I’ve been going through the edits on The Widening Gyre, and there is one thing that is true of both teaching and writing: You never stop learning.
I’ve learned that I have a bad habit of creating clusters of sentences with the construction “Someone does something AS something else happens.” As my editor said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that construction, but if you cluster them up as I’ve done, it calls attention to it and yanks the reader out of the story.
I’ve also learned that despite my having gone through the MS several times, I had a few leftover remnants of earlier drafts that had to be dealt with:
- Events mentioned when, in the current draft, they haven’t happened yet
- Characters names that have long since been changed
- Ship names that are wrong
I also have a habit of using the gerund verb form to write sentences where characters do several things in sequence. This is a problem, because that form really makes it seem like they are doing all the actions at once, which is, most of the time, completely impossible.
I also had a lot of “echoes”–words that are fine once, but when they happen three or more times on a page, it will yank the reader out of the story.
And there was, to be honest, a frankly inordinate amount of “snorting” going on. Most, if not all, occasions of snorting got changed to other things.
Aside from these problems, the editor and copy-editor called my attention to several places where things weren’t clear, where a word I’d used might lead to misunderstanding, where things could be tightened. And I found a fair few places on my own that seemed to work okay, but could be fixed with a small change to the sentence structure or a different word.
Going forward, I have some tics I’ll know to watch out for, because I’d hate to force my editor to deal with so many of the same issues in the next MS.
All in all, my first experience going through a manuscript edit for publication was really nice. We’ll see how the next iteration goes!