Mary – Depending on where you want to go with the story, “the princess” might still be a perfectly appropriate tag, reminding your readers that your MC is, after all, still a princess even if she is currently on the run. If you’re not planning to have her go back to defeat the usurper any time soon, though, it would make sense to switch to something else when you can’t manage with the simple pronoun “she.”

Jean Ann – Thank you.

Deborah – I think the character-tags and said-bookisms thing is just a pet peeve for my walking buddy, but I don’t know for absolute sure. I’ll have to ask if she reads Fanficrants.

Gray – What distinguishes a first draft from extended notes is, I think, something that varies writer to writer. “Painful to reread” is not part of the equation for me, personally; the distinction for me is more about voice and depth of detail. Or to put it another way, when I’m doing a compressed first draft, it sounds enough like actual part-of-the-story narrative summary that I can use large chunks of it nearly verbatim for transition sections; when what I have is extensive notes, I can’t use even a sentence directly. The voice and style is wrong, and the content changes too much when it’s notes. When it’s a draft, chunks of it may expand a lot, but they don’t change radically. It’s enormously easier for me to write from a compressed draft than from notes; unfortunately, writing the compressed draft is something I find exceedingly difficult. You win some, you lose some…

“Getting something down before it evaporates,” is a big part of it. For me, there’s also, “getting it down in a manner that isn’t actively painful to re-read” – because otherwise, the first draft loses story-nature and becomes a series of extended notes instead, which doesn’t work for me.

So I have to use the first quick-and-dirty techniques that come to hand, to get a tolerable tone and rhythm. “Rayon blah blah blah… Rayon blah…. Blah blah Rayon,” in close proximity is going to wear out my patience soon, in contexts where, “Rayon blah blah blah… The combat actuary blah… Blah blah the hamster-faced little android,” is less obtrusive on the first pass, so to speak. Similarly with said-bookisms and stage business.

I’d been doing this by instinct for a long time before I learned to read these, along with certain kinds of “John was…” infodump and “Jane thought/felt…” mental state dump, as a useful part of my construction style to be exploited, rather than a weak part of my writing style to be choked off at source. As you say, one has to get used to them as techniques rather than mistakes, to get the good out of them.

I also find that, on bad days when the prose is flowing like stodgy porridge, it helps to remind myself of this point quite sharply.

And now I’m wondering if your walking partner frequents Fanficrants, because that’s one of their favorite topics of discussion.

Nice post, Patricia.

Sisters are just about the most helpful editing tool ever.