Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Fuck Yeah Editing

I kind of hate to admit it, but I think there's something to the oft-repeated advice to let a draft go cold before trying to edit it. When I made my first stab at this back in Feb., I could only read a few pages of the MS at a time before I started feeling discouraged and depressed. The writing seemed so far from what I wanted it to be, and I was overwhelmed at the thought of all the work left to do.

Today I dove back into making line editing notes on the remainder of Act I, and was shocked at how much better I felt about it. It totally feels like someone else wrote it, which makes the problems seem much more fixable, and also makes it easier to see what is working.

As I said yesterday, I don't really have a long-term plan here; I'm just going to feel my way through it this month. In the short-term, I'm going to spend the next 3-4 days drawing maps and writing 250-500 word blocks of description. One conclusion I've reached from all the reading I've done lately is that I skimped way too much on the description. I think I took warnings about overly detailed descriptions too much to heart. In the end, you gotta write the book that you'd want to read, and I liked me some well-written description. I don't plan to dump 500-word chunks of description whole into the story, but if I have more detail than I need it'll be easier to insert sentences where I need them. I think.

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