Okay, the time has come to pull Jaben’s Rift back out of cyber mothballs. It’s been sitting (with me trying very hard not to think about it) for almost four weeks. Now it’s time to start snipping, chopping, shredding, ripping, and whatever else it takes in order to turn it into something readable. I’ll be trimming away the fat, working on dialogue, getting rid of excessive adverbs, and dropping things that don’t add to the story. The official starting word count (including chapter titles) is 125,295 words. My target range is 90,000 to 110,000, which means trimming away about 20% of what I’ve written. Oh, the pain! Too dramatic?
It’s really amazing, though, what you can get rid of or move. On JR, I tended to edit as I went. I remember one section that I went over a couple of years ago, that I dropped from 1,100 words to 300. Looking back, I realize I had fallen into a trap that catches a lot of writers (especially new writers, such as yours truly), that of the dreaded info dump.
An info dump, sometimes called a data dump, happens when a writer is so eager to make sure the reader understands the story and main character that they throw every detail of the character and his or her motivation into one long section of prose right at the beginning. The problem is that’s not how we get to know people in real life. In fact, part of the fun of a relationship is the time it takes to learn about the other person. It’s that way in books too. Dump everything about the character out at the beginning, and there’s nothing left for the reader to anticipate learning about them, no questions for which the reader can anticipate answers.
So, for any prospective fiction writers out there, take a little time giving out the information about your characters and the situations they’re in. Give us just enough to get us interested, and then dole it out in little bits and pieces, in either dialogue, or memories, or inner thoughts, whatever. Don’t dump it all on your reader at once, no matter how tempting it may be.
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We interrupt our normally scheduled blog for the following quick rant.
Attention Google! I am so tired of running a search on your engine and clicking on a link only to have it take me to some other page full of “related links.” Then I have to click on the “back” button and click on the first link again in order to get to the page I wanted to go to in the first place. Oh, it only happens once in a while, but it’s still annoying! Instead of hijacking my web surfing, how about you just put the link to your “page o’ links” on the search results and let me make my own decision, thank you very much.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.
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Alright, since I’ll be using my time to edit Jaben’s Rift, the next novel will be placed on hold for now. Once I have JR ready, a synopsis written, and my query ready, I’ll get back on the second one. It’s almost 16,500 words now. Better than last week, but still a little off the pace. Once JR is edited and the best I can make it, I’ll need to hit this next one even harder.
Hope your weekend was a great one,
Dave
Dreams that are never dreamed can never come true.
Writing and Rambling 