500 words.... gone*

*also known as, the Revisions to Chapter 8.

Word Nerd continues to plug away at the revisions on the novel.
This weekend's project was supposed to be chapters 8 and 9. That was until she realized how much work needed to be done to chapter 8. It wasn't even the whole chapter that needed fixed, just one small scene in the chapter.

Sometimes revising is just tweaking -- a word here, a word there -- and fixing some grammar and sentence structure mistakes. Other times, revising was like this weekend. Cut the whole scene, rewrite.

This scene in particular had bugged Word Nerd from the get-go. It was a flashback, but she didn't use long flashback scenes anywhere else in the novel. This scene felt out of place stylistically. The problem was, how else to convey this information to the reader without the scene being an info-dump. (Info-dump = several paragraphs or more that an author uses to kerplunk information into the story that the reader needs to know).

A few paragraphs from the original version survived. The flashback got reduced to three short dialogue lines -- specific things the protagonist remembers her father telling her. The rest was reworked into her thoughts and dialogue with the other character in the scene.

Word Nerd feels better about the changes. Hopefully, the next time she gets back to these chapter in the second go-'round for revisions, she'll feel the same way.