I used to be a pretty good conversationalist. Now, the topics rattling around in my head would not interest most people. For instance, I could spend several hours discussing the merits of hardwood, engineered hardwood and laminate wood flooring. It isn't that I'm particularly knowledgeable on the subject; I'm thirsty for knowledge. If I was dating a contractor right now, we would never run out of things to talk about. Alas, I am not.
The other topic I could run into the ground has to do with my second round of edits on the book. We're working on "point of view", something most readers don't even notice and most writers obsess over. I'm considering the merits of shifting the first-person chapters by non-central characters into third person. If you've read Monsoon Season and have any idea what I just said, I'd love your opinion!
I bight be a little late in the game on this post, but I thought I'd throw in my 2.5 cents anyway.
ReplyDeleteUnless you really want to spend another 100 hours editing your manuscript, I wouldn't do it. I did something similar and it created an editing nightmare for me. My book follows a non-linear timeline; I alternate chapters with past and present scenes (think 500 Days of Summer, but I wrote my first draft before the movie came out!). I wrote the first draft entirely in past tense, and decided to change all of the present scenes to the present tense. It took me about 10 full edits to catch everything (God, I hope I caught everything), because it is so easy to miss little changes that need to be made when you switch tenses.
I haven't read your book yet, but it was good enough to get picked up by a publisher, so I'm thinking it's good as is.
Hope that helps a little bit.
yes, alas, your advice is too late! i dragged my feet and swore it couldn't be done, but i did it. luckily, i have a copy editor who caught several changes i'd missed making. it was a ton of work and no one will ever know how hard it was. i think it makes it clearer for the reader. i fought it because it was already clear to ME...
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