Our topic at the SFF Seven week is all about first drafts, and the adjectives we'd choose to describe them. My three?
Clean
I write pretty clean overall, which is a blessing. I'm lucky enough to have one of those brains that retains spelling and picks out typos pretty easily. My weirdest mistake is the homonym errors that emerge when I'm in deep drafting. Stupid ones - like know instead of no. I think it's because at my core I'm an auditory learner. When my trained, conscious mind is less engaged, I revert to how words sound. Otherwise, though, copy editors love me. There's usually not a lot of minor stuff to correct.
Partly Cloudy
For the most part the story is pretty clear when I'm done with the first draft - but there can be some places that are a little obscure. My developmental edits are almost always adding, clarifying and filling in. The polishing of the first draft makes it all shine with no fogginess.
Fuzzy
I spent way too long looking for the exact word I wanted here. Revising the first draft for me means tightening up the dangling threads. I really wanted a weaving term for this, but could only find the fix, not the adjective for the unfinished state. Sometimes I discover insights as I finish the story, so I have to go back and make sure those threads are apparent from the start. I trim up the dangling threads and sort of hem up the whole story.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Clean, Partly Cloudy, and Fuzzy
Labels:
clean,
developmental edits,
first drafts,
fuzzy,
Jeffe Kennedy,
partly cloudy,
revisions
Jeffe Kennedy is a multi-award-winning and best-selling author of romantic fantasy. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and is a member of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). She is best known for her RITA® Award-winning novel, The Pages of the Mind, the recent trilogy, The Forgotten Empires, and the wildly popular, Dark Wizard. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.