185: "Reader mindset" method for rewrites (Book Writing Update!)

In this episode, your host and indie author Sagan Morrow shares her experience with reviewing her current work-in-progress (Book 8 in the Polyamorous Passions series) using a "reader mindset" prior to doing rewrites! 

She shares her process and results for reviewing her current WIP as a reader: 

Find out a breakdown of the process she’s using, the game-changing book writing method that’s shifted her out of Author mindset and into Reader mindset (plus why this matters), and 5 fascinating things that came up for her throughout this process... 

Resources mentioned in this episode: 

• Small Town Stilettos and the Polyamorous Passions series: SaganMorrow.com/books 
• Connect with Sagan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saganlives 
• Connect with Sagan on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@saganlives 

Transcript

You’re listening to the Author Diary Entries podcast — formerly known as Indie Author Weekly. I’m your host, Sagan Morrow, and this is episode #185.

Last week, I was in Winnipeg visiting family, and I turned my vacation responder on so I didn’t need to do any type of work except for my book!

The novel I’m currently working on is Book 8 in the Polyamorous Passions series — it’s the second book in Scarlett’s trilogy, and I’ve been working on it for quite a while now! I keep on letting it rest for long periods of time before revisiting it. There have now been multiple times when I’ve thought to myself, “Okay, we’re in the last leg of this before we shift into the proofreading phase,” but then I keep adding more to it.

…The same thing happened when I was working on the last novel I published, Small Town Stilettos. I swear, each book takes me longer and longer to write than the previous one!

So when I was approaching a full week of focusing solely on my book (in between seeing family and friends), I wasn’t too sure what that writing process would look like: Would I have a ton of rewrites to do? 

Here’s a little update for how it went…

First, I revisited my notes document where I’d done a bunch of planning for this manuscript. I put together a checklist for what I wanted to review in each chapter — things like the pacing of the story, whether it keeps me engaged as a reader, if I have enough of the main character’s internal dialogue, if it’s light and humorous enough, do I as the reader care about each of the characters, and so on.

After that, I began reading the entire manuscript chapter by chapter — not to actively make changes WHILE reading it, but simply reading that single chapter and then going through the checklist to see if it checked off the boxes or not. As I was reading it, I also made an ongoing list of bullet point notes for me to go through when I’m doing a proper edit: things like, “I used the same word twice in this paragraph,” or “double check this timeline is correct,” etc. 

I really didn’t want to get distracted with edits at this stage — because this was much more about reviewing the novel for the story itself. BUT, I also wanted to make sure I’d remember to deal with some of those things during the editing stage! So making quick notes about it as I went along worked as a great strategy.

After I read a given chapter and went through my checklist, the next thing I did was to write bullet-point notes about my thoughts upon reading that chapter. I don’t think I’ve done this quite so intentionally with any other book before — I created a separate document that was basically just, “Here’s what I liked about this chapter. The foreshadowing here is good. This line is pretty cute, I like the dynamic between these characters, the backstory provides extra context,” all of that kind of thing.

…AND, I also included notes about things that I wasn’t super happy with. For example, “This chapter doesn’t have enough of a comedic factor to it, and since this is supposed to be a romantic comedy, I may want to go through and add more comedy to it,” or “The pacing isn’t bad in this chapter, but there isn’t enough action; the next chapter will need to start with a bang in order for me as a reader to want to keep reading.” 

Any time there were notes about the things I wanted to potentially change or add in, I’d underline and mark those as bold, so it’ll be that much easier for me to quickly go through and revisit when I do the ACTUAL rewrites. 

This whole method worked really well for systematically going through the novel. I also found that by writing my thoughts on each chapter immediately after I read it, it helped to give me some perspective on the quality of the manuscript. As an author I find that it’s a real challenge to have any kind of objective understanding of whether my novels are “good” — so by writing down my thoughts from that reader lens, I think this will make a big difference in the way that I “see” my own work.

I’m curious to see whether this practice will also be useful for creating the back-of-book blurb, as well as to figure out marketing language for tropes and what readers can expect. It’ll be interesting to see if it helps with that!

I thought that this past week would be for actively doing the rewrites, but if I had dived right into that, I suspect it would have made my novel a bit messy. This was much more about rereading and organizing thoughts and doing more planning, so that now I can more easily go back through and do those rewrites.

The other reason why I didn’t want to do rewrites as I was reading it is because I knew that it’d be too easy for me to think, “Oh I should add XYZ to this chapter,” and then rediscover two chapters later that I already addressed the thing I thought was missing, for example. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself with the rewrites. 

There were five things that came up for me throughout this process over the past week…

#1 I ended up breaking down some of the longer chapters into shorter chapters.

As I was rereading the chapters and going through my checklists, sometimes I’d think, “hmm, there doesn’t seem to be enough of this character in that chapter” — but by making some of the chapters shorter, it didn’t feel like as big of a deal if some of the main and supporting characters weren’t in constant appearance. 

This can also be a helpful way to keep the story flowing smoothly, because a chapter ends on a bit more of a cliffhanger. Whereas before, I might’ve had some of the chapters ending very neatly, this method of turning a large chapter into two chapters almost keeps the story rolling better — the middle of a chapter suddenly becoming the END of a chapter can be pretty effective, I think.

#2 This process made it much easier to see where I could move some scenes around.

The main character Scarlett — a burlesque dancer — gets a career opportunity in this novel that essentially makes up the main plot, BUT she was waffling quite a bit throughout it. To the point that I was like, “hmmm, she needs to make up her mind sooner!”

When I got to chapter 7, I realized that there was a short prelude to a scene where she essentially makes up her mind, BUT that it would actually work much better leading up to a different scene in chapter 5. This way, she’s only hemming and hawing for about 3 chapters, which is much more reasonable and realistic, rather than 5 chapters, which just started to feel ridiculous as the reader.

It required very minor edits to move that “prelude” scene to an earlier chapter, and the story has much better flow now. I don’t think I would’ve been able to clearly see this if I wasn’t doing the recap of my “thoughts about this chapter” after reading each chapter! It’s kind of like I’m writing notes for myself as if I am my own beta reader, or as if I’m compiling notes as a developmental editor or a book coach for someone’s novel. 

And I will say — I’ve done a lot of different types of rewrites and edits over the 7 years that I’ve been publishing my novels, but this method of compiling notes for myself throughout the process might be my most favourite method to date. It really got me into the mindset of being the reader rather than the author.

#3 There are a lot of men as main characters-adjacent in this novel.

If you are a fan of the TV show Gilmore Girls, you might’ve heard that the character of Luke was originally going to be a woman (fun fact!) — but they decided at the last minute that they didn’t want ALL the main and side characters to be women, so they changed the diner owner to be a man instead. 

I was thinking about that when reading through this novel, because I actually felt kinda tempted to change one of the characters from a man into a woman. Specifically, the character I briefly considered changing is Zach: he’s the owner and bartender at the Dusky Panther, who plays a pretty prominent role in this story. As it stands, the main character Scarlett has her two best friends Emma and Helen who are women, and then there’s also Reese who’s a friend but also kind of the “competition” — and *as a reader*, I personally don’t LIKE when stories feature a main character who only has a couple of women friends. 

Not that that’s the case for Scarlett — it’s just that there aren’t any other friends of hers who really pop up in this story.

Ultimately, I didn’t make a change here. I really love the brotherly dynamic that Scarlett has with Zach. There’s also this beautiful scene of platonic friendship between Scarlett and Helen’s boyfriend Grant — and that’s really WHY I decided not to change any of the characters’ genders: because having those platonic friendships between men and women are so lovely, and I like showcasing a complete lack of sexual tension between them (especially given that it’s a romance novel so there gets to be sexual tension elsewhere).

One of the subplots that I enjoyed writing in Helen’s trilogy of the Polyamorous Passions series, Books 4 - 6, is that she DOES have sexual tension with her boss (who is a man) — and so for THIS novel, it was nice to highlight purely platonic relationships instead, outside of Scarlett’s romantic love interests.

That leads us to the fourth thing I want to note about this story…

#4 There are very fun flipped dynamics.

In the previous two trilogies, Emma and Helen are the ones who broach the subject of ethical non-monogamy with their partners. In this case, it’s the other way around — Scarlett enters into a relationship already knowing that her boyfriend, Pete, is ethically non-monogamous.

(Sidebar: if you are interested in checking out the Polyamorous Passions series, it’s available at all major e-bookstores! The first 3 books feature Emma as the main character, Books 4 - 6 follow Helen’s story, and Books 7 - 9 focus on Scarlett. Visit SaganMorrow.com/books to grab your copy, or visit your favourite e-bookstore. Happy reading! End of sidebar)

Another fun way that this is flipped is that with both Emma and Helen, the first person they’re in a relationship with is a little more… tightly wound, I guess you could say. Carlos and Grant are the two “secondary” men who come along into their lives, and they’re both more free-spirited. 

But with Scarlett, her boyfriend, Pete, is far more open and very much a free spirit compared to her other love interest that starts to — spoiler alert! — kind of pursue her.

This is one of my favourite things about writing the Polyamorous Passions series. There are some subtle differences in the dynamics and the way Emma, Helen, and Scarlett each view and approach ethical non-monogamy. What I hope readers get from this is that there is no one-size-fits-all; there are many iterations. It’s truly about figuring out your own way.

#5 Writing polyamorous romance novels requires a delicate balance.

I was a bit nervous going into reviewing this novel because I was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough of Pete, her love interest who was very prominent in the PREVIOUS book in this series. But that wasn’t the case, which was good to see! 

Writing polyamorous romance novels requires a VERY delicate balance between the different love interests. When you have a traditional love triangle, there’s deliberately this tension between the two love interests, a sort of competitive nature there, where the readers become Team This Person or Team That Person. 

…but with a polyamorous romance novel, you want the reader to be Team Everybody! This is not easy to do! It’s a real fine line to ensure that all the love interests are getting enough page time and that they are compelling enough that the reader is happy about both of them. 

Anyway, because to date I’ve exclusively written polyamorous romance novels, I think I sometimes forget about that! I feel like I might need to talk more about this in its own episode at some point.

I haven’t quite finished this process of going through the entire manuscript chapter by chapter, but I’m making excellent progress and about halfway through the novel — I’ll keep you updated as I continue the rewrites and edits!

And in the meantime, as I mentioned before, you can read the first 7 books in the series when you visit SaganMorrow.com/books, or when you search “Polyamorous Passions” at your favourite e-bookstore.

That’s a wrap on today’s episode! Find me on Instagram & Threads to share your thoughts on this episode — my handle is @Saganlives. As always, you can access the show notes and transcript of this episode at SaganMorrow.com/podcast. And if you are enjoying the Author Diary Entries podcast, please take 2 minutes to rate and review it on your favourite podcast platform. 

Thanks so much — I appreciate you!