When I finished revision nine of my novel, I decided to let my husband read it. He'd been asking for a long time, and I always held back from letting him. I had heard early on that asking family members especially such close ones and good friends to read our work could be a problem. It they hate the work they would be reluctant to tell the truth, and if they love it, they may have a subjective rather than objective point of view. Well, I decided to risk it anyway, and considering how hard he worked on reviewing, I'm not sorry. He saved a copy and renamed it with his initials and started going through it marking edits and/or typos in red font and inserting questions and comments along the way highlighted in yellow. He also created a separate timeline in a Word table. That is really his forte he's a numbers guy. And, he found a lot of inconsistencies in my dates (my novel is divided in three parts each starting with a date in story's history) and inconsistencies in the birth … [Read more...]
Should we let a family member read our drafts?
Another novel milestone met
I just sent off draft seven of my novel to another reviewer. I very much value this person's judgment because of her experience editing books for the Oxford University Press and that she helped me revise and edit my memoir, Leaving the Hall Light On. I spent the last two and a half months working on this draft, looking for repetition, places where I told the story rather than showed it, and rewriting in response to some earlier review comments. As a result I cut out almost five thousand words. It's now down to 85, 485 words. It's still a little heavy for a novel, but in the right range. I've asked this reviewer to especially assess the content - are the story and its characters worth even pursuing at this point. My problem is the more I read and work on this material these days, the less confident I get. I said I don't need her to edit, except for giving me possible suggestions on where to delete/add stuff. After I sent my manuscript off to my reviewer today, my … [Read more...]
