Examine Your Story with a Mirror

I love watching art programmes, especially those contests to determine who is the best landscape or portrait artist of the year. I’ve noticed that one thing many artists do to determine if the image is staying on track, is to either turn the painting upside down, or to examine its reflection in a mirror. This gives the artist a brand new perspective. It’s a way of seeing how the tones work, if the colours are right, or, in the case of a portrait, if the likeness is accurate.

If only we writers could do the same thing.

Well, obviously, it’s not going to help to turn your manuscript upside down, or try to read a mirrored image of your text, but there are ways to see your writing in a new way. Just to be clear, I’m talking about your rewrites here. Don’t stop anywhere in your first draft to evaluate how it’s coming along. The only task with draft one is to simply get the story down. The niceties come later.

Fonts

I have no idea why this works, but it does. If you write in, for example, Times New Roman, change the font to Comic Sans or something equally informal when you are ready to start working on the rewrite. Something about the different appearance can help your eye to spot things it had previously missed. I was sceptical when I first heard about this, but it does work. I should add, too, that you can use the same font in bold, but I don’t find that as effective.; also, I find italics hard on the eye, but you do you. Experiment until you find the option that works best.

I should add that dyslexics generally find Comic Sans much easier to work with than some other fonts. If that’s the case for you, you may need to apply trial and error to find a few that work best for you.

Colours

Likewise, you can change the colour of your font to blue or green or whatever you wish. I find red too hard on the eye, but you do you. Again, the change of colour can make some things more evident to you than they would otherwise be. I would say, however, that you should just change either the font or the colour, not both at the same time, at least for this draft. For your next draft, you can move on to the colour only. Each change forces your brain to re-evaluate what you are reading.

Copy

With apologies to the trees, I find that printing out a copy of the completed first draft can be enormously helpful. Again, it’s changing the appearance of the MS. Additionally, I like being able to pop one chapter into my bag and take it to the park or a café and read it there.

I don’t know why, it’s probably something to do with the images of writers I’ve seen over the years, but I never feel so much like a ‘real’ writer as when I’m making edits on a page of printed text. That alone can help me feel more enthusiastic about the process.

When I was a child, I used to sometimes visit my mother in the office where she worked. I was intrigued by the amount of yellow paper she used. She explained that if she wrote a document, the original went on white paper, but the copy was yellow. This was in the days of carbon paper, so it was easy enough to produce a copy by carefully loading three sheets of paper into the typewriter, the white sheet on top, then then carbon, and finally the yellow. Then the typist only had to write the document once and the copy was automatically produced. Don’t laugh! This was considered high tech in the 1960s. Anyway, my point is that I know of some writers who use different coloured paper for each draft they produce. Yellow for the first, blue for the second, pink for the third, etc. It seems very pretentious to me, but, hey, if you find it works for you, go for it.

Numbers

Here’s another way of approaching revisions, especially if you have a very messy first draft and you don’t really know where to begin. This is a random approach, but if you use it for several pages, you can help train your brain to look for certain things.

This one is easier if you have someone helping you. Say your writing group. However, you can do it alone, if you must. (Oy, you in the back row — enough of the smut!)

Where was I? Oh yes. The idea is to examine random passages in your story. By taking things out of context you, or your listeners, can determine if the passage makes sense. Here’s how it works:

Ideally, use a printed copy of your manuscript, close your eyes, then pull a page at random from somewhere in the middle. (You will, of course, have numbers on all your pages. Right?) Keep your eyes closed and decide which paragraph you’re going to read. Then read that paragraph. Don’t give in to the temptation to read what came before that paragraph or what follows it. You are just examining those few lines. See if you can follow what’s happening. Are there dud sentences? Have you re-used a word too many times? By pulling a piece of the story out of context, you gain insight into how the individual components are working. It can also give you a feeling for your style. Some passages may set you cringing, but others may make you glow with pride.

I’m not suggesting you use this method for your whole manuscript, but after you’ve done it, say, 20 times or so, you should start to get a feeling for your weaknesses and strengths.

If you have someone helping, let them tell you what page to go to and which paragraph. That ensures that your samples are truly random. If you have to work alone, then the best way is to manage the process is to go the print-out route. This method can be tricky if you are working directly on the computer, but it’s not impossible. Here are some ideas that might help:

Get some numbered tickets such as those used for raffles. Tear them into individual numbers and put them in a box or jar, and pull one one out at random. Only use as many numbers as you have pages. The one you draw is your page number. You can also just write the numbers down on pieces of paper,

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For the paragraph, I’d borrow another tool of the artist’s trade: the viewfinder. (See image on the left.)

You can easily make one yourself. I like to use a heavy black card because it’s fairly durable, and it’s also effective at blocking out the rest of the page, so you won’t be as tempted to look at it. The artists’ version is usually square or oblong, and can often be adjusted to compare with the dimensions of the canvas. For your version, I would suggest use card the same size as the page of your manuscript. Then you want to cut an oblong that is as wide as the text and about a third or a quarter of a printed page in length. Now you can place the sheet over the MS page or the computer screen, moving it up or down depending on where on the page your paragraph may fall. Don’t worry if the space reveals more than one paragraph, or not a whole one. Just go by what you can see.

I hope these interventions prove useful to you. If you have tried them, please tell me in the comments. Or, if you have other techniques, I’d love to know them, too.

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