At work, I’ve gotten very used to beating MS Word with a hammer so it formats documents approximately how I want them. In comparison, formatting my fiction manuscripts is like skipping through the park on a sunny day with ice cream. One font, no headings, simple header? Wonderful.

All the beating did make me aware of an MS Word feature that I’ve been meaning to apply to my writing for a while, though. My editor officially accepted book 3 (YAY) the other week, so I created a comparison between my first draft and the final draft. The only difference between that final draft and what you’ll read sometime in 2014 is some copyediting.

Ta-da:

This is a random section in the middle of the novel. Don’t bother zooming in, I was careful to make sure the resolution won’t let you read it. Fat red is added text, thin red is strike-through deleted text, and green is when a section was transported from one place to another.

A lot of writers talk about the quirks of their “process”, and I’m delighted by the chance to illustrate mine visually. I’m fundamentally an additive writer: you’ll notice that I have a pattern of a (minorly work-tweaked) section that survived all the way from the first draft, a short deleted section, and then a longer, better added new scene. Now, there were 2-3 drafts between the two files used for the comparison, but I suspect that you’d see a similar pattern even if you compared each step individually.

Now I’m full of curiosity about other writers. How much survives from their very first draft? What do their additions and deletions look like?

Late-breaking news! My giveaway on Goodreads has gone live, so now you can enter to win a signed ARC before it’s available in stores!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Tarnished

by Rhiannon Held

Giveaway ends April 13, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Outlining is hard.

I’m jotting down some notes belatedly tonight on a book later in the Silver series–the sister helped me brainstorm it over the holidays, and I figured it’s been long enough for the ideas to have played survival of the fittest with my memory, and only the coolest ones have survived.

When I was a child my father had a shirt with the old cartoon–you’ve probably seen it before–where a professor points to one step in a student’s complicated mathematical proof on the blackboard as troublesome: “Then a Miracle Occurs.”

Tonight I am discovering all those steps in that future novel.

A little background: my outlining is not really outlining. My outlines mostly end up looking like this:

POV 1: Thing happens
Other thing
They argue about stuff–get idea to do third thing

POV 2: Get to other place
Thing
Notices stuff like x, y, z

So that lends itself quite unfortunately to points like “They escape” “They fight, she wins.” They escape!! Some…how. I’ll get back to you on that step.