You’ve finished that four hundred and sixty page novel. You sit
proudly and pat the cover page tenderly, smoothing the white surface
when much to your horror, you see a mistake! Cold sweat breaks out on
your brow, fingers tremble, mouth suddenly goes dry. As your eye
wanders down the page, more and more errors jump out at you! Fear
grips your heart as you stumble from the desk, desperate for a
calming cool drink. It’s a nightmare, but you can’t wake up. It’s
real. Your brainchild, the fruit of your creative efforts, is flawed
and it’s up to you to fix it.
This
is a scenario each of us faces. Sometimes it’s as minor as a
misplaced comma or a dangling modifier. Other times an entire scene,
or even half the novel is so bad it has to be scraped and retooled. I
started an historical novel about ten years ago, set it aside since
it wasn’t going anywhere, picked it up a few years later and
realized the reason it hadn’t gone anywhere was that it was
garbage! No other word for it. After careful review, I threw away all
but ten handwritten pages. Of those ten pages, perhaps parts of seven
survive in the retooled version.
Several
things were problematic that I didn’t realize until much later.
First, and most important, the point of view and style were all
wrong. Set in St. Augustine in the Florida territory in the late
1700s, it was told in first person by a young Spanish woman. I had
chosen to do it like a diary (not really sure why) and it was far too
limiting to my story.
Second,
after doing some more research, I found that the time period would
have to be moved from the 1780s to 1739 or I could not incorporate
certain facets of the novel. It would have been grossly inaccurate.
Third,
and most difficult, the man I had intended to be the bad guy simply
wasn’t working. No matter what I did, even in the retooled version,
he wouldn’t be villainous. The heroine refused to fall in love with
anyone else. Even the good guy couldn’t be relied upon to behave.
He became the villain, the villain became the hero, the heroine
didn’t succumb to another man’s charms, and they all lived
happily ever after. (Except for the villain, because he, of course,
was dead.)
It
got terribly out of hand. After lots of time and effort reading and
re-reading, honing, changing, and fine tuning, it is a really solid
piece of literature that I am proud to put my name on. When I started
re-writing it, I wouldn’t have given ten cents for it. It was the
catalyst that started me writing in earnest and made me realize I had
stories inside me to tell. Very few of the others are historical in
nature, the rest are sci-fi or contemporary romantic suspense. With
that novel I learned something else important. You can’t do too
much research if you want to be historically accurate. I don’t know
about the rest of you, but I’d rather spend my time bleeding
profusely from multiple wounds that tracking down that evasive, all
important fact. It took years to finish Indian Summer because it was
so hard to find the information I needed.
Sci-fi
is far simpler for me to write. Once I have a believable setting, the
rest is easy. Don’t ignore the laws of science, throw in some
really good fight scenes, add a few interesting aliens and voila!
Creating my own world is far more fun than working within the
confines of someone else’s.
Writing
is the ultimate escapism. For that short span of time, things work
out; the hero and heroine fall in love and live happily ever after.
The bad guy gets his just desserts, the good guy wins, and there is
always a happy ending.
Despite
the thrill of putting words on paper, the hard part is making sure
that everything is right. We can live with the small stuff like
ending a sentence with a preposition. Frankly, it sounds odd if it’s
correct. However, misplaced modifiers, sentence fragments and subject
- verb agreement are very important.
One
solution is to read and re-read your own work, honing and perfecting
it. It’s easy to miss simple errors that way. Sometimes running off
a hard copy helps, but it’s still hard to catch it all. Better yet,
get people who are gifted in grammar to help you. They might not be
able to name the error, but they can spot one and may be able to
offer suggestions on how to correct it. If you can afford it, have an
editor review it. Few of us can, so it’s up to us to read and
re-read our own work until it is smooth and as error free as it can
possibly be.
For
goodness sake, don’t rely on the grammar check in Word! It’s
garbage and will cause far more problems than it solves. I don’t
care if it’s the primary word processing program used world wide,
the grammar check is terrible. Spell check, on the other hand, is a
Godsend, but won’t help you if you simply type in the wrong word. I
once finished typing out a test for my 11th grade class only to find
that I had one very important little word wrong and the spell check
hadn’t caught it. Instead of saying, "What
is the theme of this story?" I had, "Shat
is the theme of this story?" (For those of you who don’t know,
that’s the past tense of the verb ‘to shit’. — 11th graders
knew that!)
There
is no easy way to get through the editing process. It is tedious and
time consuming, but if it makes the difference between selling a book
and having it gather dust, it’s well worth it.
©
Dellani Oakes 2015
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