Ahhh,
revising. I don’t mean
your friendly little cut and paste and then we’re done. I mean the fourth-time-through-the-novel
kinda rehash. When the written word starts looking like Sanskrit and you find
yourself Googling the plural possessive of “ours”--more than once. I actually woke up this morning from a dream in which I was editing my WIP. Good Lord, how did I get into this? I can’t even keep my sock drawer in order,
not to mention sixty-five thousand words and all the rotten little dots and
dashes that go along with them! Criminy. What was I thinking?
I’ve been
reading a lot about the revising process lately. Someone, I’m not sure who, recommended that to
find all the typos I should read my manuscript backwards. Oh yes, his name was Eloh-ssa. Someone else suggested “it might be worth it”
to spend three grand to get a professional edit. Sorry, but it ain’t worth it in THIS house-hold. What I really need to do is to stop obsessing
on Twitter over the latest contest and go to work so I can afford to buy a new
fridge. The one we’ve got sounds like a
clothes-dryer full of tennis-shoes.
The best
technique I have found for editing my manuscript is to submit it to an
agent. Then, when I reread the email I
sent said agent, I will spot all the myriad of mistakes that somehow, previously
slipped my eye: A glaring incorrect
“their” (it must be auto-correct, right?); the fact that I obviously think
colons should be used for digestive purposes only; and the blatant overuse
of my characters name as a mind-numbing form of thought-control. (I really didn’t use it eleven times in the
first 250 did I?) However, this type of editing tends to be counter-productive.
So my dear
talented Peeps, I thought perhaps you might be willing to throw me a bone and help a fellow writer embarking on this part of the journey. Listed below are a plethora of questions for which I am seeking answers. Rather than scan the web for unreliable answers, I thought to ask those writers near and dear to my heart. You have all been so helpful in the past. I hope to glean as much
wisdom as possible from your writerly experience. Feel free to answer all, some or none. I'll still love you--and more importantly, will still read you.
*How do you
know when your manuscript is ready to send to Beta Readers?
*Do your
beta readers check for typos, spelling and grammar or just overall flow and feel?
*Do you send your readers a questionnaire (of
sorts) along with the MS ?
*What
questions do you put on said questionnaire?*Do you use Google Docs?
*Do you send it out to one reader at a time, and then fix the whatevers, and then send it out to the next reader or do you cast a wide net?
Many thanks.
~Just JillP.S. My dream-editing was right on. I axed the whole paragraph this morning.
P.S.S. Please check out Kirsten Lamb's book, "We Are Not Alone: The Writer's Guide to Social Media" on Amazon here!
