Grid framework.
Sometimes the Five Commandments of the scene are easier for me to work with than the three Cs of three-story method. Particularly because there’s a point in the Five Commandments called progressive complication and the turning point. And learning that element is key because there has to be a shift in tone right before you get to what is the choice they have to make. And just learning that helped me so much be able to give my scenes shape and movement, and not just go, we’re coming into the scene, there’s a problem, we’re answering it. Like moving into the problem and then out of it.
JP: Yeah. I know you’re working on Vella project and I am too. What do you think, if you haven’t gotten to this point yet, but what do you think your editing process is going to look like?
Crys: Because it’s serial fiction, it’ll basically be… I haven’t even finished my first episode. But it’ll basically be me, probably reading it aloud, and then sending it to a proofreader. At least for the first mumble jumble number of episodes. if it gets to a point where I’m like, Ooh, I can’t keep this consistent in my brain, and then I will figure out what I need to do next. Whether that’s, if I have a fan, who’s just really into things like bringing them on as an alpha reader and being like, Hey, tell me when I eff things up. But also serial fiction can be really forgiving of consistency errors, because it’s serial fiction.
I think that when I bring in editing for it, it will be after like a season is finished and I’m funneling it into a novel. That’s when I will sit down and do actual, full editing and the playing with words and such. The polish.
I think that publishing serially, you’re throwing really pretty rocks into a stream. And then through reader comments, and then editing, you take those and polish them, and then you have your formatted novel. In my opinion. Some people are doing full on edits on their serial fiction beforehand. They don’t like the comparison of the minimal viable product from software for writing, but I’m a software designer. I can’t help it. It works for me.
I’m like, okay, what gets the best story out with the least amount of extra work? And then how do we improve on it after that? I just work really well with… public feedback, not really. But working feedback. The piece is doing its work and getting feedback on it working. I really just like that process. And it may be because of my software development background, because I know that when I first started getting code reviews from other developers, I had never had that kind of intense and rapid critique before. And at first it was like, eff you too. And then I realized, oh this makes me better, faster, and bring it on.
JP: Yeah. I really wished that comments were available on Vella. I know they’re not at the moment. Just because I’m with you in the same idea that I feel like with Vella you’re closer to your audience. And in that way, you’re almost a little bit more vulnerable on the pieces that you need to polish to hand over to them. Because by doing that, and by opening that channel for communication, you’re almost saying, Hey, is this something you like, let me know. And then you can alter it as you go.
Now, of course, it’s wonderful if you can hand them the most polished thing that you can get. But I think that Vella opens the opportunity up for people who may not have those means, or may not want to, ultimately.
Crys: Yeah. And I’m still on the fence about whether I’m actually going to publish with Vella. Like I’m really excited about the possibility of Amazon opening up serial publishing for the larger world. But it’s running into a lot of the problems that KDP has already had because another one of the problems is that Amazon develops all of these arms very separately.
So while they’re working with Kindle, because they’re in the Kindle app for the iOS store and fire tablets, their policies and everything else seem copy pasted from like old Kindle stuff instead of like latest Kindle stuff.
And there’s a lot of mass. There’s a lot of legal questions I have. And yeah, I really want it to work because the more viable venues we have the better. But if not, I’m still really in love with serial stuff and I will be publishing like for free on my website then. I’ll do the free to paid thing.
JP: Going back to the tools that we both use for editing.
I, working with Jeff, we have his whole character wheel that he uses. And we also have just like a general document that we can refer to for like character, places, et cetera. I find those so useful during edits, because I will come to a point where either I need a physical location or a description, and those are the points where I find those files helpful.
But even when I was first drafting when we were originally doing the AB process until we realized that was holding us up because we would have to keep up waiting on the other one to continue on. Like voice wise, the discussion we had beforehand as to what does this character sound like, was enough to get that first draft going. And then of course we took some notes on this character wheel, but I didn’t open it at all while I was drafting, because I already knew the voices from the conversation. So that’s why I find these tools super useful. And they’re really helpful during the editing process when they’re needed, but it’s not like you have to open up a hundred screens and go crazy.
Crys: And you don’t have to get it perfect the first time. First of all, it’s never going to be perfect, but you’re not going to like necessarily have to have it really fucking good at any of those first points.
JP: Agreed.
I guess our question to our listeners is: what is your editing process?
Crys: Excellent. And if you would like to join us for our next book club, it is going to be, How to Write Manga by RA Patterson. That may not be the exact title, but it is by RA Patterson. We’ll have a link in the show notes and you can join us on Patreon to get updates about those and to vote on our next book. Thanks so much for joining us this week.
JP: See ya later.
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