I’m a little over fifty pages away from the end of a manuscript. I’m doing a substantive edit — catching grammar, punctuation and spelling, and making suggestions to tighten up the narrative and improve the flow. Right now, I’m sitting on an action-packed sentence in the last paragraph of a chapter.
It’s an awkward sentence. It’s almost there. I know what it’s trying to say, but it’s got a little too much going on at once, it’s confusing to read, and I need to pause and think about what it needs.
The sentences that make me pause usually don’t need much: punctuation shifted around to give the subjects and verbs the screen time they deserve, or a simple word shuffled to make things modify what they’re supposed to modify. I know that when the answer comes to me, it’ll come to me in a flash. I’ll know just what needs to change in order to convey the urgency and the chaos that such a dramatic and pivotal moment holds. It’s just not… there yet. The ones that are close are harder to fix than the ones with glaring grammatical or structural problems. They only require the tiniest little nudge in just the right place.
I’ve glanced idly down the page while I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve seen that after the scene break, the big reveal begins. It’s my first read-through and it’s a page-turner of a book. I want to see what happens next. I’m sorely tempted to scroll down, scan ahead, take a peek. This sentence will still be here for me when I get back, right?
But, I can’t. I have a feeling that’s what the author did — rushed through this paragraph in the eagerness to get to the next scene and start pulling on the thread that will unravel all the knots. This paragraph needs its punch too, though, and I won’t let myself move on until it’s there.
I get up and walk around, if I have to. I refill my water and I think about it away from the screen for a minute or two, away from the temptation to peek forward. I let the image rattle around in my head like a movie, stripping the words away so that I can focus on the action the words are trying to convey. Then I sit down again and scroll the troublesome sentence to the bottom of the screen so that I can’t glance beyond it.
I go through that paragraph again, and then once more, and it all clicks. The problem was in the cause and effect implied in the order of the clauses, and that messed with the modifiers and the sense of what they were modifying. I had needed to pause the mental movie to make sense of what felt like conflicting information, and that had jolted me out of my suspension of disbelief. A little change later, it makes sense and carries the urgency it needs. It flows.
I leave a note in the margin, explaining my suggestion and the confusion that it resolves. I point out the issue because I don’t mind if the author rejects my suggestion and chooses a different resolution, and I want to give him the tools to do that. As often as not, my suggestion becomes the springboard to something even stronger.
Now I can move on. I’ve got fifty more pages or so to go, and I still want to see what happens next.
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