Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts

20 February 2013

A Smelting With The Senator


by Robert Lopresti

Oh, you will laugh.  It is 4 hours before deadline and I just slipped in to make one tiny change to this blog, which I finished a week ago.   I apparently hit the wrong key because the entire damned thing just disappeared.  So I am recreating it from what I laughingly call "memory."  Wish me luck.

Note: The illustrations are, in order, a buggy, a smelter, and  a senator.  Thank you.

Last month I finished the first draft of the novel I have been working on since July.  I spent the next two weeks running it through spellcheck.  That may seem excessive, so let me explain.

I am a very slow writer.  Therefore on a first draft I don't stop for nothin'.  I see typos, glitches, malaprops, and worse but I ignore them so as not to cut what flow there is.  That means there is plenty for spellcheck to catch later.

Worse, I wrote part of the draft on my iPad.  I hate writing on my iPad because the on-screen keyboard feels all wrong and I still don't know how the Pages program wants me to do certain things. For example, I still haven't learned to  turn off the autocorrect.  As a result of that I discovered one of my characters announcing that it would be no buggy to arrange a smelting with the senator.

I think he actually meant to say it would be no biggy to arrange a meeting with the senator.  But what do I know?  I'm just the author. 

And then there is the unforgettable scene in which my hero is chased by "two guys with nuns." 

But now I am doing a fast read-through of  the book and I have discovered I love  proofing on my  iPad.  For some reason it goes much faster than on my other computers.  Maybe because the machine is designed for reading text?

Soon I will be done with the read-through and then all I will need to do is edit.  And edit.  And edit...

30 May 2012

Flunking the Oral Exam



by Robert Lopresti

Those of you who turn on your computer with trembling hands every Wednesday morning, eagerly awaiting my latest contribution to civilization, will no doubt recall that last week I was rushing to get a piece of fiction into shipshape before a deadline.

Yesterday I decided it was just about perfect, and that it was almost time for me to kiss it goodbye and set it on its merry way.  But first came the final test I give every story: reading it out loud.  It is amazing how often the ear will catch what completely glides past the eye.  This time I decided, on a whim, to keep track of how many corrections I made.

Big mistake.  Would you believe I made 94 changes in my near-perfect manuscript?

Now, to be fair, only a few of them could be called mistakes.  Instead they were exactly the type of infelicities the oral reading is intended to catch.  For example, the same word showing up three times in a paragraph.  Maybe that's a good opportunity to bring in a synonym.  Not errors, just improvements.

But let's talk about the genuine boo-boos, because they amazed me.

* In my last draft I added a sentence about "the awful Iowa waters."  Waters? I thought I had written "winters."
* I wrote "the colors would have magnificent."  
I swear, I noted the missing word "been" at least five times and somehow forgot to add it every time.
*  When my character thinks someone is reaching for his money, "his hands folded reflexively over it."  Which would be fine, but what I ACTUALLY wrote was "folded reflectively..."  
Maybe he had mirrors on his fingers?

What drives me nuts about that last one is that I know for a fact that I wrote it in the first draft, which means it slid past me in at least twenty rereads.  Almost as bad was one I caught a few drafts ago, in which the same character was complaisant about a compliment.  No, dammit.  He was complacent.

I think I need to reread Adrian Room's Dictionary of Confusable Words.

And we won't even discuss the afternoon that shifted from rainy to sunny in the course of one page without anyone commenting on it.  Sigh...

I was so depressed I didn't have the gumption to print the story out for one more read.  But I will.  Sisyphus and I have our stones to roll.  Watch out below!