So I am currently stuck in the middle of editorial revisions on the Work-In-Process, and have been for an enormously long time, mostly due to outside factors. I got the last of the editorial requests at the end of February. Two weeks later, my state went into lockdown and everyone, including me, did nothing for a month except read pandemic news. Then several different family things blew up in sequence, taxes got even more complicated than usual, I had to get my sewer line replaced, and I found out I need a new furnace. Two weeks ago, a hailstorm brought down a tree on my power/internet/phone lines and damaged my roof, so I’ve been dealing with service people and inspectors and insurance claims adjusters, and I’m not finished yet.
All of that makes it very hard to write.
My preferred method for editorial revisions is to focus on them exclusively and intensely for two or three weeks straight. That hasn’t been possible with all this other stuff going on, so things are moving forward in unsatisfactory fits and starts. (I swear this book is cursed…) But this is how I do it.
I start with the easy decisions – the obviously-confusing sentence that the editor misread (if I swap two words around and add a comma, it should be clear), the spot where I left off a speech tag because I knew who said that, the places where I have seventeen semi-colons on a single page (and twenty-one on the page after that), the chapter where everybody “glares” or “demands” things repeatedly (no joke, there were about twenty repeats, and okay, it was an acrimonious conversation, but I do own a thesaurus…).
I also take out unnecessary words, phrases, and sentences as I notice them. Early in my career, that was a whole separate pass that took almost a week all by itself. It was kind of arbitrary – I’d decide to cut two lines of text per page, which got me 600 lines out of a 300 page manuscript, or around 5,000 to 7,000 words. (Yes, I cheat; if someone has dialog that runs three words into the next line, I can get one line of text by cutting three words out of that dialog. I did that a lot.) Over the years, I’ve gotten better at getting it right in the first place, as well as at spotting when I’m still using six words where three will do, so I no longer do a special pass just to tighten up the prose. It happens along the way.
On the second pass, I deal with small-ish things that require decisions. Editorial questions like “Whatever became of the lavender mouse?” (that will only take a sentence or two, and I know right where it should go, but I still have to figure out who ends up with it) and “Where did all these minions come from, if there hasn’t been a Dark Lord for ten years?” (I know the answer; the question is where and how to work in that they are all young hopefuls who took low-paying, entry-level minion jobs in hopes that it will give them a leg up on promotions when the new Dark Lady shows up). Most of these fixes require either writing or deleting two paragraphs or less (sometimes, the best way to clear up editorial confusion is to simply delete the confusing bit).
The second pass is also where I deal with consistency problems. There are a lot more of those in this book than usual, because putting it together was so very like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Chapters, scenes, and even paragraphs got copied, cut, and moved around. This occasionally resulted in problems like people delivering the exact same line of dialog or having the same conversation in two or more places, or people referring to something happening that occurs the day after they mention it. These are particularly difficult things to catch, because I’m so familiar with the material and I know what’s supposed to be happening, so I don’t always notice when it’s out of order.
Doing the easier things first naturally leaves the trickiest bits for last. Those includes adding entire scenes (“Can you show them doing more magic?”), deleting or rearranging sections (“There is a lot of backstory in these two chapters; can you spread it out or compress it?”), and the sort of changes that require a sentence here and a paragraph there through almost the whole book (“Who or what does she miss from her old life?”).
By this time, I usually have only a few of these larger changes left, so I concentrate on one at a time – first, I’ll add in the fight with the owlhead vultures, instead of having it happen off in the distance. Then I’ll go through looking for places to reposition bits of the backstory, and I’ll do a serious delete-and-compress pass on just those two overloaded chapters. (Though I’m keeping the argument over just how many Final Battles there have been between the Dark Hordes and the Alliance of the Light, because it’s silly.) Then I’ll figure out where to put more active magic in – that’s going to take a while, and I may have to do some more delete-and-compress to make room for it.
At the end, I’m left with the things I’m not going to change. There are always a few that I’ve known from the beginning weren’t going to happen – often, around half of them can be dealt with by clarifying things in the second pass. (That character hasn’t eaten anything, ever, because she’s a ghost. Obviously, I need to punch that up more, because obviously my editor missed that rather important fact…) The other half are usually things that I disagree on. In this case, there are a few questions that I know the answers to, but don’t think those answers belong in this book.
There are also a couple of proposed deletions of minor comments or events that I’m going to leave in, because I’m going to want them in the sequel. They could go, without causing problems in this book, but I feel that leaving them in will create more of a connection between the two volumes. It’s a bit tricky, because on the one hand, I want each book to mostly stand alone, but I also don’t want the second book to feel like all it has in common with the first are a few characters and the setting.
It shouldn’t take long to finish, but that’s what I said before the family drama, and the pandemic, and the horrible tax problem, and the hailstorm…
I love the concept of young hopefuls taking entry-level minion jobs! Very Girl Genius.
We’re having plumbing problems too; the upstairs flat was fine, but the in-law flat in the basement (which had been installed maybe fifty years later) corked up; every time one flushed the toilet, horrible black sewer water welled up in the bathtub.
We have an absentee landlord who doesn’t bother to respond to requests for repairs until something goes completely pear-shaped; I will not tell you about the roof at this time, except that he kept sending the handyman out to tarp it … the handyman said, “Putting a tarp on this is like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.”
We finally got in a plumber with a large and ferocious snake this evening; he was here from 5 to 11 PM, and snaked through sixty-five feet of unidentified obstruction before he ran out of snake. He’s given us an estimate of what it would cost to run a camera down the pipe and find out what-all is down there.
But the toilet can flush without coming up in the bathtub now, hooray. If anyone wants to know what it’s like to be a 78-year-old woman climbing a flight of seventeen stairs to the master bathroom upstairs, in the middle of the night, just ask.
You have my sympathies! We also have seventeen stairs between floors,but fortunately our plumbing is okay. Various appliances have committed suicide, though.
I love knowing that you love semi-colons all too well! So do I–though I certainly don’t mean to compare my writing to yours. Are you willing to tell us any more about the WIP?
Some well-known writer (whose name I forget) once said “People do not speak in semi-colons”, a dictum that I took to heart. In dialog, would-be semi-colons usually get replaced by em-dashes—but they are more than welcome in narration (perhaps a little too welcome in my prose style).
No, I don’t think people speak in semicolons, now that you mention it.
However, I suspect many here will remember the lecture given by a professional speech therapist at a Minicon many years ago, about the interesting subdialect of SF/F fen. (Does anyone have a link to it?) I bet we speak in semicolons when we get really wound up.
Outside of conversations, though, I commit semicolons to an excessive degree, and one of my standard first-revision practices is to look at every sentence and see if it would read better as two sentences, or maybe three.
OTOH I have one character in the current Work Under Review who, asked to tell about an adventure, breaks into about twenty lines of alliterative verse before being shushed because the enemy are approaching. 🙂
I would love to read/hear that lecture, if a link can be found.
Well, I have it saved to disk, but the only link mentioned in the text no longer works.
It was posted by Cally Soukup in October (I think, the attributions are hard to follow) 2000, and the title was Fannish Linguistics. Perhaps someone who’s good at Google Groups can find it? I cannot even contemplate posting in here; it’s *long.*
Fanspeak
This was originally posted in rec.arts.sf.fandom in 1999 by Cally Soukup.
http://www.fantasymaps.com/stuff/fanspeak.html
Don’t know if this is it, but it looks promising.
That is the one!
Cool!
I may have to experiment with that eye contact thing….
Thank you — this is extremely informative, on a subject (professional edits) that I often wonder about. (Although I’m not sure I’d let go of the semi-colons.)
Also, this book sounds like a lot of fun. Looking forward to it!
I used semicolons constantly back in the day. I thought sentences like “Air molecules refract light; the sky is blue” made perfect sense. I had to learn to use transition words like “therefore.” (I also learned why it was a good idea to set first drafts aside until the thoughts behind them weren’t still fresh.)
I still have a fondness for semicolons, but I view them all with suspicion. I’m connecting two thoughts, but am I failing to show the reader how the two thoughts are connected? I sure used to.
More linguistics: an article on how languages might change on a starship over time, to the point where it’s unintelligible on Earth, where language has been changing too.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/interstellar-travel-language-change-linguistic-evolution.html
It would be interesting to do in fiction… but it would take careful effort not to become unintelligible to the present-day Earthbound reader.
Agreed. It’s so cool when an author can do it, though; by the end of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I didn’t want to use “a” or “the” anymore. 🙂
I’ve been wrestling with this exact problem in my WIP. The time span is a mere 140 years or so, but significant changes would still occur. The challenge isn’t so much tweaking it just enough and not too much as it is how to tweak it.
“Ye knowe ek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yere, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet they spake hem so.”
—Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer
Lots of significant changes can occur in a mere 140 years. My husband’s father knew his (own) grandfather, who had fought in the American Civil War.
Definitely! A mere century ago, we were saying twenty-three skiddoo and rocking out to hits like Waltzing Matilda.
Which leads me to a suggestion – maybe just have the slang change over that time. That might be enough to convey the span without being too hard on readers.