Proofreading continues

I’ve discovered I am a bit to fond of the word ‘suddenly’.

It appears all over the place.

In the silence that followed the General suddenly spoke.

He felt as if the entire room would suddenly turn askew.

Gungse suddenly snapped his head to one side and his features froze.

And so on. It’s not just ‘suddenly’, it’s ‘seemingly’, ‘apparently’ and a whole slew of other adverbs.

It’s obviously a consequence of getting this entire thing written down to begin with - and in my previous revisions I was primarily focused on improving story structure and plot pacing, not so much on prose. But that’s where I’m at now. The above examples are pretty easy to fix, too:

The silence that followed was interrupted by the General.

He felt as if the room would turn askew at any moment.

Gungse snapped his head to one side and his features froze.

Sometimes the adverbs are just unnecessary and sometimes they’re just signs of a phrase or sentence that needs to be re-written: The tricky part so far is finding them. They’re sneaky little bastards and past me happens to share some qualities with present-day me, one of them being somewhat bad at spotting them. But I’m getting there.

I’m also keeping track of how much I’m trimming down by doing this and so far the novel is roughly 800 words shorter than it was before. Occasionally I’m adding but for most chapters I’m subtracting, which is good. The novel is a shade longer than I would have liked and every little bit helps.

I have also had some wonderful help from a friend of mine who works in editing and he’s given me notes on two sample chapters which is going to be incredibly helpful going forward. The short and sweet of it is my punctuation is a bit of a mess (this is no surprise to me or anyone else who has ever read stuff written by me) and I get lost in tenses a bit. Also very importantly he pointed out something I myself noticed which is I sometimes forget that I’m writing from the POV of a character and write that character’s impression as definite fact. For example, I might write:

Alex knew they were lying.

And Alex might indeed know they are lying. But odds are he only suspects they are lying, and unless Alex does know they are lying, I should make sure Alex only suspects.

So, feeling quietly optimistic for the future: Finding out what I’m doing wrong is always helpful (though it’s not exactly the greatest feeling in the world).