I’m currently editing my second book, a speculative fiction thriller (see previous post). I came upon one of those paragraphs I must have written at midnight after a very busy day with irregular meals and a lot of alcohol.
It got the characters from A to B, a conversation of two lines ensued and a lot of crossing of rooms happened. It wasn’t wrong, it did the job, but…
I fiddled around with it and after a while I couldn’t wrestle it any longer. I cut it out. But I needed it to cover a linking action. So I used an old translator trick. I deconstructed it. Literally. I wrote each of the six sentences out on a separate piece of paper and worked on them individually. When I put them back together, the paragraph worked!
Hurrah!
Lesson learned: No (essential) text is unredeemable.
