First, grateful thanks to lin robinson for the word
genera. Could it replace
genre, perhaps? (I don't hate French, I just feel silly doing the pronunciation while chatting)
Second, my worthless addition to the valuable foregoing is that there are some howling, glaringly obvious, horrendous discontinuities that I've not even noticed sometimes till the third draft. Makes you worried what you might still be missing. Like numbers. If he's thirty, how can he be thirty-two years her senior? If she can reach the top of the window from the inside, how could she not reach it from the outside? If they're travelling 50 KPH, why can't the police car catch up with them? If she had a headaches two pages ago, why hasn't she taken an aspirin yet?
I made these up, but they're of a type that I never notice until I realise that (a) I made him a little younger in the second draft; (b) I imagined where the furniture was but forgot to tell the reader about chair by the window; (c) I changed from MPH to KPH without checking what the real difference was and (d) I had a headache when I wrote the first part and meditation and chemicals had cleared it before I went back to write the second.
When reading soon after writing, you remember things and often forget that you haven't actually committed some of those things to paper yet. But later, when you can turn a page and read something you don't remember writing, it can be a little easier to spot those omisions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jackokent  I've been re-drafting 2 for 10 years. |
No, I'll keep my mouth shut. Besides ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by jackokent I found printing them out in a nice easy, bookish format and reading them like I would any other novel was realy useful. |
... is truly valuable advice. Seeing the same text on the same screen in the same format, you go blind to certain errors. Misspellings, missing words, missing quotes etc recede into the background noise of the flickering screen.
When you print the ms out, it looks sufficiently different that you spot many more of the tiny, annoying mistakes, often the ones you've had there since you started. It's a real, physical/psychological phenomenon that really isn't all that phenomenal at all. It just happens.
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Originally Posted by lin robinson "To boldly go where no man has gone before", of course. |
When Patrick Stewart first took on the role, and prior to the first broadcast of the Next Generation, there was rampant speculation about whether a Shakespearean actor of his standing could utter those immortal words with out haemmoraging.