How Could I have Written That?

Nearing the end of  the redraft, sixth edit, polish - call it what you will, I am nearly at the end of it. What amazes me is the number of things I found to alter in what I  thought was a finished piece of work. I think it happens to all authors, because at my last local writers' group meeting, a mainstream published author said whenever she did a reading, she never read what was actually on the page, but made corrections while thinking How could I have Written That? You see it in most books these days - the odd glitch in grammar, spelling or even a missing word - or a word the computer thought you wanted but proves totally out of context!

I suppose I should go through and look for redundant words, and check for passive constructions where I could make them active. I find passive constructions easy to slip into, easy on the eye and easy to execute, but these days they are frowned upon. I blame tv and film. They've accustomed people to fast moving action with few words of dialogue. When you watch something, the setting and the action are there to see as you listen to the dialogue. But of course in a book, you need those descriptive passages in order to visualise the scene in your mind. I wonder if there is a generation growing up (or already grown?) that finds it difficult to read and visualise the scene the words describe?

I caught up with the end of The Returned last night, and wondered what on earth I'd been watching these past eight weeks. In the very last scene, I thought the town had been totally submerged, yet not one character out of the many looking out over the hillside looked surprised, or frightened or puzzled. So many questions unanswered. Was the baby still in Adele's tummy, or had it been somehow removed? Is Victor a shapeshifter?  Did he change into Serge and shoot his brother? He seems to adopt many guises.
Is he the cause of it all? I suppose I'll have to wait for the second series to find out.

Plot development

Stephanie Cowell ( http://writinghistoricalnovels.com/2013/07/22/plot-development-when-writing-a-novel-by-stephanie-cowell/) remarks that she cannot follow the plot development of her story when she reads it on computer, but has to print it out and read it that way in order to see the plot pointers properly. I think I'm maybe the same way inclined. There is a miserly side to me that hates to print out a whole novel because of the printing costs - yet I know I'm niggling over nothing. It doesn't matter what it costs - it needs doing, and I'd spend the same amount or more on a bottle of wine or a new blouse without a second thought. Odd how some things cause a hitch in the gallop!

But yes, to get back to the point - I've just had a couple of critiques returned that point out where I had duplicated lines and phrases, even who sentences. This is careless of me, and it has happened because I merged several versions of a chapter into one. I think I mentioned a day or two ago that I had got muddled among my versions - well, that was one result of the merger.

A second  result was that I actually saved the chapter twice into the main ms of my story. For a few minutes I thought I was imagining things, but no, that's what I'd done. This sort of clerical error makes it imperative to print out and read in paper form. But I can still honestly say that I'm enjoying polishing my story. it is so much easier than actually writing, and if you have any inclination to wield the red pen of correction, then go for it!

In direct contrast to the pic above, I took Tim for his first walk in town today. Head constantly swivelling, nose working overtime, all those people to see, cars and buses to watch, pushchairs to avoid. A whole new world for him. He's now fast asleep beneath my desk. Worn out, poor boy.

Polishing to a shine

Do you ever get yourself in a knot with all the drafts of your wip? I do. Early on in this game, I used to get myself in a panic, thinking I'd deleted the wrong version, but never actually did that.
Now I take a more measured view.  Instead of spending time comparing one version with another, which I suspect is, 9 times out of 10, a waste of time, I look at the dates, check the word count and then force myself to delete the oldest, assuming that the newest draft is the best one. So far, I have not had cause to regret this.

My oldest version of Capture a Queen dates from September 2010, when it had the title Treason until someone pointed out what Matho was doing wasn't exactly treason. It was a complete version. I finished Treason and then went straight on to volume 2, completed it and started volume 3. Alas, I did not finish that volume. I hit a difficult plot spot and decided I'd take a break from volume 3 and go back to volume 1 and read it over again. That was March this year. Since then, I've been working on what at various points was Treason, then King's Business and finally Capture a Queen, and it is amazing the changes I've made.

I see now where my writing was not as graceful as it could have been. Two sentences, sometimes three, have been pared down to one and that one more graceful than the originals. I've removed the dreaded Superfluous Words and inserted better, more descriptive verbs. Some dodgy plot points have been smoothed or changed or even moved to a different part of the story.
I am calling this stage polishing, for that is what it feels like. Buffing the story to a real shine, ready to send out.