Category: Writing

Waffling, De-Clunking and Passive Voice

On By Carol RylesIn Writing2 Comments

Blogging the Editing: Day #3

4th January 2018

I only managed to edit half of Chapter Four today because 1) it’s a long one, and 2) I needed to eliminate a good deal of CLUNKINESS.

Chapter Four turned out to be structurally sound with good bones. It works for the way it builds on conflicts that have been set up in Chapters 1-3.  But, oh dear, what lost opportunities for CHARACTERISATION! What was I even thinking when I submitted it to publishers and agents three years ago?

Anyhow, half of Chapter Four has now been tightened, brightened and whipped into shape. Fortunately the dialogue was lively enough to not need more than the odd tweak.

Summary of Problems I sorted out:

  • Too much TELLING in places where SHOWING would elicit emotion.
  • SHOWING where TELLING would work better, because who wants to know the minutiae of every routine action?
  • Too much preamble at the beginning of scenes, also known as WAFFLING.
  • Not knowing when a scene has ended, and weighing it down with unnecessary epilogue — another example of WAFFLING.
  • An excess of repetition, unnecessary words, wrong words, awkward phrasing.
  • PASSIVE VOICE in places where ACTIVE VOICE works better, which is actually most places. Occasionally I use passive voice when I need to vary sentence structure or emphasise an interesting concept, but I make sure it’s pulling its weight before I let it stay.

Gender Pronouns and Overwriting

On By Carol RylesIn Writing1 Comment

Blogging the Editing: Day #2

3rd January, 2018

I’ve been dreading revisiting Chapter Three because it was told from a non-human character’s perspective and was about a sudden and unwanted change. I had so much trouble with it when I tinkered with it two years ago, I was convinced I would now have to rewrite the whole damn thing. But it turned out to have good bones [phew], but was horrendously OVERWRITTEN.

Its other problem was due to the character being genderless. It therefore needed to be written without using gender pronouns. I also wanted to avoid using ‘it’,  a word that comes with a long history of objectification. If the character were human, it wouldn’t be so hard, because the SF megatext already has a good selection of genderless pronouns. But for me, even established conventions wouldn’t work because my character was not only genderless, but also completely alien (at least in the opening paragraphs of the chapter). However, as it turned out, my problems weren’t caused by the need for non-human pronouns, but were mostly because I was writing my character the wrong way.

With this in mind, I tightened up the prose by killing 500 words without changing any of the text’s meaning. Yep, definitely overwritten! Then I realised that the chapter was suffering from repetitions of certain words, a common writer’s tic that is usually eliminated before the final proofread. With those sorted, I had a much cleaner palette, and was then able to restructure sentences, choose better words and pay closer attention to one of the novel’s most important elements: characterisation. This not only eliminated the repetitions but also greatly reduced the need for pronouns.

Having said that, I ended up relying on the word ‘it’ a couple of times in the early stages, but as the chapter progresses and the reader begins to understand the true nature of the my non-human character, the need for ‘it’ disappears.

 

Blogging the Editing: Day #1

On By Carol RylesIn Writing

It’s been too long since I last blogged, but to be honest, I didn’t have all that much to blog about, apart from living between Australia and Singapore for three years, and now dividing my time between two major Australian cities. Not to say I haven’t been busy on the reading/writing front. I’ve read a book a week over the past couple of years, spent last year judging the Science Fiction Novel category for the Australian Aurealis awards, written a couple of short stories, and written the first draft of new SF novel during last year’s NaNoWriMo. All contributed toward my growth as a writer, but mostly I took a break and took notes as new ideas brewed.

Now I’m at the stage where I want to get things moving proper. My aim this year, is to redraft last year’s NaNoWriMo novel into a workable second draft, while also sorting out yet another major edit on my Steampunk Novel. This latter project has been a bit of an eye opener for me because I haven’t looked at it for two years and now have distance enough to see it for what it is. Warts and All. Unfortunately it has a lot of warts, and my task now is to eliminate them.

In doing so, I’m going to blog my day-to-day experiences of this — a kind of diary to remind me of my writing strengths and weaknesses and how I go about fixing and/or recognising them. If they help me with my next novel, bonus. If they don’t, at least I’ll know which mistakes I’m prone to making, and do my best to not repeat them.

Here’s Day #1 of Draft #Umpteen of my Steampunk Novel:

Getting Those First Chapters to Pull Their Weight

Late last year, I decided I was going to give my steampunk/fantasy/sf novel another good edit because I’m determined to get it as good as it can get, and up to a publishable standard. After not looking at it for two years, wow oh wow, did I find some clunky bits to get rid of! Worse still, I realised that when I did my last rewrite back in 2015, I stupidly cut out an entire scene that had worked really well to get my novel off to a powerful start. So now I’ve returned that scene to its well-earned place. With a little bit more tweaking throughout, I reckon Chapter One is all the better for it.

Then on to Chapter Two only to discover I’d missed a perfect opportunity to weave some important world building and characterisation in with the drama. Not blatantly, mind you. But kind of slant so it doesn’t hit the reader in the face as info dump. Well that’s my intention and at this point I’m confident it works, but I’ll need it to sit for a few weeks before I reread it.

Tomorrow it’s on to chapter 3, a difficult and pivotal chapter that I rewrote several times back in the day.