Revisions on “Magic Hour” are completed. Phew!
Sections of this book were pig-awful to write. Funnily enough, those were the sections I had to revise. D’ya think I should have cottoned on to that at the time? I shall certainly watch out for that on the next wip.
In my efforts to create a multi-layered conflict I had, in fact, just created clutter. Too much bickering, my editor said. She was right. They were stuck in car arguing about who did the laundry quite a lot. Zzzzzz.
I had wanted to introduce little niggles that were symptoms of the bigger problems, but all I’d ended up doing was muddying the waters. In the end, I hadn’t spent enough time on the central issues and there were some nice things that I could have developed more, but didn’t have the space.
At first I just started going through the ms cutting a sentence here, adding a phrase there, but the whole thing felt a bit disjointed and pasted together. And the sections I had problems with were still giving me a headache. I still wasn’t bringing the central conflict into the forefront.
I was too close. I needed to get away from the words and sentences level of doing things and concentrate on the big picture. More on this tomorrow…
Glad to hear someone else struggles. Its kinda easy to focus on the cutting and tweeking and avoid the big stuff.......see me running scared :)
ReplyDeleteHugs, I hear you on the two jobs and kids.
ReplyDeleteWell done for completing the revisions.
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to see a familiar pattern emerging with writing - no pain, no gain...