Editing issues

[igenlode]

And this sort of thing is why it takes me forever to write anything these days...

From today's efforts:
When he had left Christine there, it had been through a haze of unhappiness that had blinded him to almost all else.The image that clung to him now [When he tried to picture the place now, the abiding image] was [his final] glimpse of the bare little Protestant church up above the steep street where Christine had said [told him] once that she might [sing] some day sing, [with its roof] silhouetted against the sky above the steep street against a sky that was the very [precisely the] colour of her eyes.

(bold represents actual text, [italic] insertion edits, strike through deletions)

However, the story is actually progressing again, after a horrible month spent trying to rewrite the wreck scene retrospectively to create a completely different course of events that would still justify the following material -- I really, really struggle with rewrites. It is so infinitely much easier to discover the course of events for the first time than to try to change them after they have already happened; I simply can't imagine what it must be like to be one of those people who writes fiction 'out of order' (and a lot of people can and do). I'm not altogether happy with the rewrite either, which still feels a bit forced and rather unbalances the chapter, to which it wasn't intended to be the climax, but I'm absolutely not going to do any further work on that unless I have to... action scenes never were my forte.

For the new chapter I have proceeded to dive back into the familiar territory of in media res, flashback, and character angst (as see extract above!) and a getting along relatively swimmingly, which is to say at over a hundred words a day.

I am beginning to run out of ink (I shall need to buy a new bottle before long) and to reach the end of this notebook, which has been taken up entirely by Raoul's adventures. But very, very soon (within the next few paragraphs, I hope, and at all costs by the end of the chapter) Christine will have returned to the story and the rest of it will be entirely joint in plot :-D

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

Wishing you smooth sailing (bad pun?) from here on out! I can't wait to finally read this story once it's finished. :D

In related news, I listened to "Why Does She Love Me?" on YouTube and wrote an angsty LND!Raoul one-shot as a present for you, if you want it...

[igenlode]

Thanks for the heads-up: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/13267930/1/Leave-The-Hurt-Behind
I wouldn't have noticed it if you hadn't mentioned it, as I've more or less given up scannning FFnet for new material.

[betweensunandmoon]

What did you think of it?

[watervole]

The edits do improve it though, especially "When he tried to picture the place now"is much better than the first version.

[igenlode]

Absolutely -- I recorded the passage here in order to trace the process of improvement :-)
(One advantage of working in manuscript is that you can see all the revisions to a given text simultaneously, and/or revert any of them if it seems like a good idea. The disadvantage, of course, is that the final edit tends to be absolutely covered in little rings and arrows...)

When I tell people that my first draft of a story is basically the same as the version I end up submitting, what that doesn't take into account is that the manuscript is the first physical draft, not the making-it-up-as-you-go-along version, and that it gets edited until the pips squeak during the immediate writing process.

I dare say my stories might be better if I went back and did the 'is this sub-plot really necessary'/'should I retell this section from a different character's point of view'/'is the protagonist too passive here'/'is my suspense paced effectively' macro-editing stage, but I don't. I do precisely what the books on 'how to write your novel' tell you not to do, and go straight into the agonizing-about-comma-placement stage when getting the very first words on paper.

Basically, I've always done it that way and it produces results that live up to my internal vision, so I've never had an incentive to change -- or any practice in doing so. The question is whether it would potentially produce better results if I had an editor breathing down my neck and pointing out large-scale flaws as well as small-scale ones... :-(

[watervole]

Hacking at subplots can be useful, but it does depend on the writer to some extent.

If you have good software (I used to use Scrivener for large novel sized things) then moving sections around and adding/deleting them, become a lot easier.

To some extent, it's whatever works for you. We write for our own pleasure (unless we actually get paid for it!)