I was editing my second book, a speculative fiction thriller (see previous post). I came upon one of those paragraphs I must have written at midnight after a very busy day with irregular meals and a lot of alcohol.
The characters made it from A to B, they had a conversation of two lines and a lot of crossing of rooms happened. It wasn’t wrong, it did the job, but it was neither useful nor exciting.
Pedestrian was not the word.
I played around with it and after a while I couldn’t wrestle it any longer. I cut it out. But I needed something to cover a linking action.
In the end, I used an old translator trick. I deconstructed it. Literally. I wrote each of the six sentences out on a separate piece of paper and worked on them individually. When I put them back together, the paragraph worked!
Hurrah!
Lesson learned: No (essential) text is unredeemable.
Updated 2025: Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.
Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. As a result, you’ll be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.
