Tuesday, March 30, 2010

comment on the Chap 13 sect 2

My latest Cerel post is a good example of my typical second drafts: way too long and way too much talking heads with hrdly even a reference to who is speaking, who is listening. I thought I had gone through this section to correct that but I see there are long sections of pure dialog. I like a rich dialog, but it needs trimming, maybe a summary of two, and needs to be interspersed with at least minimal action and references to the people involved. I can tell who is speaking, but I make the reader work too hard to figure it out, I'm sure, without even a hi-said, she-said along the way for pages at a time.

Fortunately, if I improve it by taking out some of the overdone mush and summarizing, it will also shorten the tale a bit, and this one needs shortening. It is well over 120,ooo words currently, and it really needs to be under 100,000 to have a chance of selling. Even that is probably longer than is wise, but my books usually are. One of the reasons i want to get one of them considered for publication is that I would then get an editor. A little guidance would take me a long way toward figuring out what kinds of things can be cut. Whole and half scenes at a time, I'm sure, though I usually trim by phrase and sentence. It's hard to decide what's not needed when in our minds its part of the story we envisioned. We have to ask ourselves, are the ideas covered elsewhere? What would happen to the tale, overall, if a scene or part of a scene was missing? Often enough, the reader wouldn't even encounter a question that the rest of the story couldn't answer. It can be there in our minds, behind the scenes, a moment in time real to us and our characters, a bedroom in the house that we all know is there but that a visitor might never be shown.

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