True to my promise I’ve been critiquing/beta reading online and off during my break from the second draft. I’m grateful to the writers who are letting me read their works in progress. It takes nerve to share one’s writing and even more when it’s still in draft form.
After a month or so I started to notice patterns. It seems* that some errors happen across the board, regardless of genre or the writer’s experience. Seeing them elsewhere only highlights them in my own work:
No one cares about my research/”inside baseball”. I suspect histfic is more vulnerable to this because of the research needed** to understand the time period, but it’s easy to go overboard with tiny details that don’t contribute to the story. Readers aren’t interested in a room-by-room description of Dee’s home Mortlake and its number and type of servants; they’ll care that Jane Dee has problems keeping the ancient pile in good repair and getting the servants to behave.
Avoid jargon/specialized language unless I define it up front. Or at least give massive hints in context. Do you know what an athanors, pelicans, or bain maries are? I don’t want my readers to have to keep referring to Google to figure out what an alchemy lab looks like.
A story isn’t a just a blow-by-blow of activity. The séances might be line-by-line accurate to Dee’s diaries but that means nothing if I don’t show Edward Kelley’s extreme stress in making up everything on the fly. Readers won’t care – hell, I won’t care – unless he reflects, panics, and schemes over his flagrant BSing.
Select words with care to avoid repetition/adverb overload. Too often I lean on either restating or on my character doing something quickly, stupidly, angrily, etc. when if I just use better words the mood will come across. This is why my next step is reading the whole thing out loud, with red pen at the ready to strike through any unnecessary -lys.
*No hedging: get on with it already! See, I did it right there! Seems, appears, starting to, about to, thinking about, almost did: these slow things down when the all the reader wants is for characters to do things and stuff to happen. Except for rare exceptions of hesitation or second guessing (and gads, Edward has enough of those) these have no place in my prose.
**Passivity is a penalty: In fencing as well as prose. My tendency to convey events as having no cause is due to long years writing business emails and impersonal technical instructions. There are probably a few in every one of my blog posts despite my best efforts. “Dee was fooled” must turn into “Edward fooled Dee“ (more than once). Ditto “the money was spent” = “Dee spent it all” (all too often). I don’t even know how I’ll find all of these, let alone get rid of them.
What about you? If you write, what’s on your “search and destroy” list for your next edit? If you read, what errors make you wince if they’re not caught***?
***More passivity. Yellow card (which is fencing “inside baseball”).