Traci Chee On Whittling Down The Word Count

I'm lucky (or cunning) enough to have lured yet another successful writer over to my blog for an SAT- Successful Author Talk. SAT authors have conquered the query, slain the synopsis and attained the pinnacle of published. How'd they do it? Let's ask 'em!

Today's guest for the SAT (Successful Author Talk) is Traci Chee, author of the NYT bestselling YA fantasy THE READER. An all-around word geek, she loves book arts and art books, poetry and paper crafts, though she also dabbles at piano playing, egg painting, and hosting potluck game nights for family and friends. She studied literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and earned a master of arts degree from San Francisco State University. Traci grew up in a small town with more cows than people, and now feels most at home in the mountains, scaling switchbacks and happening upon hidden highland lakes. She lives in California with her fast-fast dog.

Are you a Planner or Pantster?

I’m a natural pantser—I love the discovery of writing, luxuriating in a detail, chasing down a surprising development, or finding out what’s going to happen at the same time as my characters. (It all gets cleaned up and smoothed in revision, after all.) But I’m always looking for new ways to improve, and I’m trying to learn some plotting techniques to help me become a better writer.

How long does it typically take you to write a novel, start to finish?

The only two novels I’ve ever finished are The Reader and its sequel. I worked on The Reader for 18 months before I signed with my agent, but I worked on its sequel for only 6 before I turned it in to my editor! That draft was rough. But at least I got to the end!

Do you work on one project at a time, or are you a multi tasker?

I wish I could work on more than one project at a time, and hopefully that will change in the future, but for now, it’s all I can do to inhabit (or to be inhabited by?) one story, one world at a time!

Did you have to overcome any fears that first time you sat down to write?

I think I wrote my first story (about a dragon and a princess) when I was seven or eight, and I definitely had no fear then. But I really sat down to give myself a shot at being an author when I was twenty-eight, and by that time I’d learned to fear all sorts of things (derision, shame, financial ruin, etc.).

However, I also had this stubborn belief that I could learn to do almost anything if I worked hard enough. And I knew that at that point, just me at my desk with my computer, the only way to fail was to quit.

How many trunked books did you have before you were agented?

I was really lucky to sign with an agent with the first novel I ever completed, but there was over a decade of creative writing courses, workshops, short stories, and half-written manuscripts behind it!

Have you ever quit on an ms, and how did you know it was time?

I have this one short story that I really love the idea of. (It’s about a girl with a brother made of metal who talks to God. Or about a boy who talks to God. The details kept changing.) I rewrote it at least seventeen times, and while it’s readable, none of those revisions ever got it right. There was no spark to it. No resonance. No shine. That’s something you learn to spot the more you read, I think, as you find the novels or stories or poems that really sing to you. And as much as I loved the idea of that story, I could not figure out how to fix it. So I’ve left it behind—at least for now, until I gain some more insight or skill that will help me tear it apart and build it back up again.

Who is your agent and how did you get that "Yes!" out of them?  

I finished revising The Reader in the spring of 2014. It was 121,000 words long, and I thought, That’s a little long, but the writing is solid so that’s okay right?

Spoiler: No, it is not okay.

I started querying, and as rejection after rejection after rejection rolled in, I realized that The Reader was not ready, not ready at all. So I stopped sending out new queries and resolved to cut 21,000 words from the manuscript before trying again.

By mid-summer I’d gotten it down to 114,000, and through the awesome kidlit community on Twitter (more on that later), I discovered that Pitch Wars was coming up. (For those who aren’t familiar, Pitch Wars is this incredible online contest run by the inimitable Brenda Drake. Thousands of writers submit their manuscripts to mentors, publishing pros like agented authors and editors, who pick one “mentee” to work with. Then for two months, they hack, slash, revise, rebuild, and otherwise improve the mentee’s manuscript for the agent round, when Brenda enlists a parade of excellent literary agents to check out everyone’s pitches and first pages and make requests.) I’d heard amazing things about this contest, so I cut another 7,000 words by the submission deadline and entered.

And I got in! The phenomenal talent that is Renée Ahdieh, author of The Wrath and the Dawn and The Rose and the Dagger, picked me for her mentee, and she helped me cut another 10,000 words, sharpen The Reader’s hooks, and polish my prose to a high shine. A week after the agent round, I had a handful of offers, and one of them was from agent/warrior, Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency, by whom I’m now represented.

Any advice to aspiring writers out there on conquering query hell?

Try to keep your creative spark. I’m fairly confident when it comes to craft, but all those rejections were demoralizing. I doubted my work, my passion, myself. I couldn’t write. Really, it was all I could do not to sit there, full of dread, refreshing my inbox. Who would reject me next? How quickly? What else could I do wrong?

So I decided to get my spark back. And what better way than to summon up my arts-and-craftiness and make some rejection book art? It didn’t change my rejections (only a brutal look at my manuscript and months of revision did that), but it helped me to believe in myself again. You can check out the results of that little project here!

How did that feel, the first time you saw your book for sale?

I haven’t actually seen The Reader in stores in person yet, but someone just tweeted me a photo of it on the shelves at a Barnes & Noble in Southern California, and it really struck me, for the first time, that my book is going to be out there. In the world. My words, read by strangers. It is thrilling and humbling and nerve-wracking all at once!

How much input do you have on cover art?

I was very fortunate in that I’ve gotten a peek at a ton of the cover design process, from bouncing around ideas with my editor to checking out the initial sketches to seeing variations on what became the final. I did give some feedback here and there, but that beautiful cover is absolutely due to the brilliance of art director Deborah Kaplan, designer Kristin Smith, and illustrator Yohey Horishita. Truly, the best thing has been learning about the process and watching such extraordinary talents at work!

What's something you learned from the process that surprised you?

You know what’s weird? I am such a Type-A personality—I love making plans and organizing schedules and ensuring that everything goes off without a hitch—but I’ve learned over the course of this year, there’s so much that’s beyond my control when it comes to my book (sales, publicity, marketing, to name a few), that the less I know, the better I can focus on the one thing that I really do control: my words. I think in part this is because if I knew all the things that were happening I’d be able to do nothing but stand there wringing my hands, alternately fretting and screaming at my own impotence. The other part is that I’m really lucky to have an extraordinary team in my agent, editor, and publisher, who I can absolutely trust are working behind the scenes doing the making and organizing and ensuring so I can just write.

How much of your own marketing do you?  

I’m fortunate in that I get to leave most of the marketing to my publisher, but I do try to stay active on social media. I have a website (it’s also a Tumblr), Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, which are platforms I enjoy using anyway, so that makes it easy to check in consistently and keep updated with what’s going on. I also have a newsletter that goes out once a month (ish) so readers can get news, bonus content, and exclusive giveaways delivered right to their inbox!

When do you build your platform? After an agent? Or should you be working before?

For me, I think in general “platform” is less important than “making friends and staying updated with the community.” That was definitely true before I got an agent, when I used Twitter to learn more about Pitch Wars, what agents were looking for (especially via #mswl), and watch what was happening in the online kidlit community. I didn’t set up my website or Facebook page until after I had a book deal, and I didn’t discover Pinterest until my edits on The Reader were almost finished, but again, I participate in these platforms because they’re fun and interesting and educational. Probably your most essential online presence is your website, which you should keep updated, but everything else? I’d say do what you like and leave the rest!

Do you think social media helps build your readership?

I hope so! I spend quite a lot of time on it anyway, haha. I haven’t found a way to really measure the impact my social media presence has on book sales, so for the time being I think I’ll just keep doing what’s fun and save the work work for writing!

The Narrative Needle & Other Revision Stories

Doing a major revision is a lot like surgery.

I recently finished a massive revision on a book that I wrote eight years ago. Yep - eight years. It's actually the first YA book I tried writing, after trunking two finished adult mss and a third adult ms that was about a quarter finished. This YA title was a total watershed moment for me, as I sat in my office at work and said to myself, "Mindy, you're a librarian for teens. You're around your target audience forty hours a week and completely immersed in the market. You're kind of an idiot for not writing YA."

And yes, I really was kind of an idiot. So I scribbled down a few ideas and wrote my first YA novel over a period of about eight months. And I've put in a year of editing for every month that I spent writing it.

A lot of that is my own fault. I was practicing another sort of idiocy in not having any crit partners or joining any writer's forums before gleefully sending off queries into the ether for a sub-par ms that was about 30k longer than necessary. But beyond that, I wasn't doing the right thing with pacing, and I was very vague about things that I thought my reader should fill in on their own.

Oh, and also it was written in the wrong tense for the voice I was using. Ahem.

So, like a I said. There's been a year of revising for each month that I wrote it.

This last revision was the most invasive- the equivalent of triple bypass surgery. Typically I revise on the laptop, but this was such a huge undertaking that I printed it out (sorry, trees) and jumped in with my hatchet and red pen.

I ripped the skin off.
I peeled back the muscle.
I found the heart.

And guess what? It was in the wrong place.

Yeah. A major reveal moment that answered a massive question and is the crux of the story was happening about 100 pages too late. You read that right - 100 pages.

So I tore the heart out and moved it to another location. And that meant I had to rewire the entire circulatory system, didn't it? Everything in every scene following that moment had to be re-investigated, as the pivotal moment occurred much earlier now than it had before. Characters knew a vital piece of information much earlier now than they had before- it changed everything.

Circulatory system safely pumping, I got critical with the skeleton. It only makes sense that if you move the heart, the ribcage probably ought to get a little re-arranging as well. And it did. The Crux Moment Movement changed a lot of things, for a lot of characters, and their individual stories needed some tweaking for continuity. There were some bone grafts involved. Some scenes were literally jutting out, saying -- "HEY! I don't fit here anymore!! CONTINUITY ISSUES!! DANGER!! DANGER!!"

Some of those I had to push back into place and graft onto the scenes nearby. Some of them I pulled out entirely and tossed into a bio-waste container. Some were transplanted elsewhere.

I laid the muscle back on, checking to be sure it was attaching to the bones in the right places, not pulling anything out of joint. The skin went back on last, a re-insertion of everything that worked nicely and just had to be the cohesive covering that held everything together.

And with everything in place I whipped out what I call The Narrative Needle. I had squished everything back into a package that was working, but there were still holes, little places where things hadn't grown together quite yet. Things like scene jumps that could conceivably be melded together for flow, or a nice fact-delivering organic bit of dialogue that moved my characters from one scene to the next seamlessly, even if one scene was written eight years ago and the next one was eight minutes old.

With everything tied off, the end result is a much different looking creature than what I made eight years ago.

But everything inside is pumping much more effectively.

How Waxing Your Eyebrows Is Like Editing

Waxing doesn't feel good. Neither does editing. But don't you feel improved when they're both done?

I'm blessed with a head of dark Irish hair, which is great until my eyebrows start trying to mate with my hairline. Eyebrows are kind of like those support words we use in our writing - a less kind phrase would be "crutch words." Those words don't seem so bad at a glance. They're like that one little hair that escaped you and is hovering off by itself to the left of where you actually wanted your eyebrow to end.

But then the little follicles spot that solitary solider, and they send out a rescue party. Pretty soon you've got scouts going out to check the terrain. They report that it's okay, so the recovery team goes out and you know what? It's actually pretty comfortable out there. So they stay. And then the commanding officers think they might as well fill out the ranks and pretty soon the entire army has reappeared, marching right out across your face like the wax never happened.

Letting your brain get comfortable with using the crutch words is a dangerous business that leads to a manuscript in desperate need of a slashing. Or a waxing, as I've taken to thinking of it.

I'm very aware of what my crutch words are - just, then, that. Those are four-letter words to me in more ways than one. So how do you identify your own crutches? There's a great free tool to help you out.

Wordle can be incredibly useful in your editing process. It creates a word cloud based on the text that you paste in. Here's what Wordle made for me, based on the first 20 pages of NOT A DROP TO DRINK:

I'm pretty happy with that. Not only are my main characters prominent, but if you look at the larger (more occurring) words you can get an idea of what the book is about, even if you haven't read my query. Even better, I don't see my crutch words in there. That means I did a good job of rooting them out. 

Give Wordle a shake and see if it can help you identify your crutch words, then pour the self-editing wax on and rip 'em out by their roots.