In my last post, I lamented that boredom with the first draft editing task led me to break the job into smaller chunks. I concluded that editing, being work, was not as fun as writing. I accepted that my proposed timeline to complete the edit on Sunday was overly ambitious and gave myself an extension to Wednesday. On all counts, I was wrong.
With some extra hindsight and experience, I now believe that I’d encountered two problems last Friday. First, I was tired, having just reached the end of a long work week and not quite succumbed to the head cold fighting for supremacy with my immune system. Second, I got bogged down in back-to-back scenes, both of which were emblematic of the middle muddle. When I picked up the editing duties the next day, starting again at the beginning of those scenes (about which I’d taken several notes about the obvious problems), I experienced the same, soul-sucking feeling of wading through deep molasses. It helped me realize the truth of the matter: the scenes were the hurdle, not the task of editing. Boring scenes make for boring editing.
Thankfully, I’d already taken notes about the need for a connector scene within the middle act of this 3-act structure. Also fortuitous, one of the two bad scenes had embedded in it an idea for a better version of itself. So I duplicated those two scenes in Scrivener, sent the duplicates to the trash so they weren’t lost, then re-wrote them and added a third scene. MUCH BETTER. The story no longer felt boring. It was stronger, the pacing better, the motivation of the main character clearer. All told, I spent 8 hours on Sunday plowing through the rest of the novel and completing the edit on the original schedule. I enjoyed the entire 8 hours.
Yesterday morning, I broke the novel out of its subplots and merged it together into a single work. Thank goodness I’d established and kept a timeline for the book, which made that task altogether simpler. While I’m sure there will be some writing and rearrangement needed to smooth out the transitions, that’s a job saved for the second draft. The bigger problem was an early choice I’d made to insert spacing between paragraphs for readability. It totally bit me when I compiled the novel because Scrivener, by default, treats those extra spaces as section breaks. On every page, between every paragraph and line of dialogue, was a hashtag sign (#) as a separator. Figuring out how to remove that via template editing seemed like more work than I wanted to do, plus I want section separators assuming Scrivener can tell where the actual sections are. Ultimately, I bit the bullet and cruised back through every scene in the book, deleting all the extra carriage returns. That was 2 hours I’ll never get back. If I had any readers for these posts, they’d probably pipe up and tell me how I could have fixed it in 2 minutes. Oh well.
The novel’s status as of 5pm Monday, March 5: first edit is complete.