- Addison Horner
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- 🖊 Positively Sophomoric
🖊 Positively Sophomoric
Or, how to find humility in fifteen hundred easy steps.
Addison Horner
April 05, 2023
Today's newsletter: Barney Stinson, second drafts, and SECOND. DRAFTS.
Editing Tip #4
Go green, please. Every single aspect of your prose is up for recycling. Here's a shortlist of ways to reuse strong elements as you refine your work.
QUOTES: Take a pivotal, meaningful, or humorous piece of dialogue and restate it in a different scene/setting.
ACTIONS: Choices your character makes in one chapter can reinforce a theme – or subvert it – by appearing again later in the story.
EXPRESSIONS: Take a habit, mannerism, quirk, gesture, or facial expression and put it in different contexts across the story. It can represent the same emotion or something new that represents the character's change over time.
TRANSFERS: Take one of the above ideas – quotes, actions, expressions – and assign it to a different character in a future scene.
New Stuff
READ THIS if you like horror stories, alternate realities, and creepy piano soundtracks.
DON'T READ THIS if you have residual trauma from childhood music lessons. It won't help.
Breaking the Second Draft Slump (DOWNLOAD)
I'm learning some valuable lessons as I refine Codename SPOOKY with my editor's notes. I've compiled them into a new document, exclusive for newsletter subscribers (that's y'all).
Writing Update
Codename SPOOKY: Fifteen hundred. That's the number of comments, insertions, and deletions on the Word document my editor returned to me a few weeks ago. After a wonderful two-and-a-half hour chat about the story's strengths and growth areas, I'm ready to begin revisions in earnest.
Points I'm focusing on: protagonist motivation, worldbuilding depth, and rewriting an emotionally visceral scene involving an underground waterfall.
But I'm happy to say that, despite the paralyzing number of edits, the manuscript is in good shape. No major rewrites, no reconstruction. The bones are strong.
My goals for April: finish SPOOKY revisions, compile a worldbuilding encyclopedia, hire a cover designer, and set my publishing schedule. October release, anyone?
What would motivate you more: the chance to bring a loved one back from the dead (positive motivation) OR the threat of losing a loved one (negative motivation)?
Codename SPOOKY SEQUEL: I'm pausing the draft until I finish SPOOKY revisions. Once that happens, I'll be ready to write at breakneck speed once again.
Codename SPACEY: Still pining for the day I can dig into this draft. One elephant at a time.
Something Different
