I’ve put together a scholarship contest, and will be giving away 5 full scholarships to my upcoming course, “How To Revise Your Novel.” (Or smaller-value cash prizes—but still GOOD prizes.)
And I put together a nice little handout to help contestants come up with ideas, though it’ll also be useful for writers in general. The handout is The 101 Worst Things That Go Wrong In First Draft. I pulled all 101 of them from the 146 unique writing disasters I discovered in the survey I did a while back.
AND I did a demo video (which is … well … there’s a reason I don’t make many videos, but I do think it’s kind of funny). I based it on #27 from the handout.
Get the contest details, watch the video, and get your copy of the handout. All here.
Holly, I seriously can’t wait for this course. I need it bigtime. Just signed with an agent and have sent my first set of revisions in (for the 2nd book in a trilogy), but am working on revisions for the 1st book, and writing the 3rd. it’s that “publishable speed” thing I need.
Wanted to tell you too that I love your teaching style. Thinking Sideways has already helped me clarify so much in my own head. I’ve realized I was slapping a gag on my Muse when I should have been giving her a megaphone!
Am going to do my darnedest to contribute to the video fun. 🙂
Thanks a million.
🙂
Gracie
Would love to apply but the soonest I will be able to revise my second work will be thanksgiving (Hopefully). The one I’m working on now has been a bear. What I want to do finish a work then revise the one before.
I have been taught you should let a work sit at least a year before revising. I ‘m not sure how common that is, but it’s from a couple workshops, and from people who helped me with my first novel.
Also I want to finish this one before revising anything. I’ll keep abreast of developments
Considering I’m not going to be awarding the scholarships until January 19th, you’ll have plenty of time if you want to play. 😀
As for letting work sit for a year—I’d have frickin’ starved to death if I did that. Frequently, I had only a week to let a book sit.
It’s entirely possible to learn to be objective at publishable speed—which is part of what I’ll be teaching in the course.
Read “The 101 Worst Things That Go Wrong in the First Draft” before I started writing. I am incredibly guilty of the Infodump, and several others, but what was a real kick in the pants was “Writing scenes that don’t matter”.
I’m writing the second book of a trilogy (God, such a cliché), so many of the scenes I’ve been thinking about since I started the first book, and somewhere along the line I forgot if they were important or not. I fell so in love with all these character moments, that I kept every single one of them in a massive glut of a chapter.
It surprised me that I’d let myself do it too, because I’ve always strictly followed the rule “Every scene should be doing at least two things”, otherwise I know even before I write it that the scene isn’t working.
I am particularly interested in what you write about promises, because I feel like many books I read make inadvertent promises that are never acknowledged, let alone fulfilled. It’s of particular interest to me, because a series really needs a strong ending, otherwise the whole journey becomes a bit of an insult to the reader. The author owes the reader after three books.