Anne Faye

Another National Novel Writing Month is in the books - I hope all of you who undertook it achieved at least some writing progress. My project for this month (plus a few days in December) was to work on two book projects. After I had finished The Rose Ring , my boys wanted me to write an action/adventure story with them. It took over two years of working on it every once in a while, and then it needed to be edited and formatted. This was really their story - I served mostly as a scribe and editor. The story ended up being about 20,000 words. During the past month, I did the final edits, proofread and formatted and gave them each a copy on St. Nicholas' Day as an early Christmas present: One of them wants to write a sequel. I don't know if that will ever happen, but it was one of those projects that was fun to do and I'm glad that they can have a physical reminder of the experience. As for my own project, my task was to revise the novel I finished several months ago. ...

I have a story that I need to seriously rewrite. Honestly, the process scares me a bit - much more than the initial writing did. That was fun! This will be painful. I came across this quote from Stephen King in the January 2012 issue of Writer's Digest : When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

I've been drinking in the pages of the latest issue of Writer's Digest . So many good ideas! So little time! I did come across this great idea in "The Geyser Approach to Revision" by James Scott Bell: "To do the best revision possible, you need to recapture the feeling you had while writing your draft in the first place. One way to do this is through music. Find several pieces that move you to feelings consistent with your book. . . Compile a playlist of songs that evoke the mood - or better yet, a medley of the various moods - you hope to convey in  your story, and use it as background each time you sit down to self-edit."