Oh, hallo :-D Just so I don't miss out on any of your rewriting exercises. I'm very fond of them, as you know. I'm afraid I haven't been doing any of these of late (partly because I haven't had much to do with anyone else's writing), but I think of you whenever I do post them -- glad to hear that you actually got to see some of them! Somehow it feels weird to hear that the ladies in the writing group were not appreciating your editorial skills, even more so if they actually want to publish their work. Oh, it's not that they were actually rejecting them; more that I wasn't even bothering to comment, because it was so clear that we were starting from completely different places. I mean, my aim with editing is to take a piece of text and tweak it into something that I might actually want to read, preferably with some relatively minor fixes. The stuff they were posting (and to be fair, there wasn't a lot of it; the group seemed to be increasingly moribund, after the initial overwhelming rush of interest) tended to be material that I failed to click with on a much more basic level, so that *nothing* I did with it would make me want to read it.
Line-editing is easy enough, but changing somebody's whole writing style -- especially when there appears to be an entire published genre in which that style is not only common but presumably considered desirable -- is beyond my remit, and just tinkering with a bit of dialogue punctuation here or some repetitive word choices there isn't going to fix the basic issue. In fact, it might be misleading in suggesting that this will magically make things better when it really won't make much difference.
(And, of course, there *is* the fact that the principal accepted method of interaction with fic excerpts being posted in the group is to express admiration -- well, apart from mine, of course, which have been completely ignored for the last few months, presumably because nobody at all admires them but the group zeitgeist forbids them from saying so :-O)
But if I don't like what the writer is trying to do with her work, and can't suggest anything that would make me like it any better, then just tinkering with a word or two seems pointless. We just move in completely separate worlds; I am, basically, *older* than almost all of them, and we read very different books for preference.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-11-03 08:21 pm (UTC)I'm afraid I haven't been doing any of these of late (partly because I haven't had much to do with anyone else's writing), but I think of you whenever I do post them -- glad to hear that you actually got to see some of them!
Oh, it's not that they were actually rejecting them; more that I wasn't even bothering to comment, because it was so clear that we were starting from completely different places. I mean, my aim with editing is to take a piece of text and tweak it into something that I might actually want to read, preferably with some relatively minor fixes. The stuff they were posting (and to be fair, there wasn't a lot of it; the group seemed to be increasingly moribund, after the initial overwhelming rush of interest) tended to be material that I failed to click with on a much more basic level, so that *nothing* I did with it would make me want to read it.
Line-editing is easy enough, but changing somebody's whole writing style -- especially when there appears to be an entire published genre in which that style is not only common but presumably considered desirable -- is beyond my remit, and just tinkering with a bit of dialogue punctuation here or some repetitive word choices there isn't going to fix the basic issue. In fact, it might be misleading in suggesting that this will magically make things better when it really won't make much difference.
(And, of course, there *is* the fact that the principal accepted method of interaction with fic excerpts being posted in the group is to express admiration -- well, apart from mine, of course, which have been completely ignored for the last few months, presumably because nobody at all admires them but the group zeitgeist forbids them from saying so :-O)
But if I don't like what the writer is trying to do with her work, and can't suggest anything that would make me like it any better, then just tinkering with a word or two seems pointless. We just move in completely separate worlds; I am, basically, *older* than almost all of them, and we read very different books for preference.