Jul 10, 2010

Manuscripts: They're like your baby, like a dating relationship, what next? I have an idea!

For me, I usually think of manuscripts as like a boyfriend since I tend to cheat on my main ones with SNIs. Also, now I'm two-timing between Limelight and Always With Me.

But as I got to thinking about it, I started to think of manuscripts as sheep. I bet you're laughing right now. What? A sheep? Are you kidding me?

No, actually, I'm not.

I think of manuscripts as sheep because of these main reasons.

When you first start out your manuscript, it's born as a cute little lamb. It's so adorable and soft and you just want to pet it all the time. Then it starts to grow. You plump up your manuscript with words, and these words are like sheep's wool.

You can:

... let your sheep's wool grow fluffier and fluffier with writing lengthy descriptions and when you finish writing, now your sheep is so fluffy, when you start to revise, you have to cut just enough to keep the manuscript coherent.



...  keep your sheep with barely any wool because you like to write bare scenes and expand in the second draft.



... keep your sheep's wool at a decent length because you're either revising as you go or you try to write just enough words. 

You can also consider the overall look of your sheep's wool like when you're editing and revising and trying to perfect it as much as you can so it looks clean.  Otherwise your sheep/manuscript will look like a mess if you try to edit too fast for your ability or if you don't work on it enough.

So yes, I went with sheep as manuscripts when you think of over-describing, under-describing and making it look as clean as you can in the end result!