Well, I’ve been coming here for nearly  two years, after having found Jim’s writing instructions etc., but I made myself a goal of not posting in this thread until I had at least a full first draft in my hands.

And now, I’m happy to say, I crossed that threshold a few weeks ago, and now have what I consider to be a solid first draft of 168,000 words or approximately 523 pages**.

So, I now feel qualified to color myself as an author in progress. 

Sure, it still needs plenty of work, but I’d even go so far as to say that it’s not a “rough” draft, but a proper first draft; a distinction I was in no way sure of achieving when I started.

So now, after a week or two off, and a fast read through, I’ve decided to take my first (quick) pass at the dreaded synopsis, so that it can evolve and improve along the way as the MS does.

Then it’s on to round two!!

** I’m using the standard formatting that everyone has described: Times New Roman 12, double spaced, 1 inch margins, etc.; but  feel like my word to page count does not match what I see in the paperbacks that I own. Is the word to page count thing geared more toward a different published format, or do I still have something wrong? I’m trying to compare my “size” to other paperbacks of a similar genre, but feel my math isn’t working. Any suggestions?

Give this article (and its related ones) a read:

http://www.novel-writing-help.com/3rd-person-point-of-view.html

While I've not  seen anyone else talk about using a slidng sale of narrative distance in the way that he describes, the guy's whole site is pretty amazing, so I can't see him being too far out of step with this bit.

Does anyone else have an opinion (or industry knowlede) on that?

Oh, PS, using the method described, what you want to show should probably be "near" one character or another, such that you can give the unknowable stuff for a paragraph or two, then rejoin your POV character and move on with the normal narrative.

Since this is an active post, and the discussion has shifted somewhat to one's like or dislike of present tense, I thought I'd throw something of mine out.

In my WIP, (3rd person, past tense, multi-POV) there is a character who, for this discussion is best described as a bard (i.e, magic in her songs).

I'm no Tolkien, and have no plans to try and write any songs, but I do describe what the songs are about (mostly ballads and tales of heroes, etc.), mixing the words/import of the song to match the activities taking place around her.

But what I've been doing is witing the song descriptions in present tense.

One, it (hopefully) makes it easier for the reader to differentiate between the song and the surrounding "live" action, and two ... well, it just feels right.

So far, the mix seems to work well enough, but I've no idea if it's too far out of current convention, etc.

Any thoughts?

Honestly, IMO your very safest bet is to take whatever you want to send, copy it out of Word (or whatever), using either right-click, copy or CTRL+C, and paste it (right-click, paste or CTRL+V) into Notepad.

That will give you a completely unformatted document.

Then, just so you know exactly what you're working with, turn "Word Wrap" off.

Each of those incredibly long lines that you see will be a paragraph. Separate each line with a retrun to get a blank line between each paragraph. Notepad will respect carriage retruns, but don't try to use tabs to fake in paragraph indents or it will drive you crazy.

Now that you've got a bunch of long lines of text separated by blank lines, turn "Word Wrap" back on so you can see what you have.

Once you're happy with that, hit CTRL+A to select it all, CTRL+C to copy it, and then CTRL+V to paste it into any outbound email that you have prepared.

Send it to your own email addresses first (I'd recommend looking at at least two or three), just so you can get a good look.

Notice that the paragraphs should size properly to any email reading format that you open it in. It will do especially well in Outlook, as it will resize on the fly as you resize the window. It should also look fine posted into any web reading format ... like one of these posting windows, for example.

That shoud do it. Let me know how it goes?

When I was a teenager one of my friends died. He had several brothers who stood as his pallbearers, and they carried the casket from the funeral home out to the gravesite.

The song they played was "He ain't heavy, he's my brother" and while up until that point I had always found the song to be a bit hokey, after that, and to this day, I can't hear it without getting a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

It was a long and very powerful walk ...

FWIW.

@ Meg

The exampe you give is really more a question of converting telling to showing, and it's a good one. Your way is definately better than what you had found.

And I am trying to do a better job of showing. I am more conginzant of it, and when I review my work I do seem to be showing more than I had originally thought. And I have little doubt once I finish the first draft and make that first edit pass I will be doing a lot more "conversions".

And just to be cleasr, the rest of this post is not directed at you (although you're welcome to play along). You give quite a lot of very useful advice, and  I wouldn't want you to think I was picking a fight with you or anything, because I'm certainly not.

I just get a little dismayed when I read that writers should stop using certain parts of speech, or should write down to the level of their perspective readers, as viewed by other members of the writing profession.

And it's not necessarily a new thing. I belive it was Mark Twain who advocated, when editting, to kill any adjective you come across.

And it just makes me crazy.

As an example of a strong verb being helped by an adverb, take the prhase "smoke billowing skyward".

Now, obviously smoke (almost) always goes up .. and yet, in my mind the adverb "skyward" as used does add ... something, by lifting the reader's internal eye upward, following the smoke as it rises, possibly to be sent "wafting westward" by some upper level wind.

Sticking with the noun smoke, there can be all kinds and colors of smoke: Oily, black smoke boiling out; thick gray smoke the color of storm clouds; the hissing white smoke of a fire being doused with water.

But to hear some pundits, these things are all to be cut down, editted out, thrown away in favor of some shorter, tighter text that has more punch.

But geez, its not like they'll be paying us by the word (if they ever do  ) so why this almost blanket antagonism against perfectly useful parts of speech?

That's what I don't get. 

Oh, I have seen plenty of writing advice that says to dispense with them all together, and similar statements that apply to adjectives, although they are still a bit more tolerated ...

Advice that I, whether for good or for ill, have quite consciously chosen to ignore.

I'm not sure what else I'd be left with ... nouns and verbs and prepositions? 

It's all a part of the movement to write leaner prose, to always show and never tell, to write stories that play in the readers's head just like a movie, since the pundits say that's all they can handle these days.

Whether or not I will be punished for using all parts of speech remains to be seen, but I've found that I just cannot write without them.

I need those adverbs and adjectives and gerunds (on my!) no less for what they add to the picure I paint than for the lyric and rhythym of my sentences.

At least for me, without them I might as well be writing "See Jane run" ...

As someone who uses a fair amount of semi-colons (and almost always properly  ) I think I a help with this a bit.

The reason you see so few of them in current works is because many writers (especially the published ones) have been taught/told to drop the complexity of their sentences, and indeed, their overall tone and style, to reach some magical lowest common denominator.

But, if you are writing more complex sentences, then you are most definately in need of some semi-colons.

Typically they are used to separate two independent clauses within the same sentence.

Put another way, sometimes you already have your subject and verb, but wish too expound upon them further. Lacking another subject/verb combo, you use a semi-colon to tack that expounding onto the sentence in progress.

If you use MS Word, it will often signfy the need for a semi-colon by marking a long sentence as a fragment, even though you can plainly see a subject and a proper predicate. Find the write right spot to drop in that semi and voila, she is fixed. 

The second reason to use them is for sentence rhythym (a bit longer of a pause than a comma), but at that point you have to watch your usage as you'll wind up using more than are called for, and in the wrong places.

Apparently, that's also what the "em dash" ( --) is  for  ...

I'm not sure I can recite any other rules for their use at this early hour.