manuscript – Emilie Morscheck

Undertaking a Structural Edit: Part 1 – Planning

In 2020, I was awarded the Anne Edgeworth Fellowship to develop my manuscript, The Selkie Curse. The fellowship is generously funding a manuscript assessment and a mentorship. Along with the funds and my project work, those who win the fellowship are expected to undertake some community outreach. This post is the first in a series that I will be writing over the next few months about the process of structural editing. I hope to share my progress as well as any insights I uncover into the challenging task of editing my own novel.

About The Selkie Curse: Elsa and her mother, Queen Tiari, are at war with the Fisherman Kingdom. The young king of the Fishermen blames Queen Tiari for his father’s death, and he is set to destroy Tiari’s queendom. It is up to Elsa, and her best friend Aada, to find a way to end the war and save their home.

My first step in performing a structural edit was to plan it all out. I spent several days collecting every resource I had from workshops, theory books and editors, to compile a master list of tasks to be done. It was huge and needed a lot more structure in order to execute. So, I did what any sane person would, and made a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet with multiple tabs and tables.

I then broke down all of my information into stages of how I would tackle each component of the structural edit. The plan was to start at the highest level of my novel and work my down to the line-level detail. With everything in order, and the spreadsheet looking pretty, I was ready to start my re-read.

I left my manuscript for two months before starting the re-read. In the meantime I began working on another project to help distance myself from the plot, characters and world. This gave me a fresh perspective on the first draft. What did I find in that first re-read? Lots of mistakes. Spelling, grammar, what have you. But there was no time to fix those. I highlighted everything that stood out as important or terrible prose and moved on. The re-read also gave me a good sense of what did and didn’t work with the manuscript. Flat character arcs, timelines that didn’t add up and shallow worldbuilding.

Using my magic spreadsheet, I set about describing the book as how it was versus what I want to be at the highest level. Did the opening ask a question? Was that question answered at the end of the book? Were my acts balanced? Who is my target audience? What is my main genre? With all of these answered I felt ready (if nervous) to proceed. There was a lot to do!

I was fortunate to meet with my mentor, the lovely and wisdom-filled Leife Shallcross. She shared a fascinating insight into her trials in structural editing and helped me to unpick some of my nastier problems. She also issued me a challenge – to assign my book AO3 tags (more about tags here). I’ve given it a go here:

#LGBTQ Themes
#Slow Burn
#Angst
#Feelings
#mythical beings
#enemies to lovers
#blood
#family secrets
#ballroom dancing
#environmentalism

My next post will be about how I went about fixing the big issues across my manuscript. In the meantime, I will be working hard on the edits!

My key insights from the last few weeks:

Give yourself a break from the manuscript, you’ll be surprised at how much needs work, but also how much solid gold you have that will just need polishing.
Keep breaking down the tasks until they seem easy or at least manageable. Can it be done in under and hour? Will you clearly know when that task is done?
Start at the highest level of your manuscript. What is your dramatic question? Is it in the opening paragraph/scene/chapter? Do you answer it by the end of the manuscript?

Musings

My Works as Netflix Shows

There’s been a fun trend at the moment where authors put together a fake screenshot of their novel/story as a Netflix show. I had to give this a go for my works!

Below are my images for my completed manuscript ‘These Cursed Waters’ made using the template found here. It’s a fun exercise for thinking about your project visually, and the template is easy to use.

All there is to do now is wait for the Netflix deal to come in!

Writing Tips

NaNoWriMo Tips

The following is an old blog post that I wrote when I finished writing my first novel in 2011. I was in the eighth grade and was very excited to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo. It’s funny to look back on it now, a dozen manuscripts later. I was driven by the need to prove my family wrong – that it was possible for me to write 50,000 words in a month, and I’ve been riding that wave ever since.

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Here is a section of a post I wrote after completing my first novel in 2011:

It was one hell of a month and a very big challenge for me. This was something I had never dared to do before. I barely ever finish stories, much less full-length novels!

Here are my tips for doing NaNoWriMo from personal experience:

– Write an outline. Seriously. You’ll never know how valuable it is to you until the month starts and you have nothing to write about. Trust me when I say this because I had no outline and I did not hit my word count on the first day. If you can’t write an outline at least think about what you are going to do.

– Attempt to hit the word count every day. Catching up is no fun. 🙁

– Shove your inner editor up in a cupboard, lock it up, and throw away the key. When you have to write 1,667 words per day they do not need to be there.

– Write whenever you can. At home, on the bus, at school, while the teacher is talking… Jokes 😀 Don’t get yourself in trouble. But you’ll find more time to write if you do this, plus, you don’t have to stay up until 11:30 every night to hit your goal.

– No procrastination! Very important. Watching TV or playing games are no excuse. Think of all of the catch-ups… *groan* You can do that once you’ve hit your daily word goal.

– Do not set yourself an impossible challenge. If you’ve only ever written 100 words in your life don’t aim for 50,000 words. It’s not going to happen and it is completely unrealistic.

– Don’t let writer’s block get the better of you. It will most probably come at the worst of times. The only way to get over it is a) take a break (a short one mind you) b) write something else, something short or c) don’t start playing computer games. It will only make things worse.

– Social media is a no-no! Friends distract one so easily. Also, they won’t need you for that month. turn it off whenever you right.

– Sleep. Sleep keeps you going. It isn’t good to stare at a screen 24 hours a day. Drinking and eating also come under this rule.

– Most importantly:

DO NOT GIVE UP!

You have set yourself a goal and you should try your best to achieve it. Everyone thought of me as crazy but I did it anyway and I succeeded (and went mad along the way…)

So those are all my tips… There are a bit more than I’d thought there would be, I guess I can’t stop writing now! Do you want to hear how I went? Of course, you do! Thank you!

I WON! Yay!!!!!!!!!!!! 🙂