Following up on the insane interest about the first post about self-editting, here comes the last one, too.
I have been resentful, disappointed, angry, calming, hopeful, dreamy, reasonable, unreasonable enthusiastic and excited at one or another time. Now I am done. Have reached the state of entropy.
Reached it under a cloudy sky in a chilly windy evening after an editting session that lasted 17 hours. It started slow, easy and cosmetic, "not this word, the other one", "coma here, not a coma there". I could sense my speed of reading making a quantum jump and starting to feel more like the snail in "Turbo" and less like reading.
I skipped a paragraph, because I knew what happened in it. This made me narrow a scornful eye at myself and I rewrote the lousy paragraph such that I wanted to read it, although I knew what happened in it. And fine tuned my systems for catching signals of desire to skip text.
Doing this I found a seventh gear in my idea-generation gear-box. So as soon as any scene I don't quite appreciated appeared, I deleted it without thinking too much and another one appeared at its place. I am tempted to say all by itself. The characters were flexible, mouldable and generous in revealing themselves in situations they have not been in before.
Words from the dialogues clustered by character and I noticed how some of them simply overdose the "well" or "actually". Which was a fantastic opportunity for the others to mock them. Lovely, consolidated text I had already in the early afternoon, but I spent some time in making sure that words are there for a reason. And surprisingly found out there is no"began" in my book, while more than 100 things "started".
A moment of doubt appeared when I read "Nothing will change regardless" and had the gnawing feeling that I had seen the exact phrase elsewhere. This revelation found me helpless, with blurry unaided sight.
I edited blind. Or pretty close. And it ended with a moment of immeasurable joy, when I found out it was my protagonist saying it in analogic situations. I search for "regardless" and beamed when I saw it only appears in his words. The same way "understatement" only appers from the mouth of the fair lady.
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