![]() ![]() ![]() But slowly, revision came to feel more and more like composition, and the manuscript came to resemble the notebooks in which I wrote the first draft of the novel. ![]() As I worked through each page I laid it face down, using the overleaf for rewrites, adding scraps and post-its as necessary. I wasn’t sure I could make it better, and as we inched our way forward I felt I was losing my ability to make my own judgments, or my ability to see the manuscript at all. Painfully often, in the margins I found the notation “not good enough,” or “this needs to be better.” Mitzi seldom suggested particular language to fix problems, but she was eagle-eyed in spotting them. Sometimes entire passages were struck, sometimes whole pages often there would be a note telling me to condense several paragraphs to one. All of the changes were at line level, none affected plot or structure, but they added up to a major edit: we cut 17,000 words from an 83,000-word manuscript. I worked by hand on a clean copy of the manuscript, with Mitzi’s marked copy on my iPad. ![]()
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