Category: editing

The Writing Moment

Revision continues. Read. Change. Correct.

Two complicated chapters slowed progress. They remain in need of fixes. But I think their changes should be addressed in context of the entire story. So I press on into the next chapter. Read. Revise.

Those were complicated chapters. And important because of the revelations they delivered. So going through them meant patience and diligence.

But I felt that I lost some of the thread. I wondered if I was confusing myself with attempting too many changes to improve the flow. So, I want to let those chapters slip out of mind and see how they read the next time they’re approached in their natural order.

Page 306 is under scrutiny. The main protagonist is enduring an unidentified illess. Going through the prose affects me. Empathizing with the character, nausea and lethargy overtakes me. Dryness spreads from my lips, invading my mouth, takes over my tongue, slipping into my throat. My eyes grow weary. I want to stop.

But there are goals. There must be discipline. The goal for today’s session is to reach page 330, a completely arbitrary number presented to the pscyhe because I work better with order, structure, and goals, a condition of my personality and my work history.

After page 330 is reached, eighty pages will remain.

First, I’m going on a break. Stretch. Walk in the sunshine. Breathe in, as the character tells himself, breathe out. Like the song “Machinehead” by Bush: breathe in, breathe out.

I’m not looking for perfection. I just want to be happy with the story.

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The Writing Moment

A mental mistake. Revising today, the draft surprised me; things I thought I’d changed yesterday weren’t changed. WTH, over? Didn’t I change that? And that? Was that all a mirage, a dream, work done in a different reality.

Realization came belatedly, no, I was in the wrong draft. While working on the latest draft yesterday, I’d opened a previous draft to look something up. Well, it was the last doc closed yesterday, so it went to the top of the document list. Without thinking today, I opened it up, went to where the doc said I left off, and commenced revision. Wasn’t until I glanced at the page number and realized I was twenty pages behind that I finally seriously applied critical thinking to the moment and understood what happened.

What a rube. What a mistake. No harm; just time. But damn, I thought I did some good revising today. Hope I’ve learned a lesson and don’t do that again.

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The Writing Moment

Deeply into revision after letting the novel in progress simmer for a few days. Surprising early cuts come, which weirdly feel ‘natural’. Like the book is already out there, and I’m shaping the manuscript to fit it.

The process is much more involved and slower than the creative writing stage. With the entire story from beginning to end filled in before me, I know how I want to sharpen its focus. Ten pages have been sliced away from the beginning. What remained of that bird required extensive rewriting. It’s like that first draft was an exploration of the history of an event and the characters populating it. Now that I’m familiar with it, I can properly tell the story. From less comes more.

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