| Karin Kallmaker |
| Monday, 11 February 2008 20:36 |
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I have a Guest Blog this week from Bella's Queen of Romance, Karin Kallmaker. We were comparing notes recently about the arduous task of revisiting our earlier work, and I was thrilled to find I wasn't the only one who cringed while doing that. Here's Karin, talking about her newest (re)release, Christabel. You can pick it up HERE. Did I write that? In my green and salad days, when I was young in judgment, I had some bad writing habits. There was the propensity for clichés. And I liked to begin sentences with conjunctions. Sometimes, I would finish a sentence, but not really.
I also realized that there is no escaping my printed work. It's forever, and I like that. It also means that it's forever, blemishes and all. Seeing my mistakes through the eyes of greater experience has renewed my commitment to improving my craft with every book, so that if I should come back to revise a 2008 novel, like The Kiss that Counted, I will find far fewer bad habits. Unexpected, too, was the realization that if I added significant new text to the novel, the tone and style of the new text had to match that of old text. I may have learned better habits, but showing them off might leave the final new edition feeling patched up to the reader. I ended up adding more than 25% to the story. My more experienced (and now bespectacled) eyes saw missed opportunities as well as questionable word choices and grammar. Having to go back over all the new text to make sure it knitted well in style to the old text was the hardest part and I ended up doing significant minor editing to the old text. KG has revisited an older work of hers (Shaken) and I was relieved to hear that she, too, had the occasional reaction of, "Did I really write that?" I found the process educational, humbling and encouraging. My decade-old work wasn't as good as I hoped, but nowhere near as bad as I feared. And I still think that clichés should be avoided like the plague, mostly. Karin also has a great new website. You can visit her now at www.kallmaker.com. ***I Support the Writers Guild of America On Strike***
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Fifth grade? High school? College, even? No--it's all there in my published work, and I recently got a good look, courtesy of the Way-Back Machine, when I prepared a new edition of my 1998 novel Christabel. This was the first novel I ever revised and I may begin recommending the exercise to other (delicate cough) old-timers, if for nothing more than the humility lesson. That's not to say that I was not pleased that the majority of the novel was still very much to my liking, and that elements even ten years later seemed fresh and engaging to me. But there were--strike that-- There were clauses and sentences, however, that made me cringe. After all, there are a limited number of times one can refer to an object as "it" before the reader has forgotten the salient noun.
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