DIY Editing.2

Is my writing loose or sloppy? Let me count the ways.

The litrachaw on crafting litrachaw is literal, but lengthily languid. When I first learned to find the weak spots in my work by reading it out loud, I felt I had arrived at the end of the mechanical possibilities of how to “slick ‘er up.”

I just recently discovered an even more beastly approach: On 9/19, during my public book launch, instead of standing there and droning-out excerpts from my novel Lostine, I will perform good as naked(a la Prairie Lights). On my feet, with a coupla props, before an audience of unknown size, I plan to step into the personas of key characters. Lostine’s characters will tell us who they are and allude to what they did and why.

So daily, I am working toward the memorization of about 2.5K of Lostine’s character’s words that started as excerpted from the actual M/S.

What I keep running into, though, is paragraphs that just will not stick to my cortex.  

More coffeed analysis proves-out the usual flaws in my writing: screwed-up syntax, sentences in the wrong order, unnecessary complexity...

So I fix it. I try more memorization. I fix more fixes. I become very anxious about not being able to master the material at all. I lose all confidence. I can see myself, in front of people, losing my train of thought – and all because the couplings in the “train” of the sentences don’t, for some reason, work.

But so, I keep fixing fixing fixing, until it sticks.

So, why wouldn’t it stick previously?

It just wasn’t all that well-written. No other reason. That’s why this post is also called

DIY EDITING

It seems impossible to know what is enough.