Having put together some of the accumulated elements of my main scheme a couple of months ago I have been slaving away editing and revising. Predictably this got to be harder and harder and slower and slower: until I ground to a halt.
A few days doing other things and barely looking at the looming creation seem to have been enough though. Yesterday a couple of changes in technique suggested how one section could be revised in a way that would unblock the process for a few pages. Then this morning (without having started on that amendment) another idea resolved two more problems.
Wonderful! (Apologies to anyone who has been suffering recently).
The solutions are very specific to the work - but - I think that the important thing, my own advice that I needed to heed, was to let the whole thing rest for a day or three.
Has anyone else found this? Does anyone have similar "tricks" that they find help them?
David
Michael
I suggest -
1. Run the spell checker.
2. Run the grammar checker (although if it's anything like the one in my PC you will wonder what planet it is checking from quite a few times).
3. Leave it all well alone - until your eyes get back into your head.
4. Just sit down and read it - only make extremely brief notes about anything that leaps out at you - note the page the note applies to. Apart from possibly highlighting or similarly marking anything you want to go back and look at don't do anything to the work at this stage. All you want to really do now is to check that the whole thing is readable - that it flows and that it doesn't rpeat or contradict itself.
5. If you can get someone else to repeat 4 for you. They will almost certainly pick up things that you cannot pick up on - because you know what you mean - whereas they do not.
6. Possibly while 5 is happening run a print. This will show you all sorts of infuriating typos and silly mistakes that you are unlikely to see on screen. I don't know why this happens - but it always does. It's another eyeball bending task.
Great we then have progress! :-)
7. You can now look at your first real edit - cutting out the unnecessary and marking where material needs to be added in - try hard to not add in at this stage but make notes (as above) about where you need to - possibly with a guiding note re what you need to add in - make certain that add-ins will not take you off course and that they will fit with continuity - bearing in mind that any significant change will/may need all of the continuity to be adjusted through the rest of the text.
8. Now you get to the fun of applying all those notes you made... ;-) ;-)
9. And then you can think about revising...
Isn't this activity fun? :-)
David
PS Did I mention that you have to do a "human brain" spell check for words that are a correct spelling but the wrong spelling for the context? This is a real doozy job. (As an example - check out "advise" and" advice" ;-) )
Thank you for you comments, I will have my manuscript (what I am calling my draft 0) finished in the next week and will be starting the long slog through proofreading and editing soon.
I will definately be taking your advise and setting it aside every now and then to focus on other things.
Yes, it is definitely a good idea from time to time to put a particular MS aside. Three days, a week. Two weeks might be a bit longish though, you sort of tend to lose the feeling and the drive for the story.
Sometimes it's good to look at it from a distance and squint, like painters do, see who you have in the story and what is actually happening, and does it make ANY sense :)