EDITING NOVEL

ROOMS

(Trish Steele)

This has been a great week.  I've edited about nine chapters of Rooms.  Since this is the second major re-write, the changes are fewer and more targeted.  I'm re-reading every paragraph for meaning and connection.  Connection, not only with what is in that particular paragraph, but the whole book and what came before and what will come after.

The small inconsistencies are less and less, and I'm working on simplifying the phrasing.  I've found that in my writing, I tend to try to describe too much sometimes.  I think this gets in the way of the easy flow of the story, and I've been doing my best to describe when needed, but only when it's important to do so.

I think I've also helped make the conversations more real by, again, changing some of the phrasing, thinking about how people speak in more casual ways.

I've also found that I tend to use some descriptive words more often than others, so I'm doing my best to create more diversity there and yet keep some normal phrasing, too.  It's not always the best thing to try to find "a different word" to say something.  Sometimes normal phrasing is the best.

I'm learning a lot! 

Image of Door:

Trish Steel [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons