What Keeps You Awake at Night?

I’m still waiting to hear the result of my cancer surveillance CT scan. It’s been two weeks so far. I try and take each day as it comes, but that’s not easy to do. My main coping strategy has been distraction, primarily by immersing myself in other things. This takes a lot of effort, and only seems to work some of the time. I didn’t expect to hear anything during the first two weeks. I know it will get harder from here on in.

My primary distraction has been to work intensively on my crime novel. The report I got from the professional editor was very positive and encouraging. He also gave me a series of suggestions for improving the novel. In particular, he pointed out where I could cut some back-story and some scenes that he felt slowed down the momentum of the novel a little too much.

It’s so much easier for someone else to see where you could make structural edits to your manuscript. I did realize that it needed improvement and I recognized that the opening act was where I most needed to focus my attention. But I couldn’t see exactly what edits ought to be made. If truth be told, I was also resistant to making further structural changes. I had already rewritten a good part of the opening act of the novel over previous months. I’d invested a lot of time and effort in it.

With the editor’s prompting, I took a very hard look at what I had written. I noted down what the key plot points were in each of the scenes that he had identified as potentially cuttable. I soon saw that all of these could be placed elsewhere in story. I thus ended up cutting four scenes and one sub-plot. And now the opening of the novel does flow much better, with a more immersive intensity.

He also pointed out that my narrator tended to use certain exclamations and speech tags rather a lot. Turning to the ‘find and replace’ text command, I discovered that my narrator said ‘bloody hell’ 65 times over the course of the 281 page novel. Rather too many, don’t you think? Even for a crime novel. I ended up removing or replacing plenty of these. As I did for several other words and phrases that were overused.

Oddly enough, I can lie awake at night imagining alternatives to ‘bloody hell’. I’m not going mad. It’s just my distraction therapy in action. If I wasn’t worrying about my novel in the wee small hours, I’d be worrying about the return of the big C.