I should be editing but...

I'm in the middle of the second round of edits for The Courage to Love, coming out in August/September with Dreamspinner Press. It's an exciting process but it's doing my head in. The editor said she loved it and it was written poetically, then marked up nearly every paragraph with things she thought needed to be changed. Most of them, I agree with.There's nothing structurally wrong, the characters are brilliant, etc, etc. There's really only one problem, but it's insidious.

I write passively. I think passively. I speak passively. The story is set in 1919-1920, and the language of the time was passive. Unfortunately, most readers today get impatient with passive writing and won't continue reading it. I know all this and spent a lot of time before I submitted the story changing passive writing to active. I thought I'd achieved a good balance and maintained the flavour of the time period, but obviously not.

I have to go through every sentence and evaluate it, then decide if it needs to be rewritten with active verbs, then rewrite the ones that need it and explain why the rest don't. It takes me an hour to do ten pages. By the end of three hours I begin to wonder if the story is even mine anymore. I have to put it away for a couple of hours and then come back and re-read the changes I made to make sure it still sounds like my story. Only then, can I move on to the next chapter.

It's a slow process but I'm not going to rush it. The editor has spent a lot of time going through the manuscript and making suggestions. I need to respect that effort and her skills, but I also need to respect mine. It's a balancing act and doesn't go quickly.

This afternoon, I took a break. I went to www.iwl.me and analysed three chapters of my current wip. This story is very raw and difficult for me to write because it's about domestic abuse.

According to iwl, I write like David Foster Wallace, Agatha Christie and Vladimir Nabokov. I guess that means I have an offbeat style that hides clues and engenders moral horror in my readers.

I write like
Vladimir NabokovI Write Like. Analyze your writing!
I've never read anything by Wallace and I couldn't finish Lolita (it was too confronting for me) but all these authors have won awards for stellar writing so I can't be unhappy about that.

I'm going back to the site now and analyse some of my other work to see what comes back. If I get an author I don't enjoy reading, I know I have more editing to do.