Novel Writing - Chapter Two

After I finished my manuscript I decided to edit it. To start off with I began to read through it, chapter by chapter, correcting spelling and grammatical errors as I went. Needles to say, in no time at all I was bored out of my skull and my eyes would just slide off one page to another without really looking at either the spelling or the sense of what I was reading.

 Changed my tactics and started reading the last chapter first, then the one before it and so on. Got a bit tired of that, so skipped around popping into any chapter and reading it through. After a while felt as though I’ve been reading the same thing over and over again far too long. Everything seemed way too familiar.

Then a brilliant idea. Made easy of course because we have our computers to do these things for us. What if I selected a word and looked at it throughout the whole manuscript, reading either just the sentence in which the word was found, or possibly the whole paragraph.

Having decided this was the way to go, the next thing was to decide on how to make the selection. 55,000 means a lot of words. I could start with the names of my leading men and women, or some other important words or..........

So many choices. Another idea. I would start with the very first sentence and go from there. Obviously I would leave out the word ‘the’ – for starters, anyway, (I mean it will be fun when the computer tells me there’s thousands of ‘the’s) but for the time being I’ll forego ‘the’ and ‘but’ and ‘and’. Their time will come.

I began my manuscript with the sentence, ‘Marry you?’ she exclaimed. I dithered around with the word ‘marry’ but in the end found only a small number of them. So on to the next one. Obviously there would be thousands of ‘she’s’ so I went on to ‘exclaimed’. Would you believe about 25+ ‘exclaimed’, and God only knows how many exclamation marks.

Now I’m beginning to remember. As a member of the Australian Romance club I did forward my manuscript to have it edited by some lady in New Zealand. And I now remember that she advised me to tone down the exclamation marks.

I did as she suggested and removed the exclamation mark itself, from many of the burst out comments that my manuscript is littered with, but have retained who was exclaiming. Somehow comments like

‘Oh, no,’ she exclaimed

'That will do,’ she exclaimed

‘Why, it’s beautiful,’ she exclaimed.

look a bit sick without the exclamation mark. And the emotion I want to convey somehow doesn’t work with ‘she said,’ ‘she replied,’ ‘she commented’.

Believe it or not, as far as I’m concerned, there is no word that says exactly what exclaims conveys. I mean, check out the thesaurus.

exclaim - cry, shout, call, yell, scream, bellow.

Not the same, is it?

However, what must be, must be. You won't believe this, I hardly believe it myself, but I've decreased 'exclamation' to only 5 words. Way to go. Now I have to look at 'said'. Only about 400 of those.

Compliments of webstockreview.net

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Well, I’ll leave you to ponder my problem, and drop a line if you have any suggestions.

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