Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

This week I seriously thought the editing of The Broken Life was going well.

I was systematically running each chapter through the Hemingway app, the brilliant editing tool that makes editing almost a delight to do. This system highlights all the unnecessary words, adverbs, passive voice and hard to read sentences, so you can work on all of them at once. It will even tell you the readability of the work. Of course, seasoned writers can ignore this part of the post!

I used to do this the hard way, one word at a time and it took forever. There are so many words we shouldn’t use if we want our writing to flow and read well, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has picked up a lot of bad habits since my school days.

One word of caution here. While editing, you shouldn’t worry about formatting until every last edit is done. Hemingway is wonderful, but it’s not always right and does terrible things to your font size.

Just when I was feeling my most complacent, everything was going well and no demons had jumped out to annoy me, one of my characters started to speak to me. I am being polite here. He was nagging my socks off.

He wasn’t one of my main players, you understand, but he was banging on about not having a good enough role in the book. This was from a junior sergeant in my detective Inspector’s team. Smithy, as I affectionately called him, was running the argument that he could increase the tension in the book by being a bouncing board for the reader, filling in the spaces better between the main characters.

I began to see his point of view, seeing the merit of his ideas.  But the book was nearly finished, not really the time for new material. I knew it was a little on the short side, so adding more material would solve that problem. It just meant that the finish line had just frog marched further away from me!

I spent an hour or two figuring out how I could include this new material and make it work. But should I simply insert it into the relevant chapters, or slot them in as separately?

The jury is still out on that one, so I have decided to write them anyway and figure out what to do with them later.

This writing lark is a bit of a game, isn’t it? Unpredictable, surprising and frustrating as hell. But that is probably why we love it so much.

I will post again when the dust has settled, and I know what I’m doing…