Just when you think…
That you’ve finished your novel, you find that you haven’t. Today is not about Symi, it’s about the writing process. As this is a blog by a writer who lives on Symi, I usually try and talk about both things. The photos are Symi, of course as, at the moment, I don’t have anything else to photograph. So, the writing of a novel.
Regular readers would have followed me through the process of writing my next novel, ‘The Saddling’, and will know that I’m up to draft six and have started discussions with a designer for the cover and the editor for the layout. I also have a nice quote for the back cover from another author friend of mine and, with 100,000 words of character, story, backstory, setting and action, I am surely ready (after three years) to have the team start on the layout. No, not quite. My editor, who has medals in thoroughness I am sure, suggests I improve on this one even more than I did on the last one. Which is a nice way of saying: ‘Right, I’ve got you to stop starting sentences with And… except for when you intend emphasis. Now it’s time to look at your use of the passive voice.” “Okay, I reply, always happy to improve. But how?” He put me on the trail of a thing called https://readability-score.com/ which is a site and facility that I should have been using for years. Sign up, enter your text and see what it comes up with. I will do just that at the end of this blog and see how I get on.
I shan’t go into the process and the scores, as I don’t understand half of it, but you can find out how readable your text is, how many adverbs you have used, how many passive voice moments there are and so on. I entered the first chapter of ‘The Saddling’ and immediately saw how I could improve things. Mind you, I was confused when it underlined the word The at the start of an otherwise fine sentence and told me I was using too many adverbs. Since when has The been an adverb? I wondered. Maybe it was just giving me the occasional timely reminder as there were quite a few adverbs used in that chapter. Actually, the adverb note comes with one suggesting you use a ‘better verb’ so they are not all words ending in ly, which I do try and avoid as they are ‘show’ words rather than ‘tell’ words. But still…
The task now is to work on my final draft (until I check the finally layout copy) using this programme as a guide, but not always sticking to its suggestions, chapter by chapter while also looking out for any other changes I want to make. Sadly, it doesn’t always pick up on the typos I am famous for (and don’t get me started on my punctuation), but it is having great fun with the dialect used in this story. So, back to the grind of checking and rewriting some text so that ‘His words were snatched by the wind’ (passive voice) becomes ‘The wind snatched his words’ (active voice) without detracting from the style I want while also making sure that sentences vary in length and are not all short. This process should take me another couple of weeks and then… well, then I will probably think of other things I want to change.
So, just when you think it’s finished…
Oh, the readability score for this post?
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 7.5
Gunning-Fog Score 10.1
Coleman-Liau Index 8.1
SMOG Index 9.5
Automated Readability Index 7.2
Average Grade Level 8.5
Now I just need to translate what that actually means!
