Maybe a week and a half ago, could be a fortnight ago, I was so glad. I thought the final draft was done. I thought I was well and away and I wouldn’t have to look at the thing again. Oh foolish, foolish me. It turns out that there are about three more rounds to go from what I've been learning in the interim, and I think this manuscript needs them. Maybe other stories won't. Who knows anymore?
At this point I’m past caring. I've had to step away for a while because each word or sentence is looking very similar to every other sentence, so I think a break from this story is a good idea. I’ll start working on the outline for the last part of another story I've been working on for a while, and its enough of a change of a genre to clear out my editing head. Once I’m done on breaking down the plot into chunks I can go back and do the last three passes on this one, which at this point I think are a details and description pass, a dialogue pass, and a line edit pass where I think is the stage where I go line by line and make sure there aren’t any stupid typos. I say ‘stupid typos’ because I've got a very uncomfortable feeling that the intelligent typos will be a lot harder to spot; they’ll be the the ones I’m blind to because I’m the one who wrote them - you know the things that sound just fine in your head, but come out a little bit weird on paper. They’re the ones I always have had trouble with, so it’ll be a fun challenge to figure out a system to be able to spot them. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll nail all, or even most of them, but that’s ok. It yet another step I need to travel on, and I’ll get better over time.
The details/description pass is needed because although the story was intended to go at a fairly decent pace, it's also a little sparse in descriptions of things. In no way do I want to litter the book down with prose that describes every little thing, but a sense of place, or person, or location is kind of required if a story really wants to stand out and live inside the readers head. I’m not entirely sure I could do florid and evocative if my life depended on it, but there should be something. This is the pass where something gets added in. What does home look like? What was the stand-out thing that captured the protagonists attention the moment they arrived at the end of the journey? What was the last thing that stuck in their head before they suffered a tragic setback and now haunts them for the rest of their days?
After that, I reckon its going to be a dialogue pass. I don’t really need one of my characters to have a speech impediment, but I do need them to stand out from one another when they talk. Why not? My best friend doesn’t speak to me in the same way my old school teacher did, so I need a way for the characters, plot or relationships between them to stand out separate and distinct from each other when they open their mouths. Its going to be a tricky one, but its not impossible if I work through the people one by one. At least, that’s the way I’m going to approach it and see what happens.
The very very last thing I will also need to do is go through what I’m going to call a tightening round. This is the part where I think I’ve got to chop about 10% from the whole thing to make it tighter. How on earth do you figure out how to get rid of eight thousand six hundred words and still keep the story feeling like - well, the story?
Not entirely sure, but it’ll be an adventure finding out. If I was able to spray that much wordage down on a virtual page, then I guess its my job to tidy it up into a leaner, meaner beastie of a story. I’m licking my lips in anticipation.
