I’ve had all day to get stuck in and do this, but somehow forgot I was in England, not Australia. Instead, I added some words to the WIP. On re-thinking, I am going to have to re-write them as dialogue. So: a good day.
Actually, that’s – from the reader’s POV not a bad thing. The author was vaguely uneasy about a section, went through it and worked out what was wrong, saw how this affected the structure and pace of the story and will fix it. Believe me when I say these are three very unlikely things.
Firstly, you have the authors who simply can’t see anything wrong with their own work. It’s perfect. On the opposite extreme you have the writers who actually is fairly competent, and gets it right most of the time… and yet feels it isn’t. The middle ground, when you know some sections are good and yet another part activates your writer spidey-sense, and says something wrong with a bit that has problem — you’re getting there as a writer.
Of course, going through it again and working out specifically what is wrong, and how to fix it is a whole different beast. Effectively that in fact is what a structural editor does. Copy editors are a dime a dozen — valuable, add to story’s quality, stop trivial errors and continuity issues upsetting readers — but they’re not structural editors. There are very few of those. I’ve been edited by three. 2 good, one adding a little – out of 26 books. Basically, you probably can’t buy it, so you’ll have to learn to do it as best you can
It takes stepping outside your own work, reading it as if it wasn’t yours and you didn’t know what was supposed to happen. And listening to that spidey-sense, ‘I’m not happy’
Onwards.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Writer’s instinct.”
My inner structural editor sometimes goes on vacation. At other times, like the thing I just finished first revision on, it kicks in the next morning and says, “Hey, you need to tie off this loose end. And you have to sort out this subplot, Or Else.”
You have to let the ms. sit after you finish it, then reread it. It’s hard not to push the baby out of the womb even if they’re in the wrong position to come out after you’ve spent so much time in painful labor.
Trust but Verify, where my instincts are concerned. They’re as lazy as the rest of me, and have a tendency to be much too nice to my Characters.
Sometimes I’m improving things so I don’t have to write the next scene. It’s a form of vacuuming the cat. But I generally manage to plow onward.
Rumination always helps. Let it ripen a bit, then go back to it.
You have to “forget” the writing a little bit to reread effectively with a proper bit of distance.
Case in point…. notice the three uses of the word “bit” in the above trivial comment? I didn’t notice when I hit “publish”, and I didn’t notice when I wrote them — seemed fine (because my brain was already primed with the word). Only 1 minute later, when I reread my own published remark, did I notice the triplication.
Sigh… Gotta let things marinate before rereading.
How does one go about finding a good structural editor? Seems like it would be a good thing to know.