Monday, July 18, 2011

Revisions and readers' comments

This week I'm sitting with which revisions to attend to that have arisen out of the comments of my five early readers. Last Friday at Writer's retreat day, I made all the small changes: typos, missing letters, double punctuation, and a few sentences that my wise writer friend Jan pointed out were superfluous. Now comes the bigger task. Does Danny's death go by too fast? Do I need to explain how Hansen's daughter has computer hacking skills? Did I make too many references to food? (Can there even be too many references to food? :) Are there enough physical beats in some of the dialogs? Does the climax of the plot need to be slowed down?

The easiest ones are those glitches perceived by more than one reader. Those most likely need my attention. But there are some thoughtful ideas from only one reader and she's an excellent writer and a discerning reader. Do I take her advice? Can I listen to my own intuition and creative self and see if that resonates with me first?

I guess the real question is if I can slow down enough to be thoughtful about this when I want to be done with this book and move back into the novel I started last month on the big retreat.