Sometimes, during early drafts, I will put placeholder dialogue where I know I will go back and fix it later. Later is now. I'm going through all the dialogue and fixing whatever needs fixing. It is not just placeholders. Sometimes a character says something that makes sense in the first draft, but after some changes, it simply does not work anymore.
Editing is almost like time travel. What you change over here can impact what happens over there. When you make the door in chapter 10 red instead of blue, you have to go back and make sure it is always red. Maybe someone casually mentions the blue door in chapter 3.
I read a book two or three years ago where one of the characters was named Emma half the time and Anna the other half. It was definitely the same character. The author obviously changed it at some point but forgot to change each mention of the name. I don't know how their editor never noticed. Maybe they relied on Microsoft spell check.
No comments:
Post a Comment
No hate, please. There's enough of that in the world already.