Craft: Fiddly Bits in Editing

Hello ladies and gents, today I’m going to share a secret. I’ve found an interesting way to work out if I have chunks of things not working in my mss. When I scroll through my story I tend to miss things, when I’m reading the hard copy I get caught up in the words, but there is a technique that helps you see the overall structure of your story.

It’s called “The Shrunken Manuscript”. Darcy Pattinson offered it as a solution for writers trying to work out the flow of their novel.  From her website she gives the “how to” instructions.

Instructions for the Shrunken Manuscript Strategy

1. Take out the chapter breaks, so there is no white space between chapters.
2. Single space the entire mss.
3. Reduce the font of the mss until the mss takes up about 30 pages. This is arbitrary, of course, but I find that I can see about 30 pages at a time. It doesn’t matter if the font is readable; you’re trying to shrink the mss so you can mark certain things and you won’t be reading it but evaluating how these things fit into the big picture. If your mss runs over 40,000 words, you can try putting it into two columns in order for it to fit into 30 pages. If your mss is over 50,000 pages, you may need to divide it into two sections and evaluate 30-shrunken pages at a time.
4. Use a bright, wide marker and put an X over the strongest chapters. Note: Actually, you can use the Shrunken Manuscript to evaluate anything that you want to visualize across the novel: places where two characters interact, the percentage of dialogue, places where you repeat a certain setting, places where the theme is made obvious, etc.
5. Lay out the mss pages on the floor in about three rows of ten. (Adjust layout to your page count, of course.)
6. Stand back and evaluate.

So you shrink your entire novel, lay it out on the floor and look for big chunks of description/narrative. You can also look for big chunks of dialogue without beats/description to break it up.

For the visual learners Darcy has also offered this video to show how she does it.

Ellen Booream gives us a look at how she used Darcy’s technique. Kate from Kate’s Book Blog also posted a picture of her shrunken manuscript. Jim Danielson also had a go.

I’ve printed mine out and will attempt to give it a go, will let you know how I do next week.

Sandie also sent me a link to this fabulous website.  Sentence Sleuth gives you examples of sentences that do and don’t work, and they fix the ones that are totally horrid. Some fantastic information here and you can actually send in your own sentence horror and see how they fix it up. Scroll through the backlog of sentences for helpful grammar hints.

 

 

 

Posted by Natalie Hatch on November 30, 2009

https://romanceaustralia.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/craft-fiddly-bits-in-editing/