Chace Randolph

Blog Post Number 62

Written 06-03-2023 Uploaded: 07-14-2023

Some of the stuff that was pointed out to me about my writing, at least in the first book, that feels painfully obvious now that I have seen it… well Let me narrow it down to three things. Firstly, I have a problem with passive voice. That is easy enough to identify. Passive words are things like was, were, been, knew, felt, thought, there, seemed etc.

That is easy enough to fix, I did a word search for each word in question and then rewrote the sentence containing the passive words so as to not use them more than strictly nessicary. For example, there were 1345 instances of “was” in the manuscript when I started this process, and I narrowed that down to about six hundred. More than having the word count for just that one offending word. I had a whole list of words I went through in this manner.

The second problem was a matter of Show vs Tell. I had way too much telling, where I am informing the reader of the characters feelings like a check list, he was tired because of this and this and that. He knew he needed more water or else he wouldn’t have the strength to get through the next day. That kind of stuff.

The third major problem, was a lack of dialogue. I was told that roughly fifty percent of any given page should be dialogue. I tried to solve both the second and third problems at the same time, removing several pages and even rewriting a couple whole chapters to remove lots of the telling, and replace it with dialogue to facilitate the showing.

I know its not a perfect solution, and several more sections should have been removed and rewritten, but I am working quickly here, and it has made a significant difference, the characters spend more time talking, and this lets the reader see more of the relationships between them, and how they are feeling, without me having to tell them directly. I feel all in all it has made a massive improvement, and I am also proud to report other stuff I have written more recently, while still not perfect, is not as bad in any of those three categories, and in the future editing should go much quicker to try and bring everything up to this new par.

I have started copy typing a horror story I wrote by hand. It’s not done, and I will continue to write it, to finish it by hand, but I haven’t worked on it in a while. I am copy typing / reading what I already have in order to pick up where I left off, to finish writing it by hand.

I have already started implementing these same kinds of edits to is as I am copy typing it, and It makes a huge difference. Sure, all the stuff I did a while back is going to waste, but it feels so much better now. Any badly written story, can be edited into a good one, so long as it is complete. I just have to finish it, get it out on paper, and I can edit it out into something good.

I have learned much and I feel my writing has only improved, hopefully in the future, it will take less editing after the writing, and hopefully what I have already written, now that I know what to look for, will be easy to clean up, especially as my writing has naturally improved over the now dozen or so novel length manuscripts I have completed.