Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I Get It

In my revision process, I’ve made a list of words that I highlight and remove or replace. This time I used different colors. Red for passive words, yellow for those that needed to be replaced and green for those that need to be removed.

It is very eye opening to see your manuscript with these highlights. If you want to improve your manuscript this is a good way to do it. You can see the strong sentences because there’s nothing highlighted. The weak sentences are filled with highlights.

Last night I worked on chapter one again with the highlights this time. I was able to build on the sentences and hopefully make it a stronger chapter.

As I was sitting on the bed, it clicked in my head, this is what revision is about, making your story stronger.

What do you do to make your story stronger?

1 comment:

Gina Conroy said...

I do something similar to you. I notice all the rapid heart rates and smiling my character does, and note the over used words. Then I'll go back and do a search for my growing list of words.

I also just learned how to backload from getting Margie Lawson's Deep Editing notes.

Here's an example I just found in my WIP:

Noises erupted from outside my door.

To backload it take the power word and put it at the end. So it could become: Noises from outside my door erupted. Something like that!