Paksworld

Some of you may remember the posts I did last year during the Spring Revision Season, but some of you weren’t here yet, so I’ll chatter away as if you couldn’t look up the posts by category and find them (but go ahead if you want.)   Editor-revisions are basically the same as any other revision except that Editor has more experience and more clout even than DRW and Karen S- and Ellen M-.

24 hours should always elapse before digging into revisions, because sometime the second reading of a comment, and the relevant text, offers a better fix than the first one.  But today began the digging in.     Most of Editor’s comments this time are at upper-construction to finish level:  the awkward phrasing,  the confusing bit of dialogue, etc.    Embarrassing to the writer, because why didn’t I see this and fix it before?

Chapter 1 comments include one that will need serious thought,  and three that are fix-ups to clarify something confusing or simplify the awkward.

Chapter 2 has two comments of the fix-up sort.

Chapter 5 has one construction-level (apparently left out or cut as nonessential something that was essential in story-logic–why someone does something) and two fix-ups.

And so on.   Some chapters have more construction level comments, in all cases but one, where I knew reasons and linkages so well that I didn’t put them in.  (I did that in a geology test one time and got a bad grade…did not realize I’d leapt over all that the test-giver was looking for.)

Doing good revisions is a more intricate process than you might think, because every change affects the story around it–maybe for the better or maybe not.  Sometimes it’s necessary to put an entire chapter or viewpoint back into the fire and start over (not this time, fortunately.)    More commonly,   a “simple” change propagates out from one to twenty pages, forcing some other changes (which also have an effect.)

For instance, in these comments, Editor suggests changing the person that information comes from.    That will mean restructuring the conversation (since both parties involved had their own thoughts and their own “leading up to something” phrasings for the original conversation.    Going from “A said X” to “B thought X” is easy…making it feel natural in that time and place isn’t exactly hard, but takes thought, especially since A and B aren’t the same sex.