Saturday, February 21, 2009

Editing "Faded, Stupid, and Reckless"

So I'm working on editing Faded, Stupid, and Reckless. It's not the first story I've tried to edit (I began editing My Paper Heart Will Bleed).

Editing is interesting. When I edited My Paper Heart, basically what I did was I formatted the story, spell-checked it, double-spaced everything, and printed it out. Then, I took a red pen and edited some small things.

I realized that I had a LOT of mistakes in the story. There were plenty of grammar mistakes, and syntax and punctuation issues. There was also the whole thing of a dead character mysteriously coming back to life.

I also decided that I wanted to change almost every character's name. So basically, the printed manuscript of My Paper Heart is almost completely covered in red ink. It's actually kind of amazing to look at.

Around this time last year, I decided I wanted to edit Faded. I felt that it was my strongest story, but I knew that it could be so much better. I had a lot of formatting to fix before I could print it- that alone took a few hours. Over 70,000 words. 364 pages. 51 chapters (plus an epilogue). Several reviews and messages. Hundreds of hours of hard work. When I typed the last sentence of that story, it was such an indescribable moment. I had spent over a year working on it. I had asked many people what they thought- many liked it, but some didn't. I wrote down ideas, and crossed many of them out. I worked on the story at home, at school, at camp, on the beach, on vacation, on the plane, at hotels, at family functions. I worked on the story when I could've (should've?) been doing homework, watching TV, or interacting with other humans. I felt so many emotions while working on the story- happiness (writing makes me happy), satisfied (isn't it just satisfying to see all this work you've done?), frustration/writer's block, confusion... I worked on the story while friends, homework, school, teachers, music, and family members crossed my mind. The only thing that never crossed my mind was the idea of not finishing the story.

So anyways. I had all of Faded in a document, formatted and spell-checked (spell-check also took quite a long time). I printed it out and hole-punched it (that took a looooooong time) so I could put it in a binder. Then, I made a list of things I wanted to change about the story. I haven't made any major changes as of yet- I've really only edited to fix little things, but the big things will come next.

Some things that will probably change for the next version of Faded:
1. Better grammar, syntax, and word choice.
2. While reading through it the first time, I realized that a lot of the sentences written had sounded good originally, but now they just looked awkward. So those will be fixed.
3. Some characters may have different first and/or last names (not saying which characters!).
4. A "re-organization" of the events that occur before the move to Montreal. I've realized that the flashback was awkward, and it might belong at the beginning more.
5. Removal of unnecessary events that contribute nothing at all to the rest of the story (there were a few of these).
6. Stronger, more "real" characters.

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