Riding home on the cows back
In the second redraft, the story will be apparent.
The editing will not be complete. You have story, but you must bring it out into the world properly.
Write to be read.
Remove all the punctuation and grammatical mistakes.
Make things clear; plot is not the act of straightening out poor story telling in earlier chapters – Jack-in-the-box twists added later are no asset.
Try reading out aloud- our minds have a way of twisting what we read to make sense of things. By saying it aloud, you let yourself her from an outside angle, what you’ve written.
This is just polish though- no amount of editing can revive a dead story.
Unless you’ve written a text book people expect to find a living story.
5 comments:
I usually do that, reading my blog post before I hit publish. It helps me realize some grammar mistakes and of course the missing punctuation marks.
I thought I am somewhat crazy but coming from you, now I know I am doing right.
Btw, thanks for adding my blog to your links, I appreciate it so much.
Although I certainly don't write novels with the intention or expectation that they will be read out loud that's never stopped me reading chunks to myself to ensure the text flows. If it cannot be read out loud comfortably then the odds are it will be hard to read silently.
@ Manilenya, it’s great that you discovered reading aloud in editing yourself, when you develop techniques it means you’re practicing to constantly improve your writing, and the results always show = )
I think the things we learn best we learn through our own experiences. When it comes to writing, there are some hard and fast rules for grammar, but the remainder of the game, how you edit, how you proof read, is all up on the table for grabs.
Don’t look to anyone as an authority on writing, but take in different points of view, weigh them with a steady hand, and see what works for you. Don’t be afraid to try new things, and new ways of communicating with writing.
You’ve a great writing voice in your blog “Residual matters” It’s conversational and you communicate clearly and with character. I think the key for all good writing is practice, develop and learn what story is and how it happens, but on a page by page, word by word level, not a theory of divisions and sections.
You can find a link for “Residual matters” in the bar to the left of this page.
@ Jim Murdoch, that’s pretty much the nut of it, “If it cannot be read out loud comfortably then the odds are it will be hard to read silently” It helps to break away from story, personally, and come at it from a different angle. Our minds can sometimes be lazy and fill in the gaps and rearrange things, and somehow we voluntarily miss weirdness with words and punctuation.
Jim has one of the best writing blogs around, “The truth about Lies,” you can find a link to “The truth about lies” on the bar to the left of this page.
I've been reading a lot of self-published books by authors who don't have the budget to pay for editing. Mistakes don't only make the book look and feel amateurish, it distracts from the experience. When commas and semi-colons are overused and words are mispelled, it simply takes away from the story. An author's job, in my opinion, is to write an engaging story and then turn the story over to a professional editor to fix the spelling, typos and grammar. Editing is one of the most important steps in the publishing business.
Heya, Phil, Ultimately, I think that is the best way to go, but I do believe we improve our writing by looking over our own work and attempting to correct the mistakes we see. We become more aware of our mistakes as we are writing, and develop better writing techniques.
It is absolutely necessary to have someone look over your work before it goes to print. No big publisher would send a book to print unedited (for many reasons) and neither should self published authors. There are times where, believe it or not, we are all wrong, and it’s the job of editors to correct us in those moments- better they than your readers who paid for the book.
Phil is a member of Authors on The Net (http://www.authorsonthenet.com/) a great resource for writers of any description.
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