Spell Me a Story

There’s some Facebook meme that’s gone around featuring a paragraph in which the spelling of every word is shuffled and folks are challenged to read it anyway.  From the comments I’ve seen, it appears most people understand it, piece of cake.  The exercise demonstrates how the human brain doesn’t read letter by letter, but word by familiar word.  As a fast reader, I assume that's how I do it, and it's no help at all when I’m trying to catch my own terrible typos.

I spent the last week reading the latest draft of my current work in progress out loud.  If you are a regular reader of Middle Passages you surely probably most likely absolutely may have noted that typing, spelling and punctuation are not my strong suits. I can’t tell you how many times I go back and read a post I wrote then edited, edited, edited and published, only to discover typos.  Argh.  Drives me crazy, because I know you see them, too.  So, anyway, I am aware of my challenges in this regard and trust me.  Over the course of an eighty-three-thousand word draft, there’s a lot of proofreading to do.

Since we don’t speak as fast as our eyes devour a page, reading out loud forces us to slow down, to concentrate on each word, which is when the booboos percolate up.  When I read out loud, I find where I’ve used the wrong tense, forgot a word, or plopped in the wrong spelling.   This week, it also helped me to identify spots where the story is weak, where I need some interior thoughts to help to spell out what is happening in my characters' brains. So I add a sentence here and there. That means more proofing. Ugh.

I want so much to be done.  But I’m not there yet.  Soon though.   I say that a lot.  It’s the only way I can sooth my typo-ridden punctuation-challenged awful spelling will-I-ever-finish-with-this soul. 

What tricks do you use to edit your own manuscript?

Onward Editor

Lately, I feel like I’ve read my dratted story so many times, if I do it one more time, my eyeballs will bleed.  But during one of my insecure, lack of confidence, what-a-waste-of-time-when-this-thing-goes-nowhere editing days, something neat happened. 

Let me set the stage.  I’m a voracious re-reader.  If I like a book, I’ll read it again a few years later, and if it’s really good, there could be multiple repeats.  Of course, after the first time, the end is not a mystery, but during the time between reads I forget the details.  As a result, a good book can suck me in the second, or the fifth time as well as a book that’s new to me—to the point that little gets accomplished in my life until I’ve turned the last page.

So here I was last week, reading/editing my own darn work in progress for what feels for the millionth time, hating a lot of it to tell you the truth, when I arrived at a critical scene and got hooked.  Imagine that.  I mean, I wrote the thing, right?  Trust me, I knew what happened next.  But, yep, as I approached the climax of the story, I didn’t want to put it down.  And then I had to put it down, had to dash to the bedroom to change my clothes, to skedaddle to work— arriving at work late because I didn’t pull myself away soon enough.  For the rest of the day, while I sat in our crowded office editing a newsletter, I kept thinking about my own story— the one I’ve read so many times.  I couldn’t wait to see HOW I wrote what I knew was going to happen next.

When I got home and picked it up again, the story was as compelling as earlier in the day, the red pen saw very little action, and I learned something.

Regardless of what happens to this dear book of mine, it’s not a waste of time.  It’s hard work, and there is a whole lot more of that to come.  But I'm developing and growing as a writer. 

And now that I've managed to excite that nasty little second-guessing critic who dwells deep inside of me, I'll admit to a minor victory.