I Can't See!

[intothewood]

Help.

I’m going over my second book because it needs some fixing, and it’s definitely been awhile since I’ve read it through. But I’m in that state where I can’t really see anything for what it is.

Have you been there? One minute you look at something you’ve written and think ‘hey, that’s pretty good’ and the next minute you’re thinking ‘oh god that’s fucking awful!’ Or you get an obsession with, say, commas, and suddenly every fucking comma looks out of place. You’re reading unnaturally, halted by all the commas and the sentences don’t read like sentences any longer, they’re just a string of words separated by awkward commas!

I really need to do this, but I’m second guessing everything. Everything. The logical answer would be to put it aside, but I don’t wanna. Yes, I’ve turned into a stubborn four year-old who can’t read properly.

Stubborn four-year-old antics aside, have you had this happen and is there something you do to break from it? Because I really want to work on this today.

Comments

[owlectomy]

Read it out loud.

Read it backwards. (Last page, then next-to-last, and so forth.)

Read a couple chapters of a book written in a completely different style, as a palate cleanser. (Not a book that's so good it's intimidating; you may prefer a really lousy book, or you may prefer something that's just different.)

Sometimes completely changing the font or text color or background color is enough to disrupt the can't-see-anything-for-what-it-is state.

[scarylady]

Don't you have a beta? They are the ones who get to give you a reality check in that situation. A good beta will be totally honest with you.

[smw]

Yes, yes, a million times yes. This is not helped by the fact that I sometimes do write shit and don't know it at the time.

That being said, are you reading this as an electronic document? I find reading my own work goes much better if I can look it over in hardcopy, since I don't have the option to immediately edit whatever makes me cranky. It also helps distance me from the fact that this is something I'm responsible for -- for whatever reason, words on paper don't belong to me in quite the same way electronic text does.

[nightsfury]

I'd like to echo what owl said with the addition that if you can find someone else to read it aloud (while you listen) that might be useful, too. Especially for picking up dialogue that might not seem to be working, but you can't quite pin down the issue.

Having someone else read it might also make it easier to judge the flow and pacing, catch awkward or redundant phrasing, etc.

Hope this helps.

[callainlove]

I definitely second, or third really, the reading it aloud advice.

Also, it might help to simply take a breather from thinking about it, rest your mind in some way, and then go back to it later with a fresh perspective.

[niniane]

I do a couple of things.

The first is to let it sit. This allows me to get some distance from the story and really ask "is it working?"

Then I read it very slowly, making line edits. I also ask myself questions about it, such as "is the POV for this scene the correct one?" "Does the order of scenes make sense?" "Are all of the scenes needed to comprehend the story?" "Did I leave out an important scene?" "Does something happen in each scene, or did I throw in some just to provide continuity that I could get by with a line or two of exposition somewhere else?"

Once I think I have that all figured out, I turn it over to a couple of different people. I have maybe 4-5 different betas that I work with off and on. Not all always have free time, but usually at least one will give the work a look over and tell me if there are any ways of fixing it. Some of their suggestions are pretty minor - a line edit here, a comma there. But often they'll suggest major overhauls to the entire story. If the story gets an overhaul, I tend to submit it again, until they're content.

I also tend to use Critters.org (if you don't write SF, F, or horror, I'd recommend www.critiquecircle.com instead. Also, Absolute Write can be helpful) as a final set of "eyes". The problem with most of my betas is that we tend to see things more or less the same way. So while they'll catch stuff that I should have caught, they often won't catch completely and totally different things. And having a bunch of other people look at my story and say, "That didn't make sense" or "that seemed a little off" or whatever can spare me from submitting something really awful. (And, again, if major changes are made, I submit again.)

It's a long process but! It seems to work, and keeps me from getting too complacent, I think.

(Note that I try not to inflict super rough stuff on either my betas or a critique group as it tends to make their eyes glaze over to where they're correcting typos and doing line edits rather than catching fatal flaws with the manuscript.)