Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

This year at YeahWrite our free workshop focuses on everything BUT the writing, with an editorial series that’ll take the words right out of your mouth and put them on the page. Of course, we’re also including some tips on writing so that the eventual edits to your story won’t be the heartbreaking kind where you have to remove an entire character or plot arc and re-evaluate every interaction in your 300,000 word novel.

Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And speaking of navigation, don’t worry: our Navigating Prompts workshop from last year hasn’t gone anywhere. You still have a handy tool to refer to when you’re stumped by a prompt or need help on how to approach it or what judges might be thinking as they read your story.

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month (usually on the Second Sunday) we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

The best part of writing is… writing

Look, we’re professional editors but we’d be lying if we said the best part of writing was editing. This month at the Scarlet Quill Society we’re going to focus on minimizing the worst part by making some major and minor edits unnecessary. You can do this before you start writing, even. How cool is that? Not all of these tricks work for every writer, but you should be doing at least some of them.

• Outlining
• Research
• Talking it out
• Side quests and short-shorts
• Tech setup

Before your pen hits the page (fingers, keyboard, touch screen, whatever your process is), you’re already writing in your head. We’ll talk about how to edit as you go next month, but this month let’s jump right into pre-writing.

Why Prewrite?

I just read a really neat article on why sound in movies is actually worse than it used to be. You can read it too, (it has a lot to do with the same things we’re talking about in editing writing! who knew!) but the TL;dr for this month’s relevant topic is that not as much effort is going into making the sound great at the time it’s captured, because there’s an assumption that everything can be fixed in post-production.

But should it?

Advice you’ll hear a lot as a writer goes something like this: just write, you can always edit it later. Or, it’s easier to edit the words you wrote than the words you didn’t. And this is true, but it can only take you so far. Editing something you wrote without any planning can often take much longer than getting the words on the page, and may actually take you longer than it would have to wait a little while longer before you wrote.

The more time you spend prewriting the less you’ll spend on editing. Look, we don’t make the rules, we just tell you what they are.

Outlining

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, outlining is useful. It’s just going to look like different things to different people, and that’s okay! You don’t need to write a detailed outline the way your fourth grade teacher suggested you do for that essay to have a functional book or story outline. In fact, it doesn’t even have to look like that outline at all. But let’s start there:

Bullets and numbers

When you’re trying to organize a long work, sometimes it helps to have a roadmap. These roadmaps can be incredibly general, or incredibly specific. A bullets and numbers outline will look something like this:

1. chapter one

a. meet dani, nina, and wira
b. introduce schedule for school and home
c. drop hints about “secret”

2. chapter two

a. start in the city
b. Ken has accident
c. move to country house
d. describe “unconnected” accident

That’s fairly detailed. The same story might also be outlined like this:

• Describe MC (Blue) and friends (dani, nina, wira, billy, dawn)
• Accident- intro via Blue’s job
  • (offscreen: Upton and Leeroy at the warehouse scene)
• Connect city to country with Blue in middle

Notes

For those of us who aren’t plot-outliners (ME, IT’S ME, I HATE IT /rbg) there are still outline techniques that can save trouble later. Consider keeping a notes document either on a physical piece of paper or in a Google Doc or something you can access easily on the go with important details like:

• Blue
  • student teacher, sub in 4th grade
    • 4th graders are 9-10
  • Mom lives in Milwaukee (name mom!) with little brother (omg what is anyone’s name) (in community college so 19?)
• Billy and Dawn Thirdborn
  • [link to pin on Google Map for house location]
  • [link to house plan]
  • Kids
    • Nina
    • Dani
    • Wira

Then if you can’t remember a detail about someone, or about what happened, you can look it up easily and be consistent over the entire arc of your story instead of finding out that the gun in act one has become a compound bow in act two. You can also use this style of outline to keep track of things you need to mention in backstory so that your plot can go forward.

• Renee is in Blue’s class – dad in accident.
• Nina always has bags or boxes to take back and forth from the farm [connex with LPZ]
• Dani is the one with the short temper

See? Even for folks who don’t love outlining, having the major points you need to get to in a checklist is useful. You can also stop midway through writing and do this, or use it when you get that great “oh yeah this is how the characters get from point A to point B” idea.

Research

What writer isn’t familiar with the notion of sitting down to write for an hour, only to emerge, dazed, from their browser two hours later with fifty tabs open and not a single word written? But research doesn’t have to be all-consuming. It is, however, a necessary step. Whether you do a surface skim or a deep dive, you need to take the time to find out the things you don’t know about the world you’re writing in.

Figure out what you don’t know

If you’re making up a world, think about the climate, the structure of the world, and the politics of the area. Look up how those things work. If you’re making a planet with no water, find out how that affects what geological formations exist. How do sand-carved (as opposed to water-carved) canyons form? What kind of rock might be there? Remember, your caves can’t have stalactites, because those require water to form!

Look it up

For the vast majority of things, a brief search will be adequate. If you’re setting your story in the real world, take the time to look up the locations on a map. Find out what’s there, and how far they are from each other. Use Google’s street view to get a sense of the lay of the land, and what kinds of plants and trees you see around you. Look up the temperature for the time of year you’re setting your story in.

Do this even if you’re writing memoir: memory is a tricky thing, and that storm you would swear came through when you were eight might actually have hit the region when you were ten.

Even if you’re dashing off a short story for a 48-hour competition (shameless plug here) take the time to make sure that if you’re using a real world location you’re describing it accurately. You never know if that’s where your judge is from. Look up the demographics of the place, too: don’t assume that all small towns have the same characteristics. Don’t assume that all woods have the same wildlife or trees. Heck, don’t assume that all snow is the same.

Talking it out

We’re going to say this a few more times this year (especially in July) but run your ideas past someone before you get too attached to them. Whether it’s finding out that a “fact” you took for granted isn’t true, or that you’ve thoughtlessly evoked colonial violence in the trappings of your worldbuilding, talking out your major plot points and the bits of your world that you love best can save you having to rip them out later when your steampunk murder mystery falls apart for want of a poison and you have to change every single costume description and name in the book anyway. Nobody wants to write a story they have to throw away afterward, so save yourself all the time and effort of editing your writing back into a shape that makes sense in the world and take someone who cares more about the quality of your work than about building up your ego out to lunch (or send them a gift card for coffee and have a nice Zoom together in these uncertain times). If you don’t have a regular writing group or an editor friend, YeahWrite’s coworking hours and Coffeehouse are great places to find a sounding board for that idea you’ve been mulling over. Just remember that in any instance where someone puts in work for you, you should reciprocate somehow. For professionals, food or money are the standards. For friends, remember you should do them a favor. And for other writers, maybe you’ll be able to pay that moment of “the Idaho panhandle has trees on it, though” back—or forward!

Side quests and short-shorts

Sometimes writing something you never intend to publish or edit is the fastest way to start getting those ideas on paper. If you don’t do well with outlining, writing short character sketches might get you going and provide the same sort of gut-level information about your world or characters. Brief scenes and backstory works (keep it short!) are a great way to not only get to know your characters and your world, but to find out what you should have been looking up, without having to revise your central, longer story. If you write that cave scene on your desert world and a friend reads through it and says “this is great but there’s no water, why are there stalactites?” you don’t even have to revise that story because it’s not going ANYWHERE. Maybe on your blog, but maybe not. On the other hand, you now know how to describe any caves that come up in the main story, without needing to edit out your favorite description in the whole book later. Not that we’ve ever done that. Nope.

Tech setup

We know: everyone hates Clippy. But your computer and the programs on it really are here to help you. Before you start writing, you might want to try one or more of these ideas:

• Add character names to your dictionary so you can leave spellcheck on. Then you don’t have to keep fussing with it later.
• Set up parental controls for your browsers that you can turn on to keep yourself off social media while you write.
• Set up do not disturb protocols for your notifications so that you don’t have to keep taking breaks to check your email or see if your boss texted you—make sure the important stuff can get through!
• Set your autosave timer to as short a timespan as you possibly can without being intrusive. If you lose power in the middle of writing, you’ll only lose a few minutes of work, not hours.
• Make a playlist if you write best to music. No, make several, for different moods. That way you don’t have to keep hitting skip.

A stitch in time…

The easiest way to make your stories a fast, simple edit is to prevent as many mistakes as you can in the writing process. This doesn’t have to paralyze you, but knowing a few things about your story and the world it’s set in—and then making sure you remember those things—can save you tons of time and heartbreak. Because not everything can be fixed in post. Sometimes the heart of your story, the plot point it hinges on or the character it’s all about, isn’t salvageable later. And that’s honestly a worse feeling than never having written the thing in the first place.

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society on Sunday, February 13 at 2:00 pm US Eastern Time.

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place on the (usually; we’ll warn you!) second Sunday of every month at 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time. Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session
• $5 monthly subscription: Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!
• $3 monthly subscription: Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists.

Rules of Order. Order of Rules. Something like that.

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read: Editing nonfiction: how much is enough?
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read: Line- and copyediting: getting picky
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read: Finishing touches and final checklists: more than just spellcheck!
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read: DIWhy? what you can (and can't) do yourself
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author:

About the author:

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me