It’s the monthly blog hop/ known as the Insecure Writers Support Group founded by Alex J. Cavanaugh. You’re invited to join if you're a writer, insecure, or just supportive of writers. It happens the first Wednesday of each month, and it would be sweet of you to visit at least a dozen or so new blogs and leave a comment. Your words are appreciated. Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!
The awesome co-hosts for the June 2 posting of the IWSG are J Lenni Dorner, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, Lee Lowery, and Rachna Chhabria!
June 2 question - For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?
A while back...
I had been working on a manuscript that I dearly loved...
And I remember thinking...
This is such an incredible story, yada, yada, yada...
And I’m such a creative writer, yada, yada, yada...
Soon I’ll send out queries, and get an agent,yada, yada, yada...
And one day it’ll be on the NYTimes bestseller list. YADA!
But for several reasons I put this manuscript away.
Last year...
Eager to start working on it again...
I went into my archives of unfinished manuscripts...
Blew off all the pixel dust and
OH. . .DEAR. . . GOD!
What is this mess?
OK…
The story was still good...
But my writing?
Yeesh!
Clichés, repetitive words, too much backstory...
Weak description of scenes, lazy grammar...
One-dimensional characters, etc, etc, etc!
Really?
How could I not have noticed all this before?
After the shock and realization sunk in...
Of how much editing this baby needed...
I got to wondering...
Why does it take time to gain perspective?
Why can’t my brain be like Grammerly?
And catch mistakes immediately?
Whoa!
That’s it!
I’ll create an ap...
That downloads directly into writer’s brains
And then as a writer is looking at their manuscript...
The ap will automatically tell them in their head what changes to—
Uh, wait a minute...
Editing out that thought right now...
Because I’m a writer, not a developer...
And I don’t need any more distractions.
Lord knows I have enough of them already.
So?
How much time do you need to get a better perspective?
Always,
Em-Musing
5 comments:
I can totally relate to your initial excitements and expectations about an early manuscript. I have one of those too that actually was considered by the acquisition team at Little Brown. I edited it for 10 years and then decided to move on for awhile. I may still go back to it but am prepared to have the same reaction as you when I re-read it.
If you do make that app, let me know.
Yep, that's happened to me, too. But, the opposite has also happened. I pull out a manuscript ready to rip it apart and lo and behold, it's still pretty good! Just a few tweaks here and there, and presto! Now to write the query letter... oh, crap.
I want to revisit a YA I was working on several years ago. I know it's absolutely riddled with cliches, as it was the first novel-length story I finished. Kinda' scared!
The excitement of getting the story down means we all too often fall down in other areas. An editing app would be handy!
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