{"id":815,"date":"2009-05-13T15:35:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T15:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bestfantasynovel.com\/2009\/05\/13\/when-do-you-lose-your-voice\/"},"modified":"2009-05-13T15:35:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-13T15:35:00","slug":"when-do-you-lose-your-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/2009\/05\/13\/when-do-you-lose-your-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"When Do You Lose Your Voice?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
I’ve been on both sides of the beta read. <\/p>\n

In the following hypothetical situations, I’ve also been the reader making vague or specific suggestions. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll discuss it from the writer’s side today.<\/p>\n

I’ve experienced what it’s like to have someone tell me: “This paragraph [scene\/chapter\/last third of the book] doesn’t work. You could probably cut about 10,000 useless words if you tighten this.”<\/p>\n

My response: That’s great, but how? If I knew which words were useless, I wouldn’t have included them.<\/p>\n

Then again, the beta reader may rewrite the five-page scene where the hero and heroine storm the castle as, “They ate ice-cream.”<\/p>\n

My response: Wtf? That isn’t what I wanted to say, or how I would have said it.<\/p>\n

However, frequently I do accept a beta reader’s suggested changes, especially of clunky sentences, even scenes, wholesale.<\/p>\n

Suppose what I had written was originally, “Laboriously, yet also suddenly and instantaneously the bullet kaboomed and zoomed out of the gun muzzle on the gun she was holding and pointing at him, hurtling through the air like a speeding bullet, which in fact it was, until it began to pierce his broad yet vulnerable chest, fragmenting bone and hurting a lot.” <\/p>\n

The beta reader suggests, “She shot him.” <\/p>\n

And I think, “Brilliant! This captures the whole thing in just three words! Why didn’t I think of that?”<\/p>\n

But then a part of me looks at the stripped down version, and wonders, but has it lost my voice? Did I do more than put out the fire on the roof, did I kill the spark in the lamp?<\/p>\n

Do you ever worry about losing your voice during rewrites?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been on both sides of the beta read. In the following hypothetical situations, I’ve also been the reader making vague or specific suggestions. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll discuss it from the writer’s side today. I’ve experienced what it’s like to have someone tell me: “This paragraph [scene\/chapter\/last third of the book] doesn’t work. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[429,557],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revision","category-voice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}