How To Revise Your Novel has required a lot of work, a lot of time and a LOT of work­sheets, but Lesson Seven (which ended up using more paper than my novel did) took the cake. And..it was worth it.

Here at last l acquired a vocab­u­lary to define not one but sev­eral miss­ing ele­ments that before I had no way to express, AND saw the means of chan­ging these things, so my story can indeed become the novel that I wanted. “Grateful” is just the tip of the ice­berg. “Empowered” “inspired” and “determ­ined” are in there too.

It’s hard to ima­gine a more sig­ni­fic­ant les­son, but it is after all only Lesson 7 of 21, so it’s safe to assume there will be more value to fol­low. Knowing the prob­lem is the first step, know­ing how to solve it is prob­ably num­ber two, but actu­ally doing the work of fix­ing it is still to come. There’s still a lot of work ahead of me, but I can see the prize more clearly now.

Thank you, thank you, Holly.

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…but I’m work­ing on How To Revise Your Novel again, and actu­ally mak­ing pro­gress. The goal is to be done the course by Christmas. It is com­ing, oh yes.

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In the midst of pre­par­ing my daugh­ter to go to Africa this sum­mer I haven’t kept updat­ing as much as I should, but I have been mak­ing baby steps of progress.

Lesson 4 is done, Lesson 5 well into. This one is bring­ing each scene down to a “VS” state­ment, ie Main Character’s Mandate VS Her fear of Heights. This brings the scene con­flict into sharp relief, we then describe what that basic con­flict looks like and add Why It Matters.

It is harder and harder to find writers that I enjoy after learn­ing these things — but the ones I do enjoy are SO wonderful!

Hopefully I will be one of those writers before too long.

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Recovering from a week away for a fam­ily wed­ding, I pulled out Lesson Four again and spent some time writ­ing a new “one sen­tence sum­mary” of my first Nanonovel, Gift of the Ancients.

I had a one sen­tence sum­mary for the story before I wrote it, but Holly Lisle’s way of going about it is dif­fer­ent than Randy Ingermanson’s (I used his Snowflake method to plan the novel in the last ten days of October 2007). As usual, at first I res­isted chan­ging a pre-​learned method, but I have to say I’m very pleased with the res­ults. The new sum­mary brings the story to life bet­ter. As I work on more things in com­ing weeks some things in the sen­tence may change, but over­all I think we have a winner.

The pur­pose of a one sen­tence sum­mary is a mar­ket­ing tool. It’s a fast but com­plete response to the ques­tion “So what is your book about?” and is your first line of attack in try­ing to interest an editor. It’s import­ant, and not easy to do. My ori­ginal one sen­tence was:

Forbidden friends must reach and activ­ate an ancient weapon to save their land from inva­sion.

Ingermanson recom­mends a 15 – 17 word limit to keep your sound-​bite short. It’s accur­ate, but doesn’t hook the way I wanted it to.

In How To Revise Your Novel, Holly Lisle allows for 30 words, but advises includ­ing your Protag, Antag, Plot, Setting and Twist and breaks down just how to do it. The new sen­tence is:

A strong-​willed trouble­maker secretly dis­cov­ers Ancient tech­no­logy and must use it to pro­tect low-​tech Ympyra from power­ful invaders, but an enemy becomes a friend and noth­ing works out like she thought.

The twist needs some work, but this is by far the stronger sen­tence. Anyone agree?

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Today I fin­ished Lesson Three, which just took more brain power than was avail­able for me to fin­ish it quickly. I’ve read through Lesson Four and I’m excited to get to work on it as well.

Besides the How To Revise Your Novel course, to aid my writ­ing I am also doing, with my homeschool­ing son, Shurley English Grade Seven, which prom­ises that I will ‘fear no gram­mar’ upon completion.

This course requires some of my lim­ited resources as well, and may slow my pro­gress through HTRYN, but the time is right as I can teach two of us at once.

A week of travel begins for me tomor­row with little oppor­tun­ity for writ­ing, so updates will likely cease until the last week of May, when I can get back to proper work.

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Almost made it to the end of Lesson Three, but life intruded. Will fin­ish up tomor­row and begin Lesson Four on Monday.

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Scene cards went well today, I think I’m get­ting the hang of it. The ‘sequels’ (see Techniques of the Selling Writer) are a little harder to handle, but I’m get­ting some kind of a grip on them.

It’s encour­aging to see the work still pro­gress­ing even as I have low per­sonal resources this week. Every step mat­ters, even the small ones.

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Almost a quarter of the way through Lesson Three, assign­ing each scene (defined as when some­thing sig­ni­fic­ant changes) a sen­tence describ­ing all the essen­tial ele­ments of the scene, or not­ing miss­ing elements.

I have a hard time going from big-​picture to small-​picture in terms of how sig­ni­fic­ant things are. The first quarter intro­duces so many things, and while there are some dra­matic twists to get the story going, other things are less obvi­ous but still important.

I am hop­ing it will go easier tomor­row, where a lot more plot action takes place.

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