SUMMARY OF EDITS FOR CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

If I hadn’t seen a comment from my editor on the final page, I might have thought she hadn’t read this chapter. I’d used the cliché ‘It’s vanished into thin air.’ My editor suggested that I could have used ellipses and stammering to add tone to the dialogue as follows. ‘I-it’s vanished!’

This was a technique I had already used earlier in this chapter when I wrote:

Ramona’s expression deepened. ‘Ray...Ray...’ she stammered as tears welled in her eyes. ‘He... was taken... by Beasties as well.’

In my latest draft I changed this to:

Ramona’s composure shattered into fragments. ‘Ray... Ray...’ she stammered as tears welled in her eyes. ‘Yetis...took him... as well.’

I’m still in two minds as to whether the use of the word ‘stammered’ is necessary. It didn’t draw a comment from my editor but is something I will need to think about.

The term Beasties is one which Elisha’s community had coined to describe the mysterious hominids which had been sighted near their village. It occurred to me that the Scavengers (Roma) would probably have come up with a different name to describe them. Whenever they talk about these creatures they refer to them as Yetis. It is only a small change but one which I think is more authentic.

I made quite a few minor changes to the original text of this chapter as I did with Chapter Seventeen. However, once I’d put them aside for a month and re-read them, I realised that not all of my changes were for the best. In quite a number of instances, I changed the wording back to the original. This is one good reason to keep hold of all of your drafts.

In an earlier post I mentioned that editing involves looking forward and back. Changes to one part can often throw up new ideas or require changes to other parts of the story. In Chapter Eighteen there was an opportunity to put some extra detail into one of the scenes, which would foreshadow a future event that wasn’t in my original draft.

The key to making changes to a professionally edited draft is to make use of all the criticism and advice the editor has given on the MS as a whole. If you simply edit a chapter based on the comments made in that particular one the improvements will only be superficial. Whilst my editor’s comments were very sparse in chapters seventeen and eighteen, she had already provided a number of hints and tips in other chapters. Bearing these in mind and applying them where necessary has enabled me to improve my work to a much higher standard.