Questions and Answers Part 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog. Today I'd like to talk to you about my novel again. Okay, I'll remind you of the title, but by now I think it's become familiar to those who follow me: Extraordinarily Parallel Lives. 🤓 As I was saying, the first question I'll answer is this: the revision process often requires drastic cuts and substantial rewrites. I'll tell you this: when I finished the novel and before sending it for proofreading, I reread it about ten times in about two years. Indeed, there were some cuts, some additions, but only a few lines, a few sentences. But perhaps also because I didn't like rewriting a chapter or more. Now I'll try to explain myself better: in the three stories I still have to publish, in the second story something happens that, if I had known at the beginning of writing that I would publish it, perhaps it would have developed differently, because I can already imagine the comments: "But why did you make this happen? Maybe to get more visibility?", but you didn't think about real life, about people; but you have no heart. 😔 So let's say that perhaps I overemphasized what could happen, but those who know me know that I put other people before myself, even at my own expense. Besides, the novel and the stories are just pure fantasy stories. And then, if something bad happens in a fictional book that brings us back to real life, don't think that it was done on purpose for profit. Now, in this case I would have had to rewrite about ten chapters, but I didn't even remotely think about it, because the story was born that way, I don't even know how I ended up writing those words, those pages. I didn't dare change it, also because I wrote the first two stories, but it's as if someone or something inside me was dictating that story to me. If you remember, I already said it in the post "My Writing: Where It All Began"; I'll leave the link below. So, who was I to change that narrative? Let's move on to the next question: What was the hardest part to write? We always come back to that. 😯 As for the novel, I remember that everything went smoothly, there were no drastic stops. And for the first two stories, everything went swimmingly too; while for the third story I said to myself: "And now what do I write? How do I move forward?" But it lasted a few days and then I started. So, I can say that the story, or the narrative, as you prefer, of the third story is the fruit of my vivid imagination. The next question is: Did you do professional editing? No, I didn't. The truth is that at the beginning I didn't even know what that meant. Then, as I researched and heard more opinions, some even conflicting ones, because some said editing was like proofreading, others said it was much more invasive. As I read online, the editor works on the plot, characters, pacing, and style; and here I got a little scared. Of course, a professional would have improved all these things. It certainly would have given my writing a boost, but I'm still scared today, because perhaps it would have changed how I wanted to tell it, the narrative of the novel or the stories, the characters, and the style. Well, this word struck me in particular, so I told myself that all it took was correcting it to make it readable, but that way it would remain as close as possible to the original writing, which is that of a boy who, after graduating from middle school, decided to drop out. We'll take a break here for a moment, and see you in the next post. Bye bye.🤗

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