Another week brings another tale of endless revisions. Right now I'm working my way through Chapter 9 of 29... so clearly I still have a ways to go. Other than that I don't really have anything else that is terribly exciting to report about my revisions process. Luckily, Nathan Bransford - the owner of quite possibly the most popular literary agent blog in the galaxy - (Hmm... that sounds hyperbolic or perhaps sarcastic, but honestly his blog really just is that good.) was kind enough to post today on the subject of revisions.
More specifically he posted a checklist of big questions to ask yourself while in the revisions process.
While reading through the list some of them received a definite thumbs up for my MS, some were "Oh yeah, that's a problem I know about and I'm working on it", and others were "Ummm... I don't know. Now you're making me worry about this."
Some of the bigs ones that fell into the latter two categories are:
- Is your voice consistent? Is it overly chatty or sarcastic?
- Is the tense completely consistent? Is the perspective consistent?
- Is there sufficient description that your reader feels grounded in the characters' world?
- Do you know what your writing tics are? Do you overuse adverbs, metaphors, facial expressions, non-"said" dialogue tags, or interjections? Have you removed them?
- Do you overuse certain words or phrases? Is your word choice perfect throughout?
There were other ones on the list that I think deserve my attention as well, but these were the ones that really set my internal alarms off.
That's it for my WIP Wednesday. How has your past week been? And if you've checked out Nathan's list which of his questions sets off your internal alarms the most?
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