Glenda Bailey-Mershon
It’s cut and paste time for my new novel. Any large project can get a bit out of whack: scenes out of place, sketchy “bridge” material where you didn’t quite know how to write, and so on. In a multilinear novels with more than one voice and thread, this can happen times seven.
So the easiest thing for me is to print out the novel, separate it by chapter on the flooor, read each chapter, cross out what doesn’t work, and cut out the good parts. Then I attach the clipped bits to new paper with tape, move them around till I’m satisfied, and voila! A new improved draft. From there it’s easy to move the offending parts around in the word processing software until I’m satisfied, and then to rewrite portions, especially the bridge material that opens and ends chapters.
However, I can’t do that today because I don’t have a printer. I will next week, though. So for today I’m off into fantasy land with new material for the short story collection I call, Space Walk.
Love and luck to you all, whatever you’re doing today. Leave me a note to let me know, will you?
Susanna J. Sturgis
/ August 24, 2016I was remembering this as I sat down to write this morning. I wrote the same scene in longhand from two different perspectives, typed them into the computer, and was staring at the screen trying to figure out how to weave them together. Brain freeze. Plus I was afraid that once I started cutting and pasting, even with track changes on, I’d forget how they were originally if I didn’t like how it was going. Aha! I thought. Print those pages out! I did, and now I’ve got it.
I’m about to start draft #3, a daunting prospect because several threads have been growing through the cracks of draft #2 and who knows how they’ll weave together or what else will want to change in the process? I just decided that my first step is going to be printing the whole thing out. Thank you!
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Glenda Bailey-Mershon
/ August 24, 2016There are times in editing when nothing but a hard copy will do. Computers are miraculous, especially to those of us for whom arthritis has made longhand impossible, but they also make it too easy to get lost in the page before us without taking the whole into account.
I think a good way to look at it is, when you come to the point when you need to move whole pages, endings, beginnings, chapter breaks, scenes around, a bit like a jigsaw, you have made serious progress on the manuscript. You have enough of a hold on the whole to make creative chaos worthwhile!
Good luck, and thanks for commenting again.
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