Coming up this week, more deep POV techniques: conveying the view from inside your character’s head and doing that in “real time.”
Woot! I just finished the latest round of revisions on my current project. I’m really glad I undertook this latest round (although actually it was two rounds at once—not my best idea ever; very easy to forget where you are in the book that way!). I’ve made some semi-major changes and strengthened and clarified a lot of things. It’s a stronger book for my efforts. And I switched the titles for the sequel and this one, since I think they actually fit the books better this way.
But now I have another problem: it’s right around 101,000 words. In seven or eight rounds of revisions, I’ve added 12,000 words. So my next goal is to trim it back to 95,000 words, max.
Sigh. It’s such a burden to keep having good ideas 😉 . I’m surprised that I’m still having ideas on this book, since I finished drafting so long ago (or it feels like it’s been so long). I’m starting to wonder if it’ll ever be “finished,” or, like George Lucas said (quoting someone else), it’ll be abandoned, never finished.
Do you find yourself having to cut or add words during/after revisions? What do you think is the best way to cut—go through and take out a few words here and there, or cut whole scenes? How do you know when you’re done? How is your writing progress coming along?
Photo credit: Richard Dudley
I usually reread the entire thing, cutting words here and there, rephrasing things and deleting whole scenes. I know when I’m done when I can show it to someone else feeling pretty good about the work as a whole.
Yep, that’s how I did the first few passes. This last time I was working on clarity and decided to change some things in the subplots. I also went through to make sure each scene had a scene goal, which I think strengthened it a lot, too.
One of my biggest problems is not knowing when to stop tweaking. I usually leave it for a few weeks while I work on something else — and then come back to read through it again with a fresh outlook. I learned from someone else not to do these later read-throughs on the computer but to print out the ms single spaced. It reads more like a book that way and it’s easier to notice any residual mistakes and the trivia that could be axed — the words and whole scenes that I’m tending to skip over that don’t really move the story ahead. The urge to re-read and keep tweaking never quite leaves me, but I keep remembering that an agent and/or editor will undoubtedly have more suggestions so I try not to beat it to death once I think it’s as good as I can make it.
I like the idea that “I try not to beat it to death once it’s as good as I can make it.” Once you get to the point where you can’t tell if your changes are making anything better, it’s probably a good time to stop 😉 .
I used to write disjointed plot free stories that were 106,000 words. Now that I know how to plot, I finish at about 80,000. Now my challenge is to take the MS and flesh the details out so I dont have my readers saying “Great scene, where are we?” Making sure everything is contracted, (it’s) and taking out the extra that’s removes ALOT of words from my rough drafts.