I’ve been committed to an anthology being assembled by a group of women I’ve worked with for over a decade. We’ve been at this particular project for some months now, and we’re at the stage at which the final manuscript is taking shape. It was hard to part with my contribution, because the minute the writing leaves your hands, it’s like sending your child off to summer camp for the first time. It’s a type of separation anxiety that only writers can feel.
A short story like mine takes time to develop and nurture. When I finally let go, another member of our team dropped me an email and offered to proofread for me. I’m happy for the feedback and the second pair of eyes, because the DIY process becomes harder the longer you’re at it. Once you have looked at your work 200 times, everything starts to look like drivel and you can’t look objectively any longer.
A problem I’ve had with word processing is that documents tend to open on page one, even if I stopped typing on page 15. This leads to a desire to read from page one all over again until I got back to where I left off. I became so obsessed at one point that I began looking at the sequence of actions in the story to make sure my characters were not sitting down in paragraph one, and sitting down again in paragraph two, without the requirement of standing up or doing something other than sitting down somewhere inbetween.
I recently shredded the editing copy on which I had noted “sat,” “stood,” “fell down” and other such margin scribbles, and then I ran a fresh one to look for overusage of favorite words. One of my favorite authors has always stood out when I read her books because of a pet word, “miasma,” which has cropped up enough that I have noticed it. It’s a harmless quirk, and because her work is historical fiction, there are plenty of chances for there to be a miasma description. Usually it’s a plague or mid-summer ozone tainted by poor sanitary conditions. Maybe, though, it’s the cloud of doubt that makes writers like me not want to let go their manuscripts.
Other than dutifully using “said” in dialogue, I’m not sure if I have a pet word in my writing, but my volunteer editor will surely spot it if one does exist, bless her heart. Or, if she wants this to all be over, she’ll smile and say nothing, because we are all writing with that same attention to detail, and in each of our manuscripts we see our own little obsessive shortcomings.
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