As I worked on editing yesterday, it occurred to me that there's no rush. I'm hardly the most patient person in the world, but lately I've not felt overly ambitious. And I'm not on any sort of deadline.
Pasting one chapter at a time into a new document is working well, although knowing where to separate chapters can be tricky. As I previously noted, I added no chapter breaks to the manuscript as I was writing it, mainly because I didn't want to artificially disrupt the flow of the story. Like everything, there is a psychological component to writing chapters. We tend to look at them as stand-alones, in which each one needs to start with an interesting premise and end on a sort of cliffhanger, to entice people to keep reading. I'm sure most writers benefit from that approach, whereas I just freestyled it. Now as I begin isolating chapters, their lengths vary a lot, but what's this "rule" that all chapters have to be uniform in word count? Who made that one up? I like order as much as the next person, but that's ridiculous.
What did I accomplish yesterday? Well, I didn't resolve the main character's ambivalence surrounding the record label offer, but I didn't want to. I needed her to waver on that. (That's why it's called ambivalence.) But I did explain it better, I hope. Now she no longer turns on a dime. She has reasons for her doubts.
There also weren't a lot of wording changes required. The writing is solid, but too sparse. My biggest task will be to add descriptive elements and to recognize where they're needed. I'm blithely ignorant to that. I'll read a scene and it seems perfectly clear to me, because I'm picturing the surroundings in my mind. This is certainly my biggest failing as a writer, which I know I can rectify, but first I'll need to "see" those failings; deliberately search them out. While I don't believe that every setting needs to be spelled out for the reader, description adds color and turns the narrative from a screenplay to an actual full-bodied story.
An example of this was when I got to the scene of the main character arriving at the star's estate for the first time. Wouldn't she be awed by it? Well, not according to the way I wrote it. She did remark on the circular driveway, but only because she wasn't sure where to park. She ended up pulling her car into a spot by the lake. So, there's a lake and a driveway. Goodie. It's written so poorly as to be laughable. I had managed to detail the interior of the mansion, but her first glimpse of the outside? Nope. Could have been a mobile home, for all we know.
It's issues such as this that will make editing a very long process, which is why patience is a virtue. I need to stop worrying so much about whether the story makes sense. It does. What I need to do is fatten it. Bring it to life.
Before I move ahead, I really should go back and reread those first chapters I pasted and fill in the missing details.
So, time moves slowly. And often it moves backwards. I could pay a fortune to have a developmental editor point these things out, or I can clear my head and start to recognize it for free.
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