Monday, November 20, 2006

The Joys of Editing and Tense

I have just spent a blissful (?) hour in the college refrectory editing a piece of writing. This particular piece is now on its third or fourth edit. I had felt ok with it so I posted it onto the college bulletin board and was a left a list of things that didn't quite work. Not that I am complaining - it's good to have constructive criticism, but the downside is that if I have to edit evey two pages this much I will be ninety before I ever produce a novel!

I used to just write but now I am thinking about points of view, tense and who is narrating. I can't decide whteher I should have some bits written in the voice of one of the charcters (the first person) and some in written about them (third person). I have looked at lots of novels and they are rarely written entirely in the third person as this somehow makes the writing less accessible to the reader. I don't think that all of my story works in the first person though. It seems weird to switch narrators too often, so I thought maybe to just have one or two characters write in the first person and write the rest in the third person. Confused? I am too.

4 comments:

Chaotic Mom said...

Your writing ABOUT your writing has shed some light into the frustrations writers face. I don't know how they do it. I see things in pictures, hard to put words to the thoughts sometimes...

Anvilcloud said...

We used to have the kids do peer editing back when. I remember one kid got rave reviews from his peers, but when I read it I was stunned to see that every one of the six sentences in the paragraph was a fragment.

Chaotic Mom said...

Thanks for posting a comment on my "Giving Thanks for Mothers" contest.

I have laughed, and I sure have cried while reading through all the entries. And I've RE-READ them all since coming home from my conference, too.

I wish I could post ALL of them as winners, maybe send out some more books from my winnowed out collection. ;)

But I've FIANLLY published a winner and invite you to come on by and check out my post. I am working on a sidebar link to the winning post, but also a link to the contest post with ALL of the listed entries.

theprovocativecynic said...

It's probably no comfort, but it's common for me to hand in writing assignments which are labelled Draft 28! My worst-ever was Draft 52............