#overwritten paragraphs and repetitive ideas

[lavndrmenace]

american pastoral, philip roth

#horrible photo but truly who cares #this book is good but honestly too dense are there are so many striking moments that don't get to breathe and just get lost surrounded by #overwritten paragraphs and repetitive ideas #like i still like it much more than i expected but would not choose it for myself u kno #reading #text #philip roth

[izzythehutt]

What does your editing process normally look like? Does your final product is usually end up looking a lot different than the original version of the chapter?

It's very chaotic. There's usually a rough draft that's either written in longhand in a notebook (college ruled, 100 pages) or sketched out with speech to text in my phone. Or some combination.

I'll take that and type it out/stick it in a word document and clean it up. Then begin expanding upon it. It's around this point in the editing process that I'm always convinced that what I'm writing is total crap and I've lost my touch. Usually the dialogue is very on the nose, everything is overwritten or repetitive. This is the phase where I have a big picture idea but it hasn't taken shape. There is a LOT of placeholder sentences at this point.

Once I push past this stage (I often have to just leave it alone for awhile) then I start editing on the micro level. Things get taken out (often paragraphs or sentences) and entirely new exchanges that were not planned get put in. There's a lot of obsessing over sentence placement. I'm hyper aware of pacing and when dialogue doesn't flow. How information is revealed gets fine-tuned (cutting what feels repetitive, for example.) In this last chapter, there was a scene with Regulus and James at the beginning of the chapter I cut. It still happened in-universe, I just decided it was more dramatically interesting not to include for reasons I hope are obvious.

Once I get past THAT then we really get into the weeds of sentences themselves, grammar, mechanics, adverb use. While I'm doing that, I might decide to add a whole new paragraph or dialogue exchange. Major substantive stuff gets added at the last second.

Then I'm just bored and tired of looking at the thing and I usually give it a lazy once-over, very aware there's going to be some incomplete sentences in there, and I post.

#writing #my writing #personal #i'm a perfectionist until i'm lazy