For the past two weeks I’ve been re-editing the 9th draft – no, I’m not joking, I’ve written nine drafts over nine years for a short story that for the purposes of this blog I’ll title, Shaving.
I decided to re-edit this draft after creating an email submission to an online science fiction magazine, and realised that I needed to ensure that the formatting had carried over correctly from my Word document and that it maintained the requirements that the magazine wanted. I submitted this draft to two magazines earlier in the year and I thought that I might as well try to tighten the story at the same time as submitting the story again.
Whilst proofing the formatting in the email I once again began to notice certain things. I found that there were still a few instances where it was possible to make the prose tighter by reducing word count through saying something with fewer words and getting the same meaning. Also, this was the first time that I noticed that there were two instances where the point of view (POV) switched from my main character (MC) to the supporting character (SC). I honestly have no idea how I didn’t realise this before, but it woke me up to yet another item to be added to my editing check list. I needed to keep the POV on the MC as he and his thoughts are the focus of the story, not the SC’s.
Each draft of this story has been different than the one before. My experience and abilites have increased year-on-year so that when I come back to the story I’ve been able to find solutions to problems that had dogged earlier drafts.
I submitted the 3rd, 5th and 8th drafts to the online writing group that I’ve been a member of for over 10 years on-and-off. This writing group is called “Critters” at this address – http://critters.org/ and I can’t rate it high enough. The feedback I received each time inspired me to create an altogether different story for the next draft.
The 6th draft was submitted to five magazines with no success. However, it was not fruitless. One editor gave two sentences of feedback that made me re-think some important aspects of the story, notably being too dialogue driven and a lack of connection with the reader. I took this feedback, this constructive criticism and embraced the message. I re-read the story with new eyes and saw what the editor saw.
I suppose what I’m trying to say, is that although I’ve being working on this story for a very long time, it’s gotten better with each draft and that feedback is very important in the development and progression of a story and should be actively sought whenever possible.
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