Confusion


Revisions again today. I can only do so much at a time without having to lie down in a darkened room.

It’s all very well deciding to move a scene from one place to another, but then any subsequent and consequent action needs to be changed. Keeping track of this is killing me. I don’t know if it’s just detective novels which suffer particularly from this though I suspect it isn’t. The problem becomes worse with each new draft because it’s hard to remember what has been changed. It is possible, of course, to track changes using Word but constantly flicking back and forth through 80,000 words is a nightmare.

One of my readers asked me how we knew a particular fact which a character had just mentioned. I knew I’d written the background but discovered it now came in a later scene. My how we laughed.

Then this morning I decided I needed to move a couple of sentences into a scene where they fitted better, due to other changes, but when I looked for the sentences, which I also knew I’d written, they were no longer in the current draft at all. Thankfully I’ve kept virtually all the previous drafts so I can retrieve the missing stuff. This aids the process but not my state of mind.

I’m seeing lots of posts on NaNo about writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. Hats off to you guys – maybe I’ll try it next year.


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