Sunday, January 06, 2008

Another bloody rewrite.

I've been away so long, hard to know where to begin.

Stina's doing pretty well on YWO - my highest rated piece currently. Privet comes next and Amelia languishes at no.20.

I put Amelia's Body up on The BookShed, and got some interesting advice back. Reviewers have long complained that the structure was too confusing, the 'Post Mortem' chapters hopping about in time as they do, and written all in different styles (journal entries, police interviews, conversations, random monologues, etc.). Anyway, this reviewer (Patti) said just choose a couple of these styles and stick with them, bend everything to fit them, and reduce the no. of characters that you are allowing top 'speak' through these chapters, giving over nearly all of them to Caroline.

Fantastic advice, I thought. I applied it to the first three chapters and re-uploaded them.

Reviewers now agree that the result is far more cohesive than before, but they now complain that all the heart has gone out of it. It is dry and cold.

So, now I have a choice to make. Do I just put it back the way it was and ignore the niggles over the structure? Or do I persevere with the new way and endeavour to put the warmth back into it somehow?

It's got to be the latter, hasn't it? Bollocks. It'll take me weeks.

A

3 Comments:

Blogger Welshcake said...

I think you have to trust your gut instinct on this one. The important thing is to make sure you don't lose your individual voice.

1:42 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

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1:03 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wanna swap links? From the loiterer in WF who is always running out of time to update her blog these days due to too much loitering in WF.

PS I love the name Soulcompost you mention below

PS2 Keep the heart. Can they really tell if the structure is working or not if they are reading chunks? Amazing and flawed is better than perfect but so what. In my view, anyway.
Link: http:mockduck.typepad.com

12:00 am  

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