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Yesterday I got my feedback from the Editor Jeni Chappelle, which means my little Writer In Motion story is ready for its final draft.

I talked in my last week’s post about positive feedback and accepting it, so today I’ll only sum up the comments as I understood them and get right on with the final draft itself.

As always, if you’d like to skip the talk and get to the story, click here.

What I heard (read) Jeni say, and some of my thoughts:

The opening works: it’s got sense of setting along with moving the plot, plus nice imagery

Some phrasing conflicts with the fairytale-y tone of the story, and/or is vague and bordering on too flowery. I found just cutting these was the best course of action.

The #s as scene separators get a bit jarring when there’s so many in such a short piece

This sentence—On the eve of the equinox, the Spirit fell from her skies by the wish of a lonely child, and concocted a plan to trick her.—could use some more explanation. This is a big one, and one that gave me a bit of a headache. The plan itself is explained in the rest of the story, and I didn’t want to clutter this opening by infodumping that—but the rest, in my mind, just is. So I cheated a bit and sought consult with my writerly friends, and they suggested it was the “tricking her” part that needed clarity—which I can definitely see now that it’s been pointed out, and I hope addressing that helps some of the confusion.

I could cut and tweak some phrasings to lower the wordcount. A couple of these suggestions, I think, are style preferences I’m not too keen on changing, BUT a vast majority had me going “oh, duh” in mild embarrassment. It’s a good thing, though; gives me more words to use elsewhere as needed!

On the note of adding things and elaborating, this sentence—It was the birthday of the giants’ matriarch, an evening festive and alive with colour, and the Spirit feared.—feels incomplete

The styling of italics for dialogue in the past story, while using regular quotes for it in the present story, doesn’t work. I wish, I wish I got more on this. It’s something a CP pointed out last week as well—not seeing the point of it—so I really am seeing it as a thing to address.. This was my second little headache, and at the time of writing this I’m sure of one thing: it’s a matter of consistency. I need to make it consistent. Whether that means making it all regular dialogue OR making it all italics… I’m not sure! There’s something about that italicising approach that I feel adds to the tone and atmosphere, and I think this is me convincing myself to just go with that. Call me whatever you will—it’s calling to me, and where better to experiment than in this story?

Overall it’s a good story, and the way I reveal information as well as emotional connection both work (she even went as far as to use the words “brilliant” and “impressed” respectively—and here I was, genuinely expecting to hear none of it works and none of it is good enough)

Receiving all this feedback, I was inspired to work on the final draft right away. There were a couple of things I definitely needed to think about (looking at you, dialogue formatting), but overall I was happy.

I must stress this: I really appreciate the fact that the comments came from a place genuinely aiming to improve this story, as opposed to aiming to change its core. It’s the approach that I believe distinguishes a good editor, and I’m very grateful for it.

Here’s what came out of it all: the final draft.

This week, my Writer In Motion story went through a round of CP feedback. I was assigned two—and two stories to critique myself in return—and I sent the story to them with more than a slight curiosity. I’ve been posting my thoughts and doubts about this short over the past couple of weeks, as it went from its first draft to the self-edited second, and I got a couple of words of first-impression feedback along the way, but I really wanted to know how it’d do with the readers.

This week, I edited it based on that feedback—but first I want to talk a little bit about something very important, very easily overlooked, and for me very hard to do: trusting compliments.

If you’d like to skip past the talk to the story itself, you can click here.

For my week one and week two posts, click on those links.

So, trusting compliments.

For the longest time, I saw no use in compliments. The logic went something like this: they don’t tell me what’s wrong; they don’t tell my inner critic they’re right; they don’t give me thoughts on what to change, and so they must be useless. And oh, what a quick and simple slide it is from “useless” to “wrong”. It wasn’t before long that my brain could find a hundred reasons to discredit any compliment or positive piece of feedback I received—not because I thought the critics were dishonest, but because there’d always be something. “They don’t know about X.” “They wouldn’t be saying so if they only considered Y.” “They’re not seeing the Z because of S.” There was always a reason why the compliment wasn’t really, actually applicable.

Well, this experience challenged that a bit, and I decided to make a conscious effort to work through it. With this experience, there was no illusive “something” to discredit the positive feedback that came my way: I had posted everything. The readers saw (or could’ve seen) the first draft; the thought process; my own to-edit notes and doubts; the second draft that came out of it all, and more notes on that; and above it all, a finished story. The Imposter Syndrome head of the many-headed beast that is my inner critic looked for things to snap its jaws at, but it wasn’t as simple as usually—and reader, I leaned into that. I chose to trust the positives and consider them just as useful as the rest, because useful they are. Accepting positive feedback, I found, can be as complicated a skill as accepting critiques—but one that doesn’t deserve to be looked down upon as much as it often is. We deserve to be proud of our work; we deserve to be happy when others acknowledge its positive sides.

So here is some general positive feedback I received for this WiM story:

The dual timeline works! A couple of people even expressed their surprise at this, considering the length of the story and the fact the timelines are also in different tenses

The prose is poetic and flows well

The story has that fairytale-y feel I was going for

I’m pretty pleased with that. For the most part, these things are telling me that the story as a whole is doing what I had set out to do. Can my mind find things to prod at? Yes. Can it turn to what wasn’t said to try and discredit what was? Oh, absolutely. But I’m not letting it.

That said, I received more than compliments. Before I show you the next draft of the story itself—and then send it off to the Editor for one last round of feedback!—here are some very important points my CPs raised:

The Spirit’s plan in the past story is too underexplained—this was a big one, and one I’m focusing this edit on the most

Related, the reasoning behind “she won’t get back from the mountain” could use some clarity

There’s some pronoun confusion going on at times, as well as Child=Giant confusion

And a smaller one but one I just can’t not mention: hyphenated words get counted as one even when they shouldn’t, so I might’ve technically gone overboard with the wordcount by a few—it was an honest mistake! I never even thought about the hyphens thing until a CP pointed it out thinking I did it on purpose 😅

With all those things in mind, I took a couple of days to think. The feedback felt well-balanced to me, and so I wanted to approach editing in a way that emphasised on things that worked and addressed the things that didn’t. Without further ado, here’s what came out.

It’s November 12, which means we’re a few days into the second week of Writer In Motion: the week when we look at our imperfect first drafts, give them a critical thought or two, and edit them into something slightly less imperfect, before sending them off to CPs for another critique round.

I also have exciting news: I’ve been added to the group lucky enough to receive some feedback from the editor Jeni Chappelle, as well as having my posts featured on the WiM blog. Do check out some of the other participants’ stories in the official first week wrap-up post!

Click here for my Week One post and the first draft of my short story.

Click here if you’d like to skip my process talk and just read this week’s draft.

Alright.

Upon finishing my first draft, I let it rest a couple of days. And during those days, for the most part, I felt like it was the worst thing I’d ever written. In my memory (I had read it in full once at that point, and edited nothing), it was just all kinds of wrong. So I consulted some of the notes I made for myself at the end of my first post, and combined those with some more thoughts, because by now I’m pretty used to combatting my brain’s conviction I’m a horrible writer. What I needed was to pinpoint what really felt wrong on a tangible level, translating intuition into something I can tackle with edits, because knowing WHY something feels wrong makes it much more manageable.

I do this process in my head, so I don’t have all the notes for it, but these are the big points that came out of it:

Both the dual timeline and the vignette-y feeling are something I don’t want to let go of, because those were a big part of what made this story an experiment and I’d prefer to make them both work over changing it all into something more streamlined. (The order of the paragraphs and thoughts within can use some work, though.)

At least one of the storylines lacks a sense of arc. Now, this was a big one, and I identified it as the core of my intuition’s screaming. I had a series of things that happened, but I missed some kind of change in there, some kind of progression. I considered what that would mean for the present story—perhaps the Giant has a secret plan? Perhaps there’s a twist ending?—but that didn’t feel right. It was the past story that had room for an arc of sorts, that needed something to change between that first snippet and the last. So I wondered: when the Spirit fell from the skies at the child Giant’s wish, what did she want? The answer was simple: to go back home. And she’d do everything for it—if only the child hadn’t been quite so lonely.

And so, I tweaked and edited the story with that in mind. I didn’t change the whole thing much—the present story is mostly the same, sans some wording tweaks and general edits—but I aimed to change it in the right way. A title also came to me sometime as the edits were done. I’m not entirely sure where it came from, but I never am with my titles: what matters is that I feel like it somewhat reflects the storytell-y feel of the piece, which is also something I hoped not to lose with this revision.

Without further ado, keep reading for the second draft.

This month alongside NaNo, I’m doing something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I started this blog: writing and editing a short story, and blogging along about my process. I’m happy to be doing so as a part of Writer In Motion, a community and a challenge designed to do exactly that—with the extra of connecting with CPs and editors along the way.

This week the event kicked off with the picture prompt below.

Image by engin akyurt from Pixabay, posted on Writer In Motion Blog by editor Jeni Chappelle

Upon seeing that picture, I didn’t have a story right away—but I knew beyond a doubt two things. One, that light is a cloud spirit returning home to her skies. And two, that girl who holds her hand is a giant, from a nation that builds its cities to reach for the skies, and once when she was a child she tore the spirit from her home.

For some reason, my mind went to cold and mountains, which doesn’t exactly make sense with the actual picture—but that’s just something I decided to roll with. A prompt is a point of departure rather than a destination, and I’m letting the story speak.

In retrospective, taking a walk and writing this whole thing on my phone with my fingers freezing off might’ve had something to do with the cold thing.

Either way, just like that, I had a sentence. And another one. One. The Giant climbs the mountain one narrow, cut-into-the-slope stair at a time, carrying in her arms a dying spirit of the skies. Two. On the eve of the equinox, the Spirit fell from the skies to make true a wish made by a child.

From there, the way those sentences worked—each in its own tense, slightly different in tone and emotion—told me this story would be a bit of an experiment. I would tell of their relationship, the Giant’s and the Spirit’s, through a series of very short vignettes, all woven through with the story of their journey up a mountain, to the tower so high up it crosses from one realm to the next.

And so I had all I needed.

Keep reading for the first, unedited, untouched draft, and some preliminary to-edit notes to myself.

(or third, or fourth, or whichever)

I see a lot of fellow non-native English speakers/writers struggle with the idea of writing in English, be it because of pressure, perfectionism, bad experiences, or self-doubt—so I figured I’d put together a little list of things that helped me along the way, and that I recommend to other writers out there.

Read. This one probably comes as no surprise. But I don’t just mean the great classics they want you to read in school; read everything you can. Read comics, read commercials, read subtitles, read audiobooks, read fanfiction, read quick lines shared by other writers across platforms. There’s value in all of those. Read what you enjoy.

Write. Again, pretty obvious, but needs to be said. Writing on is one of the best ways to improve writing.

Give some thought to grammar. I know, not everyone’s cup of tea—but even a little bit of attention given to it goes a long way. Yes, there are grammar checkers out there, some of them pretty advanced—but they’re not people, and more to the point, they’re not the writer of your story. They can’t understand clever turns of phrase, character emotion, atmosphere and tone and tension, and holding your breath for a powerful reason. They understand the rules, but not how they can be broken in satisfying ways. So giving some thought to grammar (in whichever way you want: analysing others’ writing, playing with it in your own, reading up on theory, practicing from textbooks, etc) is worth some time and effort. Understand the rules, and then find ways for them to serve you.

Get feedback. It can be complicated, especially if you’re just starting out, to share your work with others. My advice is the following: don’t treat the people you’re asking for feedback as your personal (unpaid) editors or proofreaders. Do ask for help and explanations—speaking from experience, most native and non-native English writers will be happy to provide some—but don’t expect them to do the work for you. Something like “You repeatedly mix up present and past tense” is, in the long run, a more useful piece of feedback than having them correct every single one for you. Trust me, you can solve all such problems. All it takes is understanding what makes them problematic, seeing (reading) examples where it’s done right, and practicing until you get them right yourself.

Give feedback. Yes, you can! Reading others’ works critically is a huge step towards understanding why things work and don’t work, and what your own story may need. Think about and note what certain phrasings do for you as a reader, what stands out in a bad way (even if you can’t quite pinpoint why), and how language denotes POV, atmosphere, tone, emotion, and all those lovely things.

Big words do not a writer make. A big, BIG concern I see from a lot of ESL writers is vocabulary. You may think you don’t know enough verbs. That your choice of nouns is boring. That your adjectives aren’t unusual enough. So let me make this a Point: you can write beautiful things without making your reader reach for a thesaurus. Express yourself the way you know how. Use those simple words, and focus on the way you string them together and the picture they’re painting for your reader.

Make use of Google Translate. I’m serious. Will it do a good job translating? No. But back when I started switching to English, I first translated some of my non-English stories. And as one of the first steps, I’d put them through Google Translate—not because I thought it would do the job for me, but because it made the job switch from largely overwhelming “translate this beautiful thing into a language you aren’t totally comfortable with” to “make this readable”. It made such a difference. It made me check and learn unfamiliar words; get a sense of what wonky grammar feels like; and most importantly, explore ways to say things in a way English required, as opposed to forcing the spirit of my first language onto a story that wasn’t supposed to be in it. It made for a really good step before I could easily translate my works directly.

Don’t fear interacting with the native speakers. I know some can be tough. I know some will laugh, or treat you like a child or somehow less, or even go as far as to tell you to stop trying. But here’s the truth: native speakers get lost too. They lose words for things. They forget their grammar. They mess up their rhythm and sentence structure. They misspell stuff all the time. They make mistakes (and it’s okay that they do; we probably make some in our own first languages as well). The worst that can happen to you if you make one is to get corrected. Mildly embarrassing, but let’s look at the facts. One—it’s a whole other language for you! Two—Worst case scenario, you already knew you said something wrong, and/or you know they wouldn’t have pointed it out were you a native speaker—in which case I hereby grant you all the permissions in the world to roll your eyes. But best case scenario? You learn. You get better. Your stories thank you.

Finally, don’t be afraid to try things you aren’t sure about. There’s no spelling mistake, sentence structure issue, or a misused word that’s more powerful than a writer with a story to tell.

Finishing stories is a valuable skill. But it’s not always easy to tell, especially for us non-planners, when a story is really done. Personally, I have three things I consider and combine to tell for sure.

I find the story is finished when the promise given by its opening pages/core premise is fulfilled. Simply, it’s the answer to “why this story”: what exactly is it that I’m telling? What’s a question this story is an answer to?

Arcs, both character and plot. A story is done when there’s been a change in either the character or the character’s surrounding/situation, in such a way that, if you took the character from that point and put them in their own shoes at the beginning, it would no longer develop into the same story. That said, a lot of things change and shape characters along the way, so pinpointing the ending might require thinking about the promise/Question of the story alongside this.

If I’ve successfully brought characters/worlds to life, there’s always more story; more before this one, more after this one, even if the character dies or the world gets destroyed. So I thought of a fun trick. I wonder, at which point does this story I’m writing become backstory? If I were writing a story set right after this one, what is the last thing I would have to weave in as character/world backstory in order for that story to be strong? That point is the ending point of the story I’m actually working on. I do admit, this method comes with a likely side effect of rogue sequels.

Ideas show up in different ways. For me, the most common one is a Character+Choice pitch-type thing, which more or less means my stories tell themselves to me starting around the middle and with a focus on character arc. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes there’s a plot element, like the inciting incident, or a curious piece of the world, or one side of the character/choice pairing without the other.

Usually when that happens I either let the ideas figure themselves out in my mental palace, or just pants the whole thing anyway (depending on the way it’s calling for me)—but I have done enough reverse-engineering to understand what goes on in the back of my mind and how to intentionally develop story elements from one another. So today, I’m going to imagine I was a planning/plotting/outlining type, and talk about some questions I might ask myself depending on my starting point—plot, world, or character—to branch from one element into the others and develop a core of a story.

If I start with a plot point

The first thing I want to figure out is the cause-effect, or rather choice-consequence chain. I want to know what led to this event, and what the outcome is. But I don’t want to think about this or any other element in a vacuum. So to do that, I want to interweave this plot element with elements of the world and character. I wonder:

what kind of world/setting/situation needed to be in place for this event to be possible?

what about the world/setting/situation was disturbed by this event?

how is the world/setting/situation different as a consequence of this event?

who could’ve made a choice that led to this event?

who was, and in what ways, the most affected by this event?

for whom was this event

the best thing that could’ve happened

the worst thing that could’ve happened

the inevitable

the best of two evils

From these, a world and a character are bound to start showing through, and with them (if they aren’t there at the beginning) will come an idea of tone, atmosphere, POV, tense, and the rest. Sometimes one of the answers will be really simple (perhaps the event requires a very specific world/character element and can’t happen any other way); other times it might be a matter of pinpointing whose story to follow.

If I start with a world element

This is how most of my short fiction ideas come around. A curious piece of a world—culture, setting, history—pops into my head and I work from there. Shorts are also different from novels (for me) in that I do more active developing. If I’m starting with the world element, I ask myself these things:

what kind of person belongs?

what kind of person considers this place/culture/habit/history their home?

what kind of person is in conflict with this piece of the world?

what’s a goal one may be pursuing, that this piece of the world makes

difficult

easy

in what forms (and to whom) can this piece of the world serve as an antagonistic force?

what kind of a choice can one make that

complements this piece

conflicts this piece

what led to this piece existing?

what‘s the worse thing that can happen to this piece? Whom would it benefit?

what’s the best thing that can happen to this piece? Whom would it harm?

what kind of a misbelief or a personal lie/wound can this piece of a world inflict upon a person?

I could go on, but these make for a good base. From here, characters and relationships begin to form in ways both conflicting and complementing, all sprouting from the same world-related concept.

If I start with a character

Finally, the one I dare to call the most common. A character pops in, and with them they carry a story—or perhaps they don’t. Often they’re a strong presence, but don’t reveal their secrets without some prodding. Developing/uncovering a character is a feat of its own (just as developing a plot or developing a world), but the core point of developing any single element is to find a way it intertwines with the others. So when a character sparks into life, I want to know:

what kind of setting/situation is necessary for this character to exist?

what (or whom) does this character consider home?

where does this character not belong?

what is this character’s status quo?

what would disturb it?

why would this character make a choice that

harms them

challenges them

changes their current situation

what external element (including other living things)

exists because of this character

doesn’t exist because of this character

frames this character as a hero

frames this character as an antagonist

challenges or conflicts this character

complements this character

affected this character in the past (and how?)

Pieces of the world and plot are now showing through, as well as (hopefully) an idea of other characters who might interact with this first spark. They might still be keeping their secrets—but now the blur around them is clearing up a bit, and from here it’s much easier to find what came before and after the moment I met them.

I’ve focused on the three big elements—world, plot, and character—because I think those are the three most common ones and the three that build the core promise of a story. Other things I mentioned, like atmosphere, tone, POV, or even tense, once the core base is in place, all can benefit from variations of these questions too, and often reveal themselves in the process of finding answers.

Probably one of the most common problems I come across is that of new idea distractions. Really, baby stories sprout left and right and centre, and they’re very good at asking for attention—especially when we’re already working on something else. But what makes me feel a certain kind of way are the solutions I see thrown at these problems, a vast majority saying the same: finish what you’re working on, and push away all these new ideas without a second thought.

As with all easily-given blanket advice, I disagree.

Yes, finishing stories is an important skill, crucial even—not that I wouldn’t be a Real Writer (tm) without it, but I would lack a huge chunk of related skills without it—BUT listening to my writerly intuition and recognising when a story needs to be put aside in favour of something else is a valuable skill in its own right.

So today I want to talk about how I approach these sudden side ideas, and how I tell whether they’re to be pursued or bargained with and convinced to go back to their room.

In short, for me, it boils down to figuring out what about the new idea makes it so shiny, what makes the old idea easily outshined (surprisingly often it means there’s something specific bugging me on intuitive level), and whether the new idea really has what it takes.

Once the newness itself is put aside, I find that the appeal of these bright baby ideas comes down to one of three things, in no particular order:

it’s the right time for that story to be written, and switching is what’s best for me and my stories

it’s not the right time for the previous one, which is also a good thing to recognise

the main one got tricky, or it got quiet and I feel like I’ve lost my way, or I’m at that part of the story. Some people can lose interest in a story if they figure out the ending too early, or a bunch of other reasons, so there’s that too. (If that’s the case, chances are it’ll happen again with the new idea, so knowing there’s something to it beyond the initial spark can make the world of difference)

So, when a new shiny idea shows up and demands attention, I consider:

is there something in the main story that makes me not want to write it?

if yes, I try to pinpoint what it is. Is it fixable?

if it’s a matter of feeling, is it something the new idea fixes in a way that can’t be done otherwise?

what does the new idea have, other than shiny newness, that makes it a story I want/need to write?

is the new idea ready to tackle?

if yes, can I work on both?

To figure out whether the new idea is ready, I do it by writing a loose pitch/query for it. One of two things happens then.

I realise the idea isn’t ready (ie I can’t string together Character(s)+Choice/Conflict+Stakes), in which case off it goes back to the mental palace.

I realise the idea is ready, and from there I’ll either be more excited about it or less excited about it. If it’s more, I go back to the “why” of it. I might write down some paragraphs of prose if they’re in my head and not letting go. And I consider if working on both is an option.

Writing every day—which for me includes writerly things beyond just adding words—is an important part of taking care of my mental health, and a practice many writers swear by as well.

So I made this 30-field wordcount/progress tracker. Can also be used for tracking meds, books, or anything else, daily or otherwise.

Feel free to print it, use it, colour it, and if you like it please share 💜

(I'm still setting up my Patreon, but meanwhile you can buy me a coffee.)

Camp NaNoWriMo started, and summer months mean that my mood is generally not great and my spoons reserve is running low. But I want to participate, and I want to make some progress—so here are five things I do to make it work for me.

1- progress rather than pushing — While it is designed to push one a bit further than an average month, that’s not something I can always afford spoon-wise, but that for sure doesn’t make my progress and efforts less worthy. I’ll always choose steady progress over burning out. When moods and mental strength are low, I focus on goals that mean I did something that got me one step closer to finishing the story—which means a different thing every day. Learning to be okay with that made a world of difference.

2- counting sessions and allowing some flexibility — I want to touch my WIP every day and write something. A writing session can be anything from a sentence to thousands of words, from editing a passage to brainstorming to hours of focused work—depending on what I have the strength and time for each day. The Camp website doesn’t allow “sessions” as a unit, though, so I go with hours. I recommend it because the number (I go with 30–an hour per day) doesn’t seem as hauntingly big as counting minutes might, but any unit would do. I figure out how one converts to the other depending on various factors; an hour might be a real hour of adding words, or an hour might be the effort it took to edit that one paragraph that’s been bugging me for weeks. Cheating? Not in my mind. Camp NaNo is all about flexible goals, and I think allowing myself to measure progress this way gives me a stronger push than forcing the same kind of output every day.

3- bite sized goals — Sometimes I do feel like a bit more of a challenge, and then it’s all about the kinds of goals I set. I set them short-term (“I’ll write X today”) rather than month-long or the like, and I set them in a way that pushes me just a bit further than I’d go anyway. Finish the scene and start the next one. Edit one more page. Write for five more minutes. Get the character to place X in the next session. That kind of thing.

4- writing is more than adding words — I touched upon this already, but it always always bears repeating. There’s a lot to writing—adding, cutting, editing, prettying up, researching, brainstorming, outlining, retyping, all depending on one’s process—and those are valuable, important parts that help get the story told. I think acknowledging them is important, and I find a way to count them into my daily progress.