Before starting, I’d just like to say a big thank you to you Bethany for welcoming me on your Blogiversary. I’m so excited to part of the fun ☺
Hi everyone!
Over the past year I’ve read quite a few author guest posts and found that they are all inspiring, often sharing their experiences or giving valuable advice on some aspect of writing or another… so I guess mine’s going to be pretty different because it will be neither of those things! Let’s just say that it’ll be more along the lines of a soul-searching piece on editing and rewriting – or, then again, just a major rant on the subject!
All writers know about the task of editing and re-writing… and I can safely say that for me, it’s the most harrowing part of writing a book. Well to be honest, I actually don’t mind it at first – let’s say the first 3, 4 or even 5 times I read through my manuscript, but when 6 months down the line I’m still editing and re-writing THE SAME MANUSCRIPT – well let’s just say I’m really feeling those “shouty” capitals!
It never ceases to amaze me, but every single time I read through my manuscript again, I make new changes. So much so that sometimes I wonder whether my final story will be anything like the lovely story I had actually written to start off with! I say the ‘lovely story’ because I did find my story rather lovely THE FIRST 10 TIMES I READ IT!!! (oops sorry, “shouty” capitals again!!). But now, I honestly have no idea if it’s any good. I mean how could I - just imagine reading a book over and over again, wouldn’t you get totally sick of it after a while and end up finding it a total bore? Sure you would! So how can we writers not get to the point of being sick and tired of reading our work? Is there such a thing as too much editing or over-editing? How do we know when to STOP? And finally, how can we keep an objective point of view on our work when we’ve read it over and over (and over and over and over) again?
Oh noooo… I just realised that you probably thought that I was now going to give you answers to those questions! Oh dear… I actually have no idea what the answers are!! (But if you happen to know, please, please enlighten the newbie writer that I am ☺)
So as I have no answers to these questions, while I wait to receive some enlightenment from you all, let’s talk about another aspect of the whole editing thing. As I mentioned just before, I’ve been editing and re-writing my story for a long time now. The first six months was to clean it up before sending it to the editor, and now the past 6 months has been the re-writing process - and now of course I need to edit the re-writing!!
Anyway, over the past few months I’ve read lots of great articles giving advice on how to efficiently edit a book (I know, maybe I should have read them before starting editing the first time around…), and every time I read an article, I found something that I needed to apply to my manuscript (words to avoid etc.) so I had to go over the whole book again from square one and apply the new changes throughout the document.
QUICK NOTE: Woohoo! I’ve just realised that I have a bit of advice for everyone out there – and more importantly, myself – read all the articles and posts you can about the best editing techniques BEFORE you start the first edit of your manuscript!
Okay, back to my manuscript. I have one little dilemma left to solve… Recently I read yet another great post about effective editing, and one of the points has been troubling me since… I can’t decide whether I should follow the author’s advice on that point or not - so I thought this would be a great opportunity to ask you for your opinion on the matter… The advice is; Kill your darlings. In other words, parts of the story that you love and which have special meaning to you, but which don’t actually serve a direct purpose in the story.
So my dilemma is: I’ve brought back Lucy and Matt, the main characters from my first book, What’s it gonna be?, in a few scenes in my second book although they don’t serve a direct purpose in moving my new story along.
Why did I do it you ask? For the simple reason that when I read a book, I grow really fond of the characters and always think that it’d be nice to know how they’re doing after the end of the book. I’ve read books by a few authors who often include the characters from their previous books in their new books, albeit briefly, and I’ve always thought it was pretty cool to catch up with those characters again. So I thought that’s what I’d do - give my readers a quick peek into the lives of the Lucy and Matt since ‘Whats it gonna be?’. So what do you think? Keep my darlings or remove them? I would really appreciate your comments on the subject.
To leave you on a positive note, I have to say that one of the great things in life is that we learn from experience and from our mistakes, so you can be sure that next time I’ll definitely read up on editing tips before starting the whole editing process ☺ ☺ ☺…
GIVEAWAY
I’ve got a prize pack of 3 Amazon Kindle ebooks to give away to one lucky reader.
- Don’t Mention the Rock Star by Bree Darcy
- What’s it Gonna Be? by Cassandra Piat
- Thin Girls Don’t Eat Cake by Lindy Dale
HER LATEST BOOK
Amazon http://amzn.com/B00RABO7R4
Lucy - quirky, scatter-brained and witty - is in a rut. Matt, her boyfriend of four years, is terrified of the ''M'' word and refuses to talk about tying the knot, her job is about as exciting as shaving her legs and she feels like she's going nowhere fast. So she decides to shake things up a bit and before she knows it she finds herself waking up next to a stranger, going on a blind date, meeting a gorgeous Englishman and getting her very own creepy love-struck stalker! But despite all this, it's harder than she thought to get Matt out of her head....
Luckily she has her best friends to distract her as they have problems of their own that they need her help with. Vic, her eccentric childhood friend, thinks that her husband is playing away and wants Lucy to help her catch him red-handed. Olivia, her colleague and best friend, has met a mysterious Frenchman on an internet dating site and isn't sure if she should run off to Paris to meet him, or run for the hills?
Filled with fun, humour and a cast of zany characters, What's it Gonna Be? is a wonderful, sincere and light-hearted tale of friendship, growth and love - with a lovely touch of Mauritius...
Luckily she has her best friends to distract her as they have problems of their own that they need her help with. Vic, her eccentric childhood friend, thinks that her husband is playing away and wants Lucy to help her catch him red-handed. Olivia, her colleague and best friend, has met a mysterious Frenchman on an internet dating site and isn't sure if she should run off to Paris to meet him, or run for the hills?
Filled with fun, humour and a cast of zany characters, What's it Gonna Be? is a wonderful, sincere and light-hearted tale of friendship, growth and love - with a lovely touch of Mauritius...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cassandra is a part-time English tutor and a full-time disorganised mother and housewife. She spends her life trying to remember not to forget the 101 things on her things-to-do list, but seems to fail spectacularly most of the time! Whenever she has some free time she is either with her head in a book, or on her computer creating her own novels. She is currently working on her second novel, Stuck With Me.
She lives on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean with her husband and three children.
She lives on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean with her husband and three children.
FIND HER HERE
Amazon http://amzn.com/B00RABO7R4
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/cassandrapiat/
No comments:
Post a Comment