Mastering Revision: Genre, Continuity, and Research

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Music.
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Hello, and welcome to Writing While Distracted, the writing podcast that helps
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you transform your scattered thoughts into literary brilliance.
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I'm your host, Brenda Murphy, your NeuroSpicy writing coach.
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Stay tuned as we discuss genre conventions, continuity, and research.
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Music.
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Hello, fellow writers, and welcome back to Writing While Distracted.
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And today we're we're going to dive into the part of the revision process that
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I believe goes together in that each thing is influenced by the other thing.
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They kind of nest inside of each other.
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And what I'm talking about are genre conventions, continuity, and research.
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And they're all influenced by each other.
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And we're going to start off by talking about genre conventions,
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which often receive a bad rap.
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A lot of people feel like they're constraining.
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They feel like they're locked into them.
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But here's the thing. Genre conventions are guidelines.
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You have expectations, readers have expectations of what genre is about.
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If you're reading a cozy mystery, you're expecting an amateur sleuth,
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you're expecting a cozy community,
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tight-knit community, and a murder that may be, while it may be brutal,
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is not necessarily shown to be brutal on the page.
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Versus a thriller where oftentimes you see very brutal elements.
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That's not to say that there couldn't be a cozy thriller, but I don't think
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that it would meet anyone's expectations.
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As far as a blend goes, there are certain genres that are going to blend together,
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which might be unusual but will be readable.
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And I'm thinking specifically of the genres of cozy fantasy stories Where folks
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are not necessarily into a lot of the on-page violence and drama that goes into
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a lot of fantasy stories,
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they want a cozy fantasy story.
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And I get that. And I've read a couple and they're very entertaining.
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And the kind of read that you just want to get under a blanket and get a beverage
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of your choice and curl up on a rainy afternoon. noon.
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And that's fantastic because until recently, when you wanted to read fantasy
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and disappear into that kind of a world, you were kind of stuck with all the
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parts that maybe weren't really appealing to you.
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So don't be afraid to blend genres.
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And as neurodivergent writers, specifically, I think that we often are able
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to hold on to many different concepts and many different ideas all at the same time.
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We're not always able to articulate those ideas and concepts.
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But I think if you lean into that and appreciate that about yourself,
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if you find things that you enjoy about different genres, go for it.
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Think of them, think of genre conventions as.
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As the outline in a coloring book. You can color inside the lines if you want, but you don't have to.
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You can color outside the lines, but don't go so far outside the lines no one
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knows what it is that you're writing.
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If you're writing a romance, knowing that you're going to have two or more people
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fall in love, if you're writing a poly romance, it would be more people, is your end point.
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And in a way, it's freeing. You know what the end of your story is.
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It's either happy or happy for now.
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And you can lean into that. And you can do all kinds of things with your characters
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between the beginning of the story and when they get to the end of the story.
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You don't have to follow a set pattern unless you're writing for a house or
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a publishing house that requires a set pattern.
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And I'm looking at Harlequin Romance, which for years, if you read a Harlequin
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Romance, you knew the beat points and you were expecting them.
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And there were a lot of people who enjoyed that because whatever else was going
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on in their lives, they really enjoyed knowing and having those expectations met of the story.
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So there's a place for that. The marvelous thing about books is that people
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can find books to meet whatever desire they have when they sit down to read a book.
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And you can fill in some of those spots by blending genres, by leaning into
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it, by turning genre conventions sometimes on their heads while still meeting
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the key parts of the genre.
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So take advantage of your different viewpoint of life and lean into that.
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The takeaway from all of this is to know what the conventions are around genre,
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but feel free to bend and twist them in whatever way you like.
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Think of them as guidelines, not absolute dictates. So now we're going to move on to story continuity.
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And this is where you keep your storyline, the threads of your story intact.
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And in continuity, some people are like, what exactly are you talking about
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when you say continuity?
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What I'm referring to is that your characters, the settings,
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the events are consistent.
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The details are consistent. Your character has the same hair color unless you
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show them dyeing their hair.
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They have the same eye color. They have the same house unless you show them moving.
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I mean, things like that. Or length of times.
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We've all had the experience of reading a book where the character's hair color
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changes from blonde to brown with no explanation.
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Or that someone has a major injury, say they break their leg,
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and two pages later, without any explanation, they're walking around on it instead
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of showing us the time that went into the healing and the process.
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The readers have to know. Otherwise, it's very jarring, and it will yank your
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readers out of the story.
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And you may think that readers don't pay that much attention to details,
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but I can assure you from letters that I've received, emails rather,
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that I've received that people do notice if you blow the continuity.
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So do yourself a favor and try and keep up with that.
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Now, here is the part that's difficult for most neurodivergent people.
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Our brains don't work like everyone else's, and it can be a real struggle to
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keep track of all those details.
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Two tools have been super helpful for me, Milanote and,
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and Scrivener. They may not be for everybody. I also have used a spiral notebook
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to keep track of details.
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And I will leave links below for Milanote and for Scrivener.
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Check them out. They have free trials. Check them out. Try them out. See if they work for you.
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Scrivener, I've talked about before. It lets me stick in there every single
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odd bit of weird research and details that I need to in order to keep myself
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on track and keep my stories consistent.
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It keeps track of timelines and characters and key plot points,
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and so I don't accidentally give someone blue eyes in one chapter and 10 chapter
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laters give them brown eyes.
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The thing that will also help you with continuity is having attentive beta readers.
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I am blessed with beta readers that will totally flag continuity errors if they
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see them when they're reading.
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And that's a blessing. It saves me time. I can go back and fix it before I send it to my editor.
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And I like to send my editor as clean a copy as I can because they're going
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to catch the next stages of continuity.
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Your copy editors are going to catch those continuity errors that maybe your
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beta readers didn't see and that you didn't It takes multiple passes from multiple
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people to really ensure the continuity of most books unless you are an incredibly
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detailed, focused person.
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Most neurodivergent people that I know fall into one or two categories.
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They're either very detail-oriented and they would never have a continuity error
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because their brains are very, very good at picking up differences and things
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that are wrong or changes that they made that they didn't mean to.
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There are those of us like myself that my brain is a basket of kittens trying
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to get out most days, and I struggle with continuity.
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Whichever camp you fall into, use those tools to help yourself find a way to do it.
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It could be, like I said, it can be as inexpensive as a notebook and as simple
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as a notebook, where you write down those things that are important about your
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character and keep them in one place.
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So you don't have to go back if you're writing a series and read through the
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entire series to see what color eyes your character has.
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The other thing about writing a series is that is a huge amount of continuity
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and keeping track of your characters.
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If you're are writing a series, I am going to suggest that you make master character
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sheets that you keep all the information about that character in one place.
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And again, it can be a spiral notebook, but keep track of those characters so
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that if you're writing and you're in revisions, and don't do this while you're
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writing, if you can't remember the eye color and you're worried,
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you're questioning yourself,
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just write the eye color down that you come up with, put brackets around it and say, check this.
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Anytime that I'm working on a series book and I have questions about what I
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called something or how I referred to something or what color somebody's eyes
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were, their hair color, I put little brackets around it and say,
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check this. Same goes for spelling.
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I write a fantasy series. Am I spelling their made-up names correctly throughout the series?
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That's super important because in a fantasy series, you create entire towns
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and worlds and civilizations and objects and people and animals that have unique names.
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You need to keep track of those. Make a list. Either do a Word document or keep it in a notebook.
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I suggest a Word document of all of those things that are unique names for your
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world because when you send your book off to your editor...
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You're going to want to send them that list because otherwise they're not going
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to know if you spelled something right or not.
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Is this a typo? Is this how this is spelled?
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Who knows? But having that list will help you when you're in revisions go through
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and make sure that you've got the name spelled correctly, that you've got the
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places spelled correctly. It's a lot.
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And again, revisions can seem really overwhelming.
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Overwhelming and this is another one of those places where I'm
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going to suggest that you take time that you
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dedicate however much time you have to
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just doing revisions don't work on new writing don't work
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on new books but if you're doing revising a book focus on revising that book
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that one book so you can get it off your desk and get it out to your editors
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the other thing that I'm going to suggest is that when you're writing your manuscript
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and when you're making those notes to yourself.
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If you have an idea of where you might find that information,
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include that in your bracketed note to yourself.
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And I've spoken before that when I write my first draft, anything that I'm going
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to have to look up or research,
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I enter that in brackets and I consistently use brackets so that when I get
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to the end of my document, I can search for bracketed content and then I can
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have a whole list of what things I need to research or look up as I'm writing my manuscript,
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but it doesn't derail me while I'm writing my first draft.
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And that's the thing. You don't have to worry about it while you're writing.
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You can fix those in revision.
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Don't interrupt your writing process to go down the rabbit hole of looking up
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things that you need to know in previous parts of your manuscript.
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Just write what you're thinking in the moment and fix it later.
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Don't give away your writing time to editing. It's two different mindsets,
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creative mindset versus the analytical editorial mindset. So don't do that.
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To be clear, the thing that you can do to help yourself the most with consistency
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is to create some kind of,
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they've been called story Bibles, or, and I think, or a master sheet of characters,
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notes, whatever you need to do.
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Keep it in one place. Keep it in a place you can find it.
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Be as consistent as you can. And again, as a neurodivergent person,
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consistency can be hard.
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That's why I suggest simpler methods, either doing it right inside the manuscript
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or in a notebook on your desk.
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In Scrivener, I love Scrivener for that fact. There is an entire,
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when I'm working on a page of the manuscript, I can write whatever notes I need
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to write to myself about what I need to look up in a little column on the left that I can go back to.
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There are so many tools out there to help you. Check out Milanote.
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Check out Scrivener. go get yourself a spiral notebook
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if you're struggling with continuity just keep it
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by your desk when you make up a character and sometimes we
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make up characters on the fly because we're pantsers we don't plot we're just
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making it up as we go along write little details about those characters in your
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notebook in your spiral notebook so then later when you need to figure out well
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did they have long hair does they have short hair what kind of person are they
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did they have a tick? Did they have something that's identifying?
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A little habit? You can go back to your notebook and find that information.
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All right. So we've talked about genre conventions and we've talked about continuity.
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And now we're going to talk about research.
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And research for neurodiverse people, it's hard sometimes to do a deep dive
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into research without drowning in the amount of material.
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And we tend, a lot of us, to hyper-focus and become so absorbed in what we're
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doing, we lose track of time.
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And we are so interested in a topic, we can find ourselves becoming just obsessed with it.
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I mean, I know there are many of you out there that you've started,
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Googling online to find one fact, one tiny fact, and you end up three hours
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later knowing everything there is to know about plumbing and how to become a
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plumber and how many hours it takes to take the test.
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So much details about plumbing that you're probably, unless you're going to be a plumber, never use.
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Because as much as we love research, only a fraction gets into our stories.
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No one wants to read the amount of detail that you're going to know about a
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specific area if they're reading your novel.
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They're reading a novel for fun, not education, although it is nice to put in
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little tidbits that people may learn as they read.
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A lot of people who write historical novels sometimes will have notes in the
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back about events that they base their novel on, and I always find that fascinating,
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but they do not interrupt their manuscript and their storytelling to present
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five pages on how matches came into being.
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Pay attention to that and separate your research time from your writing time.
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This, I think, derails more people in writing their first draft than just about anything.
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The ability to flip over into a search engine and And look up questions that
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you have while you're writing your manuscript.
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I'm going to suggest two ways to deal with that. One, that spiral notebook next
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to your desk. And I'm not saying do it in a document.
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If you need to do it in a document, if you need to dictate, do it that way.
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I choose a spiral notebook because I work with my manuscript filling my entire
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computer screen so that I'm not distracted by any other applications that I
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might slip into to distract me or derail me.
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Because it is a small step from Googling something to just popping over to check
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your social media account or anything else that you happen to find distracting in the moment.
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That spiral notebook is your best friend or composition book or index card,
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whatever you, piece of paper, it doesn't matter.
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Keep it next to your desk. If you have a question that you bump into while you're
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doing your first draft, like when were matches invented?
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Write that down so that you can research it later.
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Later research brain is not the same
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as manuscript brain is not the same as
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revision brain or editing brain those are
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very different skill sets creative writing is not research research feeds into
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your creative writing knowing when those things happened can lend veracity to
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your to your manuscript and make it believable and that's what you want you
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want the little parts especially if you're writing in contemporary novels,
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you want things to be real and to actually happen.
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If you're writing historical fiction, even though the story is fictional,
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you want to stay consistent with your time period and do research so you can
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put those events into your story that make it much more entertaining and relatable and real.
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And that's what we're going for
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here. If you're writing whatever you're writing, you want it to feel real.
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If you're writing science fiction, even though you You can be creative about
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the science that you put into it.
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Underneath all of that is some foundation of real science in the real world.
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And that's what you want to look at. Even if you're creating a magic,
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a magical system, sometimes it's good to do research to see what people have already done.
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One, because you don't want to plagiarize. And two, use your innate creative
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ability to come up with something completely different.
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Or to stay within guidelines. A big thing in most magic systems is that all magic has a cost.
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And you see that repeated over and over and over in magical tales or tales where magic is present.
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Doing research about what kinds of magical systems have been written will help
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you to create a unique magic system.
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How do I deal with research? I'm not one of those people that does a ton of
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research before I start to write a book.
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I will occasionally, if I have characters that have an occupation that is far
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outside of occupations that I've had,
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or are unique occupations where what they do is something of a mystery to me,
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like what exactly do you do in that occupation?
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I will spend some time researching that. All of those things lend veracity and
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a feeling of realness to your books. And that's important.
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And research fits into genre conventions, fits into continuity,
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in that if you're writing historical fiction, people expect the story to be
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based somewhere in some history.
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If you are writing a detective thriller, people want you to not write a detective
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that goes so far outside the lines they can't even imagine that that would actually occur.
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When people read a murder mystery, they want to believe that however you've
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written it might have actually occurred.
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And again, this is research, which is why writers are always worried if their
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search history is ever made public, because we will research things like how
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long does it take a certain poison to act?
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What happens to a body when it's been buried in the ground?
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We research a lot of odd things. And at the same time, it's that research that
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is so critical to making your books readable, relatable, something that a reader will come back to.
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So remember, just because you spent hours learning how to light a fire doesn't
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mean that you need to include every single step in your book.
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Keep the focus on what will move
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the story forward and what will make your story feel real to the reader.
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Use your research to enhance your plot and your world building, not derail your story.
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Now if you do fall down the research rabbit hole and that shouldn't happen if
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you are separating your research time away from your writing time don't beat yourself up,
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We are curious by nature. Neurodivergent folks will focus and fixate on some
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of the most unique things in the world because that's who we are. And that's a strength.
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Lean into your strength, but make sure that your research doesn't derail you
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from finishing your story.
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I know too many people who've spent years researching a novel they still haven't written.
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Written you don't have to know every single thing
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before you start writing i'm going
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to suggest that if you are doing research before you have
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written your manuscript that you put a deadline on your research just like you're
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going to put a deadline on your manuscript to make yourself get the job done
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set it up like a regular appointment like you would anything else treat it as
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sacred time and give it space in your world.
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Just like when you go to write your manuscript, you give it space in your world.
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You're going to make a certain time or certain times during the day when you're
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going to focus on writing your manuscript.
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Make times, certain times during the day that you just focus on research.
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Don't try and combine the two. It is a sure way to derail yourself and get lost
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in the details before you hit the end.
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To wrap up, neurodivergent writers have an amazing toolkit to work with.
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Our hyperfocus, our ability to think outside the lines, our creativity,
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and the things that we do struggle with can be genre conventions,
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because we hate to be told what to do, a lot of us, and because our brains don't
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necessarily see the world that way.
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Continuity can be a struggle depending on your particular brand and flavor of neurodiversity.
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And research can be our best friends and also our arch nemesis.
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And the trick is to find the balance at the center of it.
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As neurodivergent writers, we have unique brains. We see the world differently,
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and that's what makes our stories stand out.
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We might struggle with the things I've just mentioned, but we also have incredible
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creativity and an instinct to break the mold.
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So do it. Don't be afraid.
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Don't back off and not write because you think you can't meet expectations of
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a certain genre. Bend those expectations.
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Create a world that is yours and yours alone and get in there and have fun.
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That's the biggest thing. If you're not having fun writing your manuscript, you're doing it wrong.
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Writing, although difficult, should never be miserable.
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I don't believe in that. I believe that you should write what makes you happy
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and what brings joy to you.
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And if you don't like what you're writing, it is perfectly fine to stop and start again.
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Start writing something that will bring you joy, that will make you happy,
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not because it's the latest thing and everybody's writing whatever is popular in the moment.
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Don't worry about that. Write the book that you want to write.
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Write what makes you excited to sit down at your keyboard whenever it's time to write.
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In this podcast, I'm going to offer a little challenge.
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If you've been struggling with one of these issues, genre conventions,
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continuity, or really just overwhelmed yourself with research,
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I'm going to suggest you pick one of the tools that I've listed in the show
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notes, and give that a try.
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Scrivener has a real 30-day test drive wherein it's 30 days of use, not 30 calendar days.
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Milanote has a free version of it. Try it out. See if it'll work for you.
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And if they do, take advantage of it. Okay, that's it for me today.
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Thank you so much for hanging out with me. And if you like this episode,
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please be sure to subscribe and leave a review. you.
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It really helps me get the podcast in front of more people.
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Join our community. I have an email news list and you can find that in the show notes.
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There are a number of free helpful guides that you can pick up such as my character
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workbook, a list of 60 ways to show character arc, a bunch of different things.
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And I will list all of those below and pick up the one that most appeals to
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you. Until next time, keep writing.
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Thanks for tuning in to Writing While Distracted where we re-navigate the winding
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roads of creativity amidst the chaos of distraction.
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If you've enjoyed this podcast and found it useful, share it and tag me.
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DM me and let me know what you found most useful.
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Please leave a review. It really helps get the podcast in front of more folks.
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Remember, in the dance between focus and diversion, every stumble is a step
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closer to mastering the art of writing.
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Join us next time as we continue to unravel the mysteries of the writer's mind.
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Until then, keep writing, keep wandering, and embrace the distractions that
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fuel your creativity. Stay tuned.
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Stay inspired. Music.
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Music.