E58 – How Far Our Writing Has Come

Show Notes

In this episode of the Revision Wizards podcast, co-hosts Miss Catherine M.H. and VE Griffith discuss the journey of writing and the significant improvements that come with editing and practice. Catherine shares an excerpt from her first attempt at a novel in her youth, highlighting its flaws and contrasting it with a more recent first draft to illustrate her progress. They both reflect on their early writing experiences, including initial feedback, the impact of learning about self-editing, and the value of continued effort. The hosts emphasize that writing is a skill that develops over time, akin to learning a musical instrument or a sport, and encourage listeners to persevere through the challenges of drafting and revising. They also touch upon the importance of learning from feedback and the ongoing process of refining one’s authorial voice.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com
Lon’s Twitter/X: @lonvarnadore1
Lon’s Instagram: @lon_scribbler

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2638

Transcript

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Miss Katherine M.H. and I’m joined by my far away weather mage co-host V.E. Griffith.

[V.E. Griffith]
Today’s episode is number 58 and we’re going to talk about how far our writing has come and what we’ve learned through editing.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
This is exciting because I have a book, and that’s in quotes here guys, that I wrote when I was 18. So this was me, no, no, I think I was 19. It was, yeah, I just turned 19, it was the summer, and I decided I was going to write a book.

I’m really going to write a book because I’ve like dabbled a few times here and there with writing in high school, but never anything, never anything good. If I could find some of those, it would be interesting. But I have what I really tried to write when I was 19 that I thought was going to be this huge breakthrough story idea and it was going to be great.

Halfway through, I realized that it was shit. The idea is still fun, but I was going to dump every trope, every genre, everything I could think of that I would ever and every kind of point of view that I could try to see what I enjoyed writing. So that part really, really helped me out.

And I do apologize, I’m just getting over being sick, so if you hear it in my voice or you hear me coughing every now and then, super sorry about that. We’re going to try to… I’m going to try as if I do the audio production.

Do you hear this, VE? All right. He’s going to try to cut out as much as my coughing for you as he can.

You’ve never heard this besides that first like two sentences that I tried to read for you. And I’m going to read the third paragraph in, which is actually, by the way, looking at this about paragraph six. I don’t know if you can see it, but the paragraph is huge.

Yeah. They are not like legit paragraphs, like a writer.

[V.E. Griffith]
Roll the tape.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Oh, yeah. So I’m going to read this to you. As a reminder, I am dyslexic, so if I stumble over it, it’s probably that bad that my dyslexia is just like, yeah, you’re on your own.

So here I go. This is a first draft from the book that I called Steampunk. Real imaginative.

There was something even more different about this flea market than any of those found in the modern day. In the middle of the market was a building. This building was something that many people surrounded to get what was inside.

Many wanted to buy or watch what merchandise was auctioned off. Many stood waiting for it to start. The building’s merchandise could only be found in very few markets, and this building held some of the best and some of the most illegally acquired merchandise to sell to people.

[V.E. Griffith]
Wow.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. Yeah, guys. Oh, and the names, the names that I chose, right?

Creel, Crail. Sure. Like that’s not a tongue twister for my poor brain to say.

Creel was waiting for his father to buy. He hated this part of the shopping list, but was mandated to it for his first year of college. Can tell who I was in college at that point.

But yeah, so that is a first draft of my first ever I want to be an author book.

[V.E. Griffith]
I hope you don’t mind my saying, and you know I love you. That sucked.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That was so bad. And I thought that was the best thing on the planet. So yeah, a lot of passive voice, lot of unnecessary nothings.

Like this was, wow. And I gave it to people to read. And I had like three people actually not, they were like, okay, I could see where this is going.

That sounds cool. They were not readers, clearly. So yeah, that is an example of when I first decided to start writing.

As a, if you had had that come across your desk, what kind of advice would you have had for little old 19 year old me?

[V.E. Griffith]
What I would say is that you need more reading and you need more practice writing. And you need to work on the passive voice a lot. My old advice that works very well for removing passive voice, you remove the words was, were, and had from your writing vocabulary, and you will force yourself to write in active voice.

I know that sometimes was is necessary in sentences, especially in dialogue. You’ve heard me say that before too. But if you can reduce their number, you will increase the activity in your sentences.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. Looking back at it, I was a very advent, admin reader. I was reading at least three books a week at that time.

So I was very into reading. I did not know how to write. That is very clear.

Looking at that, even like going to sections later on, because there’s about 200 pages, by the way, single space, might I add in 12 font written. Apparently, even then I was an overwriter.

[V.E. Griffith]
If you had brought that to me as a professional editor at the time, I wouldn’t even take your money. I’d read one paragraph and refund your money because it’s not ready for editing, which obviously now you know, but it was not ready for prime time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
No, not at all. It wasn’t even ready for my eyeballs apparently now. It is fun to pull this book out and see how far I’ve come.

So like I said, that was a first draft. Let me read you a first draft paragraph now. Again, if I stumble, it is not hopefully because it’s bad, but mostly because reading out loud is really sometimes hit or miss for me being dyslexic.

[V.E. Griffith]
Here we go.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
He ripped the blankets off and tripped out of the bed. The sheets tangled around one foot as if he had kicked them off in his sleep. His clothes were soaked and the sweat made his hands slip on the metal floor when he tried to get up.

Ridge couldn’t stay out in the open. His body screamed to wake the others, but he moved without really understanding why his body did it. He scrambled under his bed, panting like he had just run one of the stress tests.

A giggle made him pause. He looked to the left and wondered if he was still sleeping. A person was under the bed.

The body contorted with hair hanging on the floor. It reached a hand up and felt around the edge of the mattress. It’s under the bed too, he thought as he tried to get a breath in.

So that is now my writing.

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s way better.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Much, yes. So this is my first drafting now. Now that I can actually read it.

Yes.

[V.E. Griffith]
And it does still need work, but that’s what you would expect from a first draft, but that’s a much, much better first draft. So how did you get from there to here?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Great question. How do you want me to break that down better? So some of it is not giving up.

Like I really want to write a book. During steampunk, when I was writing that, I thought the hardest thing was trying to write the book. I didn’t realize how much work goes into the book once it’s done.

That wasn’t something even on my radar. It didn’t even register. Like my brain went, you write the book, you hand it off to a publisher, they send it to an editor, they polish it and we publish the book.

That’s what the idea of writing a book was to me. It was, I write the thing, I send it, my editor makes it sound better, and then I get paid. Not, not how the world works.

So I kept writing. One of the things I think that helped me out was I was a dishwasher at a job and we were allowed to listen to music. And for a while I was listening to documentaries because I really love listening to documentaries and watching them.

And for some reason, I decided to type in, in YouTube, how to write a book and Jenna Morassi came up and I love her YouTube channel. Amazing. The, I didn’t realize what I was missing out until I started listening to her short videos.

When I say short, it was like 15 minutes. So it was like something I could listen to and digest and be like, oh my God, that makes sense. And it was, it was the first time I heard her talk about, and anybody really mentioned the idea of editing besides you get an editor.

And I was like, all right, whatever. But it was, she talked about self editing and what you have to do before it goes to an editor. And it was like, mind blown.

I was like, I’m sorry, you do what? I had just finished, I think writing scandals pen when I found Jenna’s channel. And I was like, oh, oh, there’s more work to do.

And there’s a lot more work for me to do first. And I really started diving in. So like I started listening to podcasts about writing, about editing, lots and lots of YouTube, I listened to so much YouTube, mostly because that’s where I find all my podcasts, where it was just learning about it.

I think I did like two workshops, but all the workshops were focused on plotting. And like, here’s how you outline and I just was like, Nope, nope, I’m not an outliner. Doesn’t work for me.

I tried it doesn’t work. And NaNoWriMo helped me out, which is sad because like it is a weird thing like to know that scandals pen wouldn’t have come about if it wasn’t for NaNoWriMo. And now NaNoWriMo is being like, demolished, not demolished, taken down, I don’t know, deactivated.

It’s ending an era is ending friends. So that helped me out. I did get books on how to write, which all of them talk about outlines, which I don’t do.

So that didn’t help. But I think it’s why my editing passes. I have so many of them now.

Because I won’t like I didn’t learn in quotes, how to edit the correct way. Like originally, I went through like the first edit of scandals pen was to make sure I got character names, right. That was my first pass through.

Wasn’t like, Oh, you should probably look to make sure your plot made sense. No, it was I have 17 different Jameses. And I only one or because like, and it was I was using popular names for the Victorian era, which makes sense.

You would have 17 different Jameses and 16 Roberts and Charles’s. But the readers not going to know the difference. You know, both of her brothers for a while were named James and I didn’t even realize it.

Yeah. So it was it was that that was my first pass through. So each time I’ve done editing, and then gotten into writing communities, and talked more about writing, my writing has gotten better.

And then I’ve learned, I personally like my author voice better. And that has really helped me. So not only do I hear the voices in my head, but I can also hear my voice now, which is really nice.

So my voice can tell them to shut up for maybe about two minutes. And I can get some of my my little pieces in. And it’s, it’s become less shocking to me my writing, which might sound like it might sound strange, because you you outline, but I didn’t.

Eleanor figured out things before I did. Let’s put it that way. I wrote it.

I had no idea. She had figured out like a full blown connection between I’m trying I’m trying not to give any good like giveaways. She figured out the connection between the prince and someone.

Before I even knew the prince was gonna be in the book. So like when I went back to try to like figure out I was like, all right, she’s mentioning this scandal. We’ve got this timeline.

And I went back and I was like, girl, you figured out something that I didn’t even know. Like, and I’m writing it. So my writing surprises me less.

Now. Now it makes sense. Like I have that conversation better with my characters ahead of time.

So it’s almost like I get to know the book and the character faster than I used to with my writing.

[V.E. Griffith]
I started at 13 taking a course from a man named Warren Norwood. He was a science fiction and fantasy author. He put together this course called writing fiction for profit.

And if you look at it now, if you look at those course materials, they’re very much of their time, which was the early 90s. Nothing about independent publishing or anything like that. It was all about how to get an agent, how to get a, you know, how to get an editor, how to market your book, the right way to format your manuscript on the paper that you put in a box and sent to an editor, and then your editor sent the manuscript back, and you put the manuscript in another box.

So you didn’t have to print them out again. It was that kind of, that kind of advice. Then the other half of it was about the art of writing.

Half of it was writing the art, half of it was writing the business. And so he went through things like editing passes and world building and character and dialogue and story arc and things like that. And so that was kind of my first exposure to how writing worked.

And then I started writing. And I took the second course in his series called Advanced Fiction Writing, which was otherwise known as Hack and Slash. And in Hack and Slash, I got my first exposure to what an editor does with a red pen.

And we read our stuff, and he divided us into groups, and our groups read our stuff and went after it with a red pen. And it was very helpful. It was moderated so that everything was constructive.

And especially for me, because I had to learn that line between constructive and destructive, because I was 13, and 13-year-olds don’t have sometimes that social awareness to couch their comments in the correct terms, so I needed some help with that. He then put me into a writing group that grew out of Advanced Fiction Writing and has since produced several published authors, one of whom now makes her full-time living as a published TradPub author. Nice.

Yeah. And so that was kind of my first exposure. And I have been writing off and on ever since.

I got serious about writing probably in 2015 or 2016 with nanobooks that are now trunk novels. I’ve always had an awareness that there’s more to writing than just putting it on a page and printing it out and shipping it off. So where I’ve changed is not in the awareness that I needed to but in how I edit and in what my process is for first drafting and for editing.

So whereas I used to simply read and kind of make changes, now I read with a purpose and make changes with a purpose. We’ve talked in the past about my editing process, so I’ll skip most of that, but when I do my passes, I read specifically for a reason. And I read, you know, looking at dialogue or looking at world building or looking at the white room problem that we’ve talked about before, you know, two heads in a white room just talking to each other.

So all of that experience now informs my editing both on a professional level and on a personal level. So it’s been really helpful. I got into podcasts through, I forget what they called the podcast at the time, but everybody remembers them as Johnny, Sean, and Dave.

I forget the name of the podcast. Anyway, Johnny, Sean, and Dave were my first exposure to writing podcasts. Since then, I’ve branched out to other podcasts like Joanna Penn and Jeff Elkins and Jay Thorne when he was in the writing space, and Rachel Heron, a friend of the show, and Sasha Black, a friend of the show, who’s been on the podcast a couple of times.

And, you know, all of those people and all of those guests that they’ve had have given me something to pay attention to. Oh, I never thought about it this way. Let me go back and look at my paragraph in light of diversity or in light of the white room problem, you know.

And I hadn’t, in a lot of ways, I hadn’t thought about some of those things. And so, again, they gave me just another way to look at my manuscript and make it better before I hand it to anybody else. Whether or not I actually make it better before I hand it to anybody else is kind of something you can argue about, but they put me on the right path.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, I think for me it was really author voice. I love having developed one and having one so different depending on the genre. You’ve read Scandal’s Pen, that style of writing that I just read from my space op are very different.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yes, yes, they are very different.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It’s fun. I think having dabbled and written that monster dump really helped me out. I don’t know, have you ever written a monster dump where like you just, whatever, we’re putting it in?

You want the space let’s do it.

[V.E. Griffith]
No, I haven’t. My first drafting is so slow that I don’t do, I underwrite. My first Tron novels are, you know, that first 2015 or 2016 nano novel is probably in the neighborhood of 35,000 words.

And it’s a complete story. It’s got a beginning, middle, and an end. It sucks as a male.

And that’s something that came through in the novel that I’ve handed off to you, where I wanted to get to 80 to 100, and I got to, I think, 50 or 55. And so it needs work. It just needs more editing.

And, you know, part of what I’ve handed it off to our friends to do is help me figure out where that needs to be.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think editing really did help me, like, get better. And I’m working with someone right now. They feel like they thought they had it.

And now that they’re starting like the coaching and the, because this is their first draft. And now that they’re looking back and looking at the work of it, they’re like, I’m such a bad writer. And I was like, I was there.

I have the book in my closet to prove it. I was there. You just, it’s gonna take work.

It is a muscle memory. It is like you’re, you build that muscle, and it’s going to remember to do things. It’s going to remember to not talk about a market that’s in the most dumb way possible.

It’s going to learn how to write those short sentences that are going to move things along really fast to make that pacing and then stretch it out to later on to like relax the brain. It’s learning those little things that take time. And they take that practice.

And I think the first time, because you mentioned at 13, you had the first person go through and read Marker. You remember Crys from TALC.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yes. Crys Cain.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
She was the first, um, whoever read Markered something. So that was about five years ago. Yeah.

Five years ago was the first time someone like an actual editor had ever looked over something and read Markered something for me.

[V.E. Griffith]
Was it helpful?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yes. Oh, well, hold on. Not quite the first part.

So the first actual editor to ever go over my work, the first person to ever read Marker my work was my older sister. And my friends, if you hand something to a family member, be prepared for them to either tell you it is amazing. It’s perfect.

You don’t need to worry about anything or for them to brutally rip your work apart. And my sister brutally ripped my work apart. She meant it in the kindest way.

And I didn’t talk to her for about three weeks after.

[V.E. Griffith]
This is why you don’t give your stuff to family members.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, I was I was so pissed. And that was putting it lightly. I couldn’t understand how she couldn’t see the image in her head, how she didn’t understand what the characters were doing.

And after about three weeks, I sent her back a message. Thank you so much for taking the time to look over my first chapter. It means a lot to me.

And I was able to sit down and look at my writing. And I think like actually sit there and be like, you’ve got some work to do. And if other people aren’t seeing what I want them like that, I can see then clearly I have work to do.

So it did it did take me some time. And from that I learned to just nod and smile if I’m talking to someone like and they’re giving me direct feedback immediately versus and then take that step back and really think about like the actual feedback because I think we did a little thing right where I gave one of our personal updates, where I gave you direct feedback. And as I got it, and very few spots where I sat there and had to pump the brakes and be like, we are friends, VE and I are friends.

It is not kind to call them all kinds of names. And I had to like sit there and be like, it is it’s gonna be okay. He doesn’t understand.

And I’m like, he doesn’t understand. And then I was like, no, it’s, um, take a step back. Think about it.

So when Chris did it, it was it was definitely a weird, weird experience, because we did it live for one of the the episodes. So that was also a very, very strange where I’d want to say something, but knew not yet, like you actually have to digest what they’re saying. So I think that’s also helped with my writing is being able to take that pause.

I’ll come back to it. And then I can come back to it.

[V.E. Griffith]
I remember getting my first chapter back red panned. And I cried. Oh, I cried.

It was it was I understand today that the comments were right. And they were kind. And they were on point.

And they were helpful. And they were exactly what I needed. But oh, God, did it hurt.

So I would say and and to be fair, I was 13.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It’s okay. If you cry when you’re older to guys, it can hurt sometimes.

[V.E. Griffith]
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sometimes the comments are like, Oh, my God.

So what I would say is always take a day or two after you read the comment before you respond. And just if, if socially, it’s necessary to give an immediate response. The immediate response is, let me take a couple of days to digest this.

Yes, you very much for your, you know, and then step back for it for a day or a week, and then come back to it. Because a lot of times you’re going to find that the comments that you hate, or the comments that you think are biting and sarcastic and nasty, are not they just are critical of your writing. And they want to help you with your writing.

But of course, we all think our writing is perfect the first time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Nope, you’ve seen it. You’ve heard it, not seen it. God, I wouldn’t put your eyeballs through that.

I just had to put your ears through it.

[V.E. Griffith]
If you haven’t put a stake through your ears already, you know.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So we all start somewhere, though. That’s, that’s what I really like to, to show that it’s maybe one day when I’ve published like 10 books, I will pull a little steampunk back out of the cabinet. And we can read, again, a different passage probably, because the whole book is bad.

Maybe, maybe we’ll read some dialogue. Oh my god, the dialogue. I didn’t even get to the dialogue.

And we can read something and see, again, how far like a first draft has come just by, you know, practicing. You don’t become a pianist overnight. Most people don’t.

And you don’t become like a quarterback on, you know, the top football team of whichever one wants to play in the Super Bowl this year overnight. It’s something that takes time. Writing is just the same thing.

It takes just as much energy mentally to write as it does to do other things.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yes, writing is work. It doesn’t seem like work. And a lot of times our friends and family don’t think it’s work and they don’t treat it like work, but it’s work.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think that’s all I’ve got. Keep it up. That’s all you need.

Just keep at it because it will get better. Can’t get any worse.

[V.E. Griffith]
Keep writing, keep editing, keep reading.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That’s a good one. Good one to add.

[V.E. Griffith]
All right. Well, then we will see everybody next time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Stay magical.

[V.E. Griffith]
Bye.

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