Linda Lee Kane on Revising & Editing, #Giveaway

 Please welcome author Linda Lee Kane. She's talking about Revising & Editing today. And there are Giveaways! One Kindle copy giveaway of THE BLACK MADONNA to one commenter!

 

 

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  Over to Linda Lee Kane now...

I write historical fiction for the same reason people believe in God, to give meaning and order to life, or at least give it truth where truth may be lacking. 

Before you decide how to revise, it helps to have something that you have written to revise, like a first draft. When I write, I write with passion, emotion, I spill my guts out all over the pages, the next draft must bring to bear that very critical organ, the brain.

It’s okay if the first draft sucks; it’s supposed to suck. The only thing that needs to be done with a first draft is to finish it. Time and time again I hear people tell me that ‘they really have a great story to write,’ sadly I had said that same thing until someone told me ‘to just do it.’ So I did. When writing a first draft just get something down on paper. Be reckless, be shameless, be irresponsible and self-indulgent, but get it written down.

When you write your first draft, do not edit. Editing and writing are two different things, keep that in mind. When you edit your book you must be an emotionless diagnostician, probing each word, sentence, paragraph, grammatical error with a chisel and a hammer if need be.

Do not revise in the throes of creative ecstasy, or when you’re angry, upset, exhausted, depressed, you get the picture. Distance yourself from your manuscript for just a little while so you’re not so involved, take a break. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, familiarity breeds contempt, or worse, a false sense of perfection.

There are three things that I do as a writer once I’ve distanced myself, I ask a friend to read it.  I also read it aloud to myself after I have printed out each chapter. I pull out my trusty pen, and I begin the process of dissection. Another thing that could help is to have someone read it out loud, you might get a different perspective. The reader is not there to critique, but to react, to help you hear in your own words what you need to hear.

The ultimate solution is to pay for a skilled editor. For a price you can have your pick, but just because they are experienced doesn’t mean they are perfect, they could be a poor fit for your particular style of writing. Professional or not, an editor’s opinion is just that, their opinion.

When I revise I write multiple drafts to discover what I have been writing, and then to refine it into its ultimate form.  Sometimes a revision is a matter of re-envisioning, From our first drafts we may take a character, a scene, an opening sentence, possibly the theme you began with, or not...the rest is disposable words. And yet, if it has served up any one of those possible things, all that writing that you have done on your first draft wasn’t in vain.

Linda Lee Kane's latest release is THE BLACK MADONNA

Luci de Foix was nine when her parents were killed in a car accident. But was it an accident?

Unbeknownst to Luci, a group known as The Order has been watching her family for many years, waiting for the day that a diary written in the fourteenth century would be delivered to her family—a book that contains a key to a lost codex—and they would do anything to get it. Early one morning, when Luci is twenty-nine, a bloodied young man delivers a book, claiming it’s from her late grandparents.

 Plagued by panic attacks that have left her crippled, Luci struggles to overcome her fears, avenge the death of her family, and search for the lost codex.

 But who can she trust? Everyone seems intent on betraying her, even the gorgeous, enigmatic Max, a man with secrets of his own.

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