My sister is writing a novel, a debut effort. She hopes to
be done with the first draft sometime this summer. She told me she loves
watching her story unfold on the page and loves having the characters do
surprising things. She belongs to a writer’s group that sounds like a perfect
blend of writers who are serious and who take each other’s work seriously. I
have fantasies of the two of us being published authors. But she and I both
know she’s got a long haul before her book is ready to send out.
In anticipation of being done with her first draft, she
asked me if during the editing process I find that I have to take out and add
whole chapters. I told her that although I may not have to take out whole
chapters, I often have to take out or rearrange big chunks. In fact, I’ve never
known an author who didn’t. By the time you finish a first draft, you have
redundancies, story lines that petered out, loose ends, characters who need to
be reined in or pumped up, and a whole lot of terrible grammar.
I often have problems with the end, having to add scenes or
even chapters. I think, like a horse going home to the barn, I start galloping
toward the end and begin to summarize. Later, when I read what I’ve written, I
realize that what was in my head hasn’t necessarily made it onto the page.
I’m now almost done with the third edit, and I think I’m
coming down to the wire. The major glitches have been addressed, the arc of the
story and the chapters completed, the loose ends tidied, the character arcs
resolved, the story lines finalized. Or have they? I always find that when I go
back over a manuscript “one more time”, I still have tidying to do. There will be
a character I left hanging, or a story line that didn’t quite resolve. One more
pass turns into two, three, five more passes. And then I’m done.
But wait! There’s one more pass. I call it the “golden
words” pass. I have to find out many times I have used the golden words that I
love: “About, just, almost, somehow, seems….” That one last pass is vital. Golden
words are often placeholders for the thing you are really trying to say, or are
used as lazy adjectives. “She was just fine” not only reads as well if you say,
“She was fine,” but is actually stronger. Placeholder words slow down the
action and make prose sound hesitant.
I promised my agent I’d have the manuscript to her this week
so I can get it to my editor by June 1. So now…one more edit.
4 comments:
Your sister's painting is lovely! Great editing advice, too. Thanks for the post.
Good analogy about the horse galloping toward the barn! Nothing ruins a good book, bringing it from 5 to 3 starts quicker, than an author who resolved the end of the book beastly, tightly, and too quickly, like deus ex machina, where it all falls into the readers lap. Excuse me? I was along for the ride and you just dumped me on the ground because you got tired of carrying me? (That was my horse, smelling sweet hay in the barn, dumping me unceremoniously on the ground).
Good analogy about the horse galloping toward the barn! Nothing ruins a good book, bringing it from 5 to 3 starts quicker, than an author who resolved the end of the book beastly, tightly, and too quickly, like deus ex machina, where it all falls into the readers lap. Excuse me? I was along for the ride and you just dumped me on the ground because you got tired of carrying me? (That was my horse, smelling sweet hay in the barn, dumping me unceremoniously on the ground).
It's that sweet smell of the "hay" of being done that always gets me to throw the rider and everything else. But I'm learning, thanks to an agent who won't let me get away with it.
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