EDITING AND MAKING CHANGES.

Hello everybody Drew here. Hope this blog finds you well. Today we’ll talk about my thoughts about post editing and making changes to my book. It’s never easy to make changes as sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming especially if you feel that the story isn’t developing as you first thought it might. I discovered that story writing has a life of its own and sometimes you can veer off track a bit and need to rein it in a bit. Once I started writing fulltime, I learnt that rather than produce tons of words and go for content it was best to concentrate on the quality of the story. The introduction piece was so important as it sets the scene. The middle, well that is the meat and veg or guts of the story and needs to really make the story zing. The end, well that can be quite short, but it just needs to close everything up so that at least the story leaves the reader with a feeling that they have understood the storyline.
When I started the editing of Book One, I asked a dear friend if she wouldn’t mind reading it and giving me some feedback. You can go story blind sometimes and having someone else read your proofs really helps. Well, it certainly woke me up! After Julie had finished, there was so much red ink on the manuscript that I thought there might be a national storage of red ink.
I don’t mind receiving criticism if its constructive and, in this instance, it certainly helped me. It made me do an audio of each story and play it back to myself. Once I got used to hearing my own voice, funny how it sounds different to what you hear of yourself, I soon understood where the storyline gaps were and whether the flow of the story had a natural rhythm to it. My darling wife was also roped in, and she had to listen to quite a few of Harry’s adventures. One of the reasons why I dedicated the book to her, was the amount of proof listening she had to do. But the good thing was that she would sometimes come in and say, ‘what are you doing to my Harry!’ That meant I was getting an emotional response to Harry, and that from an author’s viewpoint is great.
So, my top tip for this week’s blog is if you are writing your first book, re-read it regularly and make a simple audio of the book. Listen to the story and see if it flows well. It’s surprising how easy it is to pick up story line gaps. That from my experience really helped me. I hope you found this blog interesting. Till we meet up next time when I’ll talk about illustrations, take care, stay safe and happy writing. Drew

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