(no subject)
Oct. 11th, 2005 12:02 amHaven't been doing much than reading, tweaking, adding, cutting. And reading.
Spent a few hours on Friday, copying & pasting chapters from the folder called "Folder_1" into one big doc files and then recording their word counts in my spreadsheet. Discovered on Sunday that a file called All.doc was actually a later version than the individual chapter files.
....
On the plus side, this version is about 2400 words shorter. Yah.
Which is probably all the words that will get trimmed. 'tis is a fairly lean story, despite being over 120K long (word processer count too). I've sliced off a few sentences from the end of scenes and some excessive dialogue and an occasional action that doesn't add anything (He nodded, then sat down --> He sat down). I even found a scene with a one page 'lead-in' that added nothing to the plot, nothing to the world building, nothing to character development, other than showing one antagonist liked fencing. And most of his scenes open with him doing something that has no bearing on the rest of the scene. So that had to go*. So I quickly rewrote it as something more useful... and 100 words longer.
Over 6 chapters, I've reduced the word count by 130 words.
So why bother? The exercise isn't really about reducing word count, it's about:
It is better than I remember, if dry, predictable, emotionless, but I can 'edit' this story without opening the word processor, I know it that well. And that's after leaving it alone for a year. Of course it's going to be predictable & emotionless.
Today one line almost made me cry.
So maybe it's not emotionless.
*You know what's worse than spending hours doing research for a couple of words of dialogue? Spending hours doing research for a couple of words of dialogue and then cutting them.
Spent a few hours on Friday, copying & pasting chapters from the folder called "Folder_1" into one big doc files and then recording their word counts in my spreadsheet. Discovered on Sunday that a file called All.doc was actually a later version than the individual chapter files.
....
On the plus side, this version is about 2400 words shorter. Yah.
Which is probably all the words that will get trimmed. 'tis is a fairly lean story, despite being over 120K long (word processer count too). I've sliced off a few sentences from the end of scenes and some excessive dialogue and an occasional action that doesn't add anything (He nodded, then sat down --> He sat down). I even found a scene with a one page 'lead-in' that added nothing to the plot, nothing to the world building, nothing to character development, other than showing one antagonist liked fencing. And most of his scenes open with him doing something that has no bearing on the rest of the scene. So that had to go*. So I quickly rewrote it as something more useful... and 100 words longer.
Over 6 chapters, I've reduced the word count by 130 words.
So why bother? The exercise isn't really about reducing word count, it's about:
- Adding in some more setting/world building stuff without inc. word count, because I don't feel it has enough considering it's the 'world' that is supposed to be significant in the story. It doesn't have enough, but there's no room for it.
- Checking for typoes & extra words & continuity errors (found a couple too).
- Seeing if it's really worth doing anything with
It is better than I remember, if dry, predictable, emotionless, but I can 'edit' this story without opening the word processor, I know it that well. And that's after leaving it alone for a year. Of course it's going to be predictable & emotionless.
Today one line almost made me cry.
So maybe it's not emotionless.
*You know what's worse than spending hours doing research for a couple of words of dialogue? Spending hours doing research for a couple of words of dialogue and then cutting them.
