Another Beat

I’ve got some cool news for you today. Many of you have asked about the writing process and the various tools I use. When I finished Redeemer a month ago, my next step was figuring out how to edit the beast. As you are aware from my previous posts, you’ll know that I was really struggling with trusting an editor since my last one fell ill. I searched pretty hard and found a solution that worked best for me, at this early point in my career. I found a writing friend to swap edits with, plus the insanely keen (read: picky) eye of my husband, and…now this is wild…an artificial intelligence program (A.I.) for novelists, which I discovered by reading industry hot sheets (fancy term for news in the writing world). Anyway, I plugged my unedited novel into the program. While I felt I was on the right track with this book, I was a wee bit worried about what this program would think about my novel, considering the program, named Marlowe, has been fed thousands of books, both good and bad, so it could learn the components of a best seller. When the results came back, I knew I had scored. My narrative arc and plot were exactly where they needed to be, my complexity score and my character development were strong and my pacing was excellent. The program did identify one weakness in the narrative beats, or the rhythm of the story. It showed that I skipped a beat in the middle of the story. As something like this could turn readers off, or worse, bore them, I edited the novel intently and fed the book into the program again today. Guess what? SCORE!!!!! Where I wanted to add at least one beat in the boring middle, I added two. (Yay me!)