For
the last few days, I’ve been working on revisions of my latest manuscript, hoping to be
ready in time to enter Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest on August 18. Two of
my critique partners have finished reading my MS and sent me all kinds of
comments. Some of these are little things I’ve missed (a the here, an in there),
while others are bigger (where one of my CPs says, “I’m confused!”).
Most
of the time, my CPs see and comment on different things, which is why they’re
so great. But sometimes, they agree. Usually, I know this means I have to
change whatever they’ve noted…but every once in a while, they say something
that makes me want to whine, kick my feet, and refuse to do it.
I
came across one of these examples yesterday. My paragraph initially read:
I could totally see
Molly doing that and it scared the shit out of me. I tried to imagine what it
would feel like, if Molly grabbed my SUV’s wheel and pulled so hard that I got
whiplash. The g’s, being so out of control, wanting to punch Molly so hard that
my hand would feel bruised for weeks.
Two of my CPs highlighted g’s, saying they didn’t know
what that was. Do you?
Because I do. I’ve always known. Recently, I’ve been
watching a lot of Mythbusters, where
the mythbusters talk A LOT about g’s when they’re doing experiments with cars
and people. Before that, I took physics classes in high school and college. And
before that, for years when we were
younger, my brother was obsessed with roller coasters. There was a time when
he’d talk about the design of roller coasters, about the heights of the hills,
about the g-force associated with every curve.
So let’s stick with the roller coaster example and take
this picture of Cedar Point’s Maverick:
g-force is what you feel when the roller coaster goes
through the turns and curves, some of which are in this picture. It’s what
pulls your body to one side or the other and it often feels like a weight
pressing on you. Roller coaster curves have to be below a certain number of g’s
to be safe for riders. This is why the mythbusters are so focused on g’s
in their experiments—they want to know if people would survive whatever they’re
doing.
To me, g’s is an everyday word, but I guess that's not
true for everyone else. So now comes the problem. I don’t want to delete the
part about g’s from my MS’s paragraph. For one thing, my main character is a science
girl who talks about things like Mythbusters
and g-forces. For another, I feel like if people don’t know it, it’d be okay for
them to wonder, to grab their cell phones and Google it.
Still, I know that I can’t leave things vague. I can’t
expect everyone to know about g’s or be curious enough to Google it. I knew
this, but I wanted to make sure. I posted on Twitter and Facebook and got the
responses I expected. Basically, change it. So I did. Now the paragraph reads:
I could totally see Molly doing
that. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, if Molly grabbed my SUV’s steering
wheel and pulled so hard that I got whiplash—the heavy pull from the g-force,
being so out of control, wanting to punch Molly so hard that my hand would feel
bruised for weeks.
Does
that explain it better? I hope so. It’s not quite what I want, but I’ve learned
from talking to writers who’ve been through MANY edits that you don’t always
get to keep the things you like in your MS. I guess that means it’s better to
fix it now, so that hopefully when an agent picks it up, that agent doesn’t
read the paragraph and think, “I’m confused!” Because maybe that’ll increase my
chances of an agent wanting to represent me and help me get a book published.
No comments:
Post a Comment