NaNoWriMo 2: Editing Day
So the first draft of my NaNoWriMo book has scraped across the finish line with just a few words to spare, but fear not, the editing is the real work. Enough of me telling myself the story, now I have to tell it to everyone else, though you are more forgiving of my mistakes than I am. Editing is necessary, painful and should be viewed as the real part of making a book.
Without editing there's just 50k words all fighting to go in their own direction, instead of one huge harmonious collection of words ready to run the reader over like a juggernaut of amazing story details and character moments. Without editing all those pesky misspelled words will go unnoticed, and all those words that the auto-correct changed into real words, but the wrong words will be left unchanged back to what they should be too.
I find it very hard to express myself verbally, or indeed in my own head sometimes. I wish I could come up with a witty line in a conversation I'm being forced to have, but mostly I can't think of anything even remotely pithy. Writing my ideas out in manuscript format over a few months is what works for me. Having a couple of interesting character act them out on the page while strange events occur basically gives you a window to the inside of my head, where it's like that all the time, only more so.
Anyway I'm rambling, I've got stuff going on in my life right now and writing this book has been a great help and a magnificent distraction for me. Losing myself in the crazy world of Violet, Trudiode and Alice has been very cathartic, even though Hannah and Judy threaten to take up all of the end of that story, it really is about the three robot characters, and more besides, where would we all be without Mechi Noyd the famous robot detective and her pet rhino? She walks him on a leash and feeds him fresh plants every day.
Coming up with the character Penny Dreadful has been a joy too. Her intro story, and at 10k it really is just a hello, this is happening, big ending and get out, before things get too deep. I've got plans for a proper story featuring Penny and a character from an earlier book, Lucy Perdition, who will be both an antagonist and a protagonist to Penny.
Without editing there's just 50k words all fighting to go in their own direction, instead of one huge harmonious collection of words ready to run the reader over like a juggernaut of amazing story details and character moments. Without editing all those pesky misspelled words will go unnoticed, and all those words that the auto-correct changed into real words, but the wrong words will be left unchanged back to what they should be too.
I find it very hard to express myself verbally, or indeed in my own head sometimes. I wish I could come up with a witty line in a conversation I'm being forced to have, but mostly I can't think of anything even remotely pithy. Writing my ideas out in manuscript format over a few months is what works for me. Having a couple of interesting character act them out on the page while strange events occur basically gives you a window to the inside of my head, where it's like that all the time, only more so.
Anyway I'm rambling, I've got stuff going on in my life right now and writing this book has been a great help and a magnificent distraction for me. Losing myself in the crazy world of Violet, Trudiode and Alice has been very cathartic, even though Hannah and Judy threaten to take up all of the end of that story, it really is about the three robot characters, and more besides, where would we all be without Mechi Noyd the famous robot detective and her pet rhino? She walks him on a leash and feeds him fresh plants every day.
Coming up with the character Penny Dreadful has been a joy too. Her intro story, and at 10k it really is just a hello, this is happening, big ending and get out, before things get too deep. I've got plans for a proper story featuring Penny and a character from an earlier book, Lucy Perdition, who will be both an antagonist and a protagonist to Penny.
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