AFTER THE FIRST DRAFT, WHAT? By Bonnie Toews

You type THE END and heave a great sigh of relief. DONE. You pat yourself on the back.

But wait! In today’s world, this is only YOUR FIRST DRAFT. Now the hard work begins.

Revising and editing are a writer’s most important functions in the telling of your story. In the rewriting stage, you have to move away from the subjective author who loves every sentence you’ve produced and become the tough critic. Switching hats is very difficult.

This is why most successful novelists belong to reading groups who serve to critique each other’s work. But before you expose your baby to a third, fourth or even fifth “eye,” you need to produce your best effort. That means stripping down your baby and redressing it.

Where do you start? Frankly, one rewrite won’t work. You can’t fix everything with one shot.

THE STRATEGIC APPROACH TO REVIEWING YOUR FIRST DRAFT

When you reread your manuscript, you need to examine NINE concerns. Focus on one at a time for each revision you write.

      1.       What is the spine of your story? Some authors refer to this as their THEME. This is a harder question than you think. You may assume it is simply what the story is about, but it isn’t. Your spine serves the same purpose as your backbone does for your body. It holds your story together. In my novel, THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR, the obvious theme is treason.  When I reread my first draft, I had to measure every character‘s thoughts, feelings, motives and actions against this underlying theme. Yes, it was a gruelling exercise, but it was worth it because readers say I succeeded in suspending their disbelief. They could not figure out who the traitor was until the end.

      2.       Are your protagonist and main characters well-rounded and believable? Have you explored their conscious and unconscious desires, their strengths and weaknesses? Does your protagonist have a “fatal flaw” she or he must overcome to achieve a heroic or extraordinary outcome? In my novel, one of my heroines does not recognize her own self-worth. She strives to please and over compensates to prove her value.

  

      3.       What is the overall conflict driving your suspense? What rival or adversarial force must your protagonist beat? This is the challenge that drives your plot, and as the story continues, this conflict elevates the tension. It can be a person, group, force of nature or aspect of the protagonist’s own character that stands in the way of achieving a desired goal. Conflict leads the hero or heroine to make a critical decision, one that embraces either victory or defeat, and forces the individual to face the truth:  Who am I and what do I really want?

      4.       Is the development of your plot logical? I remember reading a spy story in which the two protagonists reminded each other that their hotel room may be bugged, and then, while in bed, they go ahead and discuss their plan to reveal the villain. I read on hoping this was a decoy to suspend the reader’s disbelief until the surprise “twist” resolution. If the room is bugged, why are they telling the enemy what he needs to know to intercept them?  Maybe it’s deliberate and we’ll find that out later. Alas, no. The author never caught this flaw, and for me the story imploded.

      5.       Is the structure of your story progressive? This even relates to individual paragraphs and sentences. Does your character react before an action even happens? For example, there is an explosion. Does your character dive for cover before the sound or after?  You can’t react to something that hasn’t happened yet. The character must duck AFTER he or she hears the bang. This also refers to the order of your information. Your characters need to move forward with new insights or conclusions, not rehash what is already known.

      6.      Does your opening sentence immediately grab your readers’ interest? If it doesn’t, does the first paragraph? If it doesn’t, will readers even read your first chapter?  Let’s look at the first sentence of my new novel, COVERT DENIAL:  Rhys Jamieson froze. Do you want to know why? Then you have to read on.

      7.      Do you ‘tell” more than you “show?” Some authors introduce a new character by writing what amounts to a biography including appearance and background. Today’s readers don’t like feeling overwhelmed with such description. It’s better to weave in the details as needed, when your reader wants to know, for instance, or when it is critical to the story. This way the reader becomes a part of what is going on rather than an observer.

      8.      How do you treat your dialogue? You’ve seen it – one line after another of conversation until you no longer know who the speakers are. This stems from a need to speed up pacing, but it can be taken too far. Dialogue serves two things: to reveal what distinguishes your characters from one another through quirks in their speech and to convey information. Good dialogue presents a balance that magnifies what your characters are doing, thinking, noticing, and feeling as well as where they are located when they speak. What your dialogue should NOT DO is be a short-cut to adding information crucial to your story. Too often you end up with an unnatural conversation that is awkward and off-putting for your reader.

      9.     I leave line editing and proof-reading to my last draft, and I have a few tricks to make it easier. First, I search and replace a list of “boring” words with stronger action words or adjectives. This short list causes agents and book editors to wince: was (passive), by the fact that, very, so, then, felt, great, big, would, could, or against. Suppose you wrote, felt angry. What action can your character do that shows he is irked? Barry’s eyes flashed. He slammed his fist on the desk. “Are you crazy?” That is a stronger picture. Second, be careful with words ending in “ing.” Often it signals an imperfect past tense (was working) that is easily corrected with the simple past tense (worked). Keep your text active. Avoid passive verbs.

A retired Canadian journalist, Bonnie Toews is a veterans’ advocate, who uses fiction to bring attention to conditions she has found at the “crossroads of humanity.” In novels of wartime intrigue and suspense, she expands on true events to reveal the political betrayal of our military veterans. The first novel in her “Trilogy of Treason” – THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR – is available at amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Consummate-Traitor-Bonnie-Toews/dp/1461015383 and on her web site

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

How God Inspires Us

By Bonnie Toews

How do some of us decide to write a novel? Was it always a passion, something we had to do? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, trying to remember.

I was a voracious reader at a very young age – read Leon Uris’ Mila 18 at ten years old. His descriptions of the Holocaust were graphic, and I identified with those Jewish souls interned in the concentration camps. In fact, the way I felt about that novel goes back to my first remembered thought as a three years old – It’s not fair! How does a child that young have such a sense of justice?

Once, when I took a children’s writing course, the instructor asked us to find the child still within us. I tried to remember how I thought when I was a child. I struggled until I developed a headache, but I couldn’t find that innocent wonderment. Everything I did had a purpose – to learn and to excel. 

Rather sad, don’t you think?

I began writing at 10 to express my private thoughts in a form of self-reflection that led to personal philosophies and beliefs. They were not diaries of what I did or who I knew, but at times they were direct conversations with God the Father, not Jesus the son. Jesus was too perfect for me to be comfortable bearing my soul in His presence. I wasn’t seeking judgment. I was seeking clarification. 

At eleven years old, I played the organ for our outlying village churches in Northern Ontario, Canada, and every Sunday, on our way to these 8 a.m. morning services, my minister and I would have very deep discussions about the contradictions I found in the Bible and about Christian teachings. This relationship forged my life-long faith and trust in God, but I continued to question the human element in relationship to God and human interpretation of God. I was troubled by the religious hypocrisy I witnessed. How could someone drink and carouse on Saturday night and go to church on Sunday for absolution? It didn’t make sense.

No one seemed to pay attention to Jesus’ simple two commandments: Love God with our whole heart, body and soul, and to love our neighbor as we do ourselves. Jesus didn’t say love your neighbor more or less, he said AS (meaning the ‘same as’) ourselves. Clearly, if we can’t first love ourselves, we can’t love others. Love is just a circle of energy that comes from God to us and through us and returns to Him. If we follow Jesus’ two commandments, there is no need to create other laws because you can’t hate and commit crimes if you live by these two principles.

When Moses brought down the Ten Commandments from the mountain, everyone believed that was all society needed to live peacefully together, but I don’t believe the Ten Commandments have worked. To me, the rituals, doctrine and organization of our churches and synagogues seem based on society’s need to create courts of law and to sanction law enforcement in order to maintain power and control over us. This is why I believe Jesus had to simplify our understanding of what the Ten Commandments were meant to achieve: How to live within the circle of Love.

This understanding surfaced while I was writing my WWII spy novel, THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR. At the time I still had not figured out who the traitor was or what the ending was going to be. I awoke one night and wrote an entire chapter. When I was finished, I suddenly realized that God had been my muse. He led me to the experiences that inspired the story.

To this day, I also believe God wrote the chapter through me. And yet, neither reader nor reviewer has ever acknowledged the message this chapter reveals. I can only believe God has His own purpose for having me write it for the readers whom He knows His message will touch.

“The specter of pearly sunbeams twirling over the altar caught her eye, and she felt protected as she watched the interchanging rays, in their own celebration of life, become a divine ring of light. God was with her. She believed it with her whole heart and soul.” ~ The Consummate Traitor, pg. 257

We’ve been taught Jesus was God’s sacrifice to save our souls. And yet, because Jesus died to save us does not mean we can simply ask for Forgiveness and do whatever we feel like without punishment. This notion is a disconnect of faith that I believe has fostered so much division in our world – from racism now rearing its ugly face more than ever to religious intolerance. Our world is in terrible turmoil.

Are these the end times the Bible promises? Many believe it is. I haven’t asked God this question. I don’t think I want to know. But, when I’ve needed God’s assurance, I have found He sends messages directly through the Bible. One of my favorite passages – BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD (Psalm 46:10) – has comforted me through many troubled times, including now as I battle cancer. God has already promised us His power of healing.

Psalm 107:19-21

Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them from their distress; He sent out His word and healed them, and delivered them from destruction.

Let them thank the Lord for His steadfast love,

for His wonderful works to humankind.

AUTHOR BIO

A retired journalist, Bonnie Toews is a veterans’ advocate, who uses fiction to bring attention to conditions she has found at the “crossroads of humanity.” In novels of wartime intrigue and suspense, she expands on true events to reveal the political betrayal of our military veterans. The first novel in her “Trilogy of Treason” – THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR – is available at amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Consummate-Traitor-Bonnie-Toews/dp/1461015383) and on her web site (http://www.authorbonnietoews.com)

The Consummate Traitor: A Long Journey With a Purpose, by Bonnie Toews

The idea for my novel THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR began when I read the biography of William Stephenson – INTREPID, CHURCHILL’S MASTER SPY – by the Canadian author William Stevenson. In it, he wrote about an agent code-named Trudi, who was a cousin of King George VI. She volunteered to persuade the atomic physicist Niels Bohr, who was working on atomic bomb experiments in Copenhagen, to defect to London. The Danish Resistance did succeed in helping him escape to England but “Trudi” was arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated and tortured. No one knows what happened to her. She was declared missing in action and presumed dead. Reading this, I wondered. “What if she survived? What would her story be?” The only possibility was to create another woman to replace her on the mission.

First, I needed to create a believable royal lineage and hope I didn’t pinpoint her actual connection. To do this, I studied the pedigrees of the British, Danish and Norwegian royal families. The result: Lady Grace Radcliffe. Then I needed to create her counterpart – a woman who could look like her, but be opposite in nature and upbringing. The result: Lee Talbot. Only through their friendship, do they become more like each other as time goes on. With these names and broad character traits, I then started detailed research on their back stories, the men in their lives, and how they would fit into a plot I loosely based on the real “Trudi” mission.

Research in the 1980s was not as easy as it is today. I spent months in the Toronto Main Library photocopying sections of historic books and maps. I read the diaries of Basques who endured the bombing of Guernica. I read William Shirer’s journals about Germany through the 1930s, and Churchill’s memoirs, as well. The more I read, the more the Holocaust haunted me. One day I broke down and wept because I could hear their silent screams.

I interviewed a former Nazi aeronautical engineer who sat on Hitler’s inner circle as a designer of Germany’s first jets. He described Berlin and the effect Kristallnacht had on him in 1938. To trace all the backgrounds and invent the details necessary to build the story for THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR took me ten years before I was ready to start writing my novel. The writing of the novel took another ten years plus two revisions that evolved over the next eight years. As wartime records were released new information surfaced, and I had to change portions of the book because I wanted the details to be as authentic as possible. The traitor’s story, for instance, evolved in greater detail. Britain’s civilian spy agency – SOE – recruited so many homosexuals that this led to the later British scandal of double Soviet agents, such as Anthony Blunt, a confidante of Queen Elizabeth II.

When I was nearly two-thirds finished, two things happened. Both times I awoke at 3 a.m. The first revelation identified the traitor – I believe not knowing kept driving me to write, but then I had to go back through the story and drop hints so the reader wouldn’t be as shocked as I was! The second burst of inspiration led me to write a chapter I have always believed came directly from God. It shows the spiritual charge working in the characters. It was never a part of my outline, and yet it absolutely belongs in the story. I never rewrote it, and I’m convinced it’s the reason why writing this story has always felt like a mission I had to complete. Curiously, no reviewer or reader has ever commented on that chapter. If it was God’s purpose to include it, the reason is entirely His.

Rather than reveal that special chapter, I feel guided to leave it as the private message it seems to be for individual readers.

Award-winning business journalist Bonnie Toews covered the delivery of aid to Rwanda following the genocide in 1994 and observed first-hand why Harry Belafonte, then ambassador for UNICEF, called Canada’s peacekeepers “the best in the world.” Today, Bonnie lends her voice to the Canadian Veterans Advocacy on her Homecoming Vets blog. Her novel THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR is in its second edition with Whistler House Publishing.

Bonnie has also embarked with her life partner John Christiansen on producing the BIBI &  BABU TRAVEL SERIES. These books are armchair adventures that adults or grandparents can enjoy reading and sharing with their children. Ten percent of the series’ royalties goes to the Kilimanjaro Orphanage Centre in Moshi, Tanzania.