Despite a multitude of distractions, I’ve managed to make decent progress on revising my WIP. At first, I was disheartened at the amount of red ink I was putting on the pages. But when I took a step back and looked at what I was changing, I was relieved to see that it was fairly minor stuff.
The majority of the changes are prose tweaks and dialog improvements. There are also a fair number of typo corrections. The biggest changes so far have been adjustments to some subsidiary plot points and the consequential addition of a new scene. But the main plot is holding up well, thankfully.
One of my main priorities in revising is tightening the text by cutting unnecessary words. I’ve pulled a lot of these little buggers from my dialog. When you first write a conversation, I think there’s a strong temptation to follow normal speech patterns as closely as possible and have your characters begin with a greeting and some small talk. But those things are really nothing more than a waste of space. In most cases they aren’t going to advance the plot and most readers are going to end up tuning them out as they read because they’re basically white noise.
Another issue I’m having is tagging speech in a long conversation. I don’t want to overuse said because that gets repetitive, but, at the same time, I don’t want to reach for the thesaurus for increasingly obscure synonyms. So I often try to indicate who’s speaking through a description of body language or movement. But that too can get repetitive. I’ve already noticed that my characters do a lot of nodding, and I don’t want people to think they’re a bunch of bobbleheads.
Codex Lochianus 