David Weller Author Blogspot

It's been a while since I posted anything on this blog and with very good reason. Recently, all my energy has been devoted to rewriting parts of my MS. Following an agent request I spent a month adding another 20K to it. Whilst I was pleased with the result at the time I quickly realised that it left much to be desired. I then cut 14000 words and started writing again. With that now accomplished I am in the process of a giving my work a final polish before submitting it for consideration.  Whilst I'm more pleased now than at any other time in the writing process, I don't think for a minute that this will be the end of the tale. If there is one thing I have learned it is that a manuscript can always be improved. 

I was going to write about using a 27 chapter outline to plot your work for this post, but will leave that for another time. Once we’ve completed our draft MS it needs to be edited on several different levels. Spelling, punctuation and grammar obviously come top of the list bu t there are other things that need to be considered. Overuse of prepositions is one of them. Fo r the past few days I’ve been on ‘preposition patrol.’ This entailed going through my work and highlighting every preposition I’d used to see which could be culled. Words like up and down are the obvious ones and it’s amazing how often they appear. Sometimes the use of these words is valid but quite often they can be cut out . Recognising a verb or a noun when you see it is fairly obvious. But, instantly recognising that a word like despite is a preposition eludes most people. A word like but can also be off putting as it is usually thought of as a conjunction. So too with the word ...

I recently decided that the first part of my novel would be stronger if I reordered some of the material. I believe the changes I've made achieved this aim. However, I also needed to consider the structure. I wrote this story using a four part structure. Part 1 introduces the character in their ordinary world and includes the Inciting Incident which occurs within the first 30 pages. At the end of Part 1, something happens which launches the MC into Part 2. In this part the MC responds to events and this leads to the halfway point where a decision has to be made. This is sometimes referred to as the Recommitment. When the MC enters Part 3 they stop reacting to events and actively go on the attack. This culminates with the Crises,  which is the darkest moment for the MC. In Part 4 the tension drops slightly as the MC goes through the scenes which lead to the Climax . After this point the story is essentially over and enters the dénouement phase. Whilst the changes I made di...

I've always known that the first four chapters of my first novel were the weakest. Despite all the time and effort I'd put in to editing this material, the story never seemed to take off until the beginning of Chapter 6. I was on the verge of scrapping the first four chapters, and doing a complete rewrite, when I had a eureka moment. I realised that by reordering some of the events in the story, I could make the early chapters much stronger. The first chapter only required minor editing.  Chapter 2 contained elements which I didn't like, and so I decided to keep the first two scenes and take out the rest. I then removed a scene from Chapter 3, and added what was left to the first two scenes from Chapter 2. I renumbered Chapter 4 as Chapter 3, and kept the first half. The second half of this chapter was replaced by material from the second half of Chapter 6. I discarded the whole of Chapter 5, and the first half of Chapter 6. My new Chapter 4 now consists of the ...

For the past six months I've devoted all my energy to editing Truthseeker to the best of my ability. It certainly paid off as a sample resulted in a request for the full MS by an agent. What the outcome of remains to be seen. My second novel, Secret of Heathcote Manor has taken a back seat for as long as I can remember. It is, in my opinion, a much more saleable story than my first, but I've just not had the desire to edit it until now. I took a look at it yesterday and the errors just jumped off the page. On the one hand, I cringed at the sight. On the other, I realised just how far I've come since I wrote it. Today I finally bit the bullet and set to work. The first thing I did was to copy the whole MS into a 5x8 template, which I downloaded from CreateSpace. For reasons, I'm unable to fathom, I seem to be able to work better on a draft in this format. Perhaps it's because it looks more like the finished product. So far I've worked through the first tw...

This was the final chapter and drew just one comment from my editor. That was about how the MC reacted to one particular discovery she made after the climax to the story. My editor was quite right and I made changes to this to show the MC behaving in a more believable manner. Just with other parts of the MS which didn’t draw much comment from my editor, I found myself making changes. Although this chapter is still recognisable when compared to the original draft, it has been fleshed out to include some more interesting detail. It includes one small scene not found in the MS my editor read and this helps to set up the story line for the sequel. Is this the end of the story about my editing endeavours? Hell no, we’re not even halfway there yet.

This was another chapter which didn’t draw very much lead from my editor’s pencil. There was one instance of a missing comma and one small typo to be corrected. However, in the rewrite, I cut the whole of this chapter and pasted it into my trusty reservoir of discarded text. A small portion of it found its way back into the MS in a rewritten form. The main reasons I decided to cut this whole chapter in its entirety included: ·          It did nothing to further the plot. ·          Much of it had become redundant because of changes to the story-line. ·          The MC was being reactive instead of proactive. ·          There wasn’t enough tension to grip the reader as it led up to the climax of the story. All I can say about the current version is that it makes the first look weak.