Story

I am currently working through comments on my novel from my proofreader. There are a number of things to be dealt with.

And I thought I was doing so well!

Polite Cat

The strangest thing about reading my novel aloud is, Alexander the Great (my cat) hears me talking, walks into the room and sees that I'm alone, and starts talking to me. He seems to be under the impression that I'm talking to him.

Well, there's no one else there, right?

Alex waits for me to pause -- usually when I'm marking up the manuscript -- and then starts meowing. He doesn't interrupt at all. Such a polite cat.

The oddest thing about this is, he doesn't do it when I'm on the phone.

Adverbs

One of the other tidbits I have learned in my courses at UofT, is to get rid of the adverbs. Why, I asked, would I want to remove a perfectly acceptable part of speech? After all, adverbs and I go 'way back. In fact, I think it was Grade 6 when we were introduced, and I started learning how to parse a sentence.

The reasoning is this: if you are using adverbs, your verbs may be weak. For example, I can say

Darrell walked confidently into the room

or I can say

David strutted into the room

or

Janet sashayed into the room.

The second two examples tell us as much about the person's state of mind, as they do about the style of walk.

As I was writing my novel in the fall, if I had an adverb, I would pause and try to think of a stronger verb. But there were times when the correct word just wasn't there for me. So, I used the weak verb with its modifier. After the rough draft was complete, I went through the document searching for 'ly' and replacing those phrases with stronger verbs. A few have been left in, mostly in dialogue, because people use adverbs in everyday communication. It's part of our normal speech patterns.

However, after reading sections BAM and AAM (before adverb removal and after adverb removal), I can say that the parts without adverbs are definitely stronger, and pack more punch. The adverbs seemed to point up how weak the verbs were ... or, maybe, I'm just noticing it now.

Editing

One thing I've learned from my teachers at the University of Toronto is -- once I have marked up my story, novel, or whatever -- read it aloud.

At first, I felt kind of stupid reading my prose out; after all, I live alone, except for my cat. But they suggested this as a self-editing technique, so I was determined that I was going to try it.

The first few pages went smoothly because I had already polished them several times. I was on the fifth page of my novel when I started hearing flaws that my eyes hadn't caught. One problem was that there were occasionally too many sounds were the same in a short space, even though they looked different on the page. Another flaw was that, in trying to vary my sentence length, Isometimes had run-on sentences. Other times, I used people's names too close together when there was a group chatting.

Some of these problems I can put down to the rush to get 50,000 words of my story out of me and into the computer in 30 days. But I'm not rushed now. I have no excuse for these errors.

Reading my story out loud has also helped me slow down and find errors in my punctuation. I though MSWord was supposed to catch these sorts of typos.

But the most important aspect to this technique has been to make me stop and think about what I'm reading -- and whether or not it's moving the story along. In the first 85 pages, I've now cut 7 pages. There was one scene (a little over 3 pages) that did not move the story forward or tell us anything new about the characters involved in it. I had read it silently several times and had been quite pleased with it, but I tend to read quickly so it didn't seem as long. Reading it aloud is a slower task but, oh, so worth it. Out it went.

Now finished 100 pages (of 245) and am ready to keep going as soon as I've finished the latest round of paperwork for my separation.