Line edits

Before I launch into the main topic, housekeeping: my webmaster and I are working on changing comments this weekend, so you don’t need an account to post one. You can always head over to my facebook and comment on the link for the current post too, though. It’s also good for following new posts if you don’t have an RSS reader you like.

Working on book two revisions this weekend, after sending off a bunch of my short stories last night. I’ve been bad about not only getting them out, but keeping them out since I’ve been learning about all the novel stuff. Now I’m working on line edits from my group for the current section, which always is muuuuch more of a slog than I expect. Not that I don’t appreciate my group and all the work they go to to give me specific line edits–they’re invaluable, but they’re very difficult to implement sometimes. Overall critiques, you can hold all in your head at once, and mold what parts of them you’re going to accept or set aside to match your mental big picture of a particular chapter or scene. (First reader or writer’s group critiques are, after all, one opinion. You can’t please everyone all the time, or you destroy the larger sense of your story)

Line edits, on the other hand, can be much harder. I’m not talking about the “delete this comma” or “you typed at instead of as” ones, I mean the more substantive ones like “would this character really mention that here?” or “I don’t know what this room looks like”. In each case, I decide if the suggested change is: 1. one I want to make, 2. one I don’t think suits my larger purpose, or 3. a symptom of a problem that needs addressing, but not in the particular way suggested. Or if it’s just a problem that’s been pointed out, I have to go through all that, and if it’s 1 or 3, I then have to figure out what the solution is. It can be a fairly involved process, for something that I agree needs to be fixed, but I haven’t figured out the best way to do it yet. Maybe it doesn’t need to be fixed at all! I’m not sure!

Then multiply that by a hundred, for each substantive line edit from four people. The chapter is much, much stronger at the end, but man. It takes a while!