Editing, the analogue way!!

Yep... I've been literally cutting and pasting recently.

Now, don't get me wrong... I use Scrivener and one of the things that I love about it, is the ability to move whole scenes around easily - a drag and drop manoeuvre. But for one particular bit of the book I'm editing at the moment, it wasn't so much whole scenes that were moving about, it was parts of scenes and so I fell back on an old and trusted method... print the whole thing out, attack it with scissors and sellotape it back together once you've sorted out what's moving to where!

I said to a few friends that this was what I was doing and got a variety of reactions, but most of them were sympathetic! A few people suggested Scrivener (which I already use) but for what I needed to do, nothing much beats having the document printed out, spread across the dining room table, with symbols and arrows indicating which bits are moving where. I sometimes wonder if a career in cryptography might have been an option, when I look back at the notations!

As a consequence of all this cutting, pasting, rearranging etc. I feel as if the section is a lot tighter, and I also have a file labelled "bits that were cut out". I haven't deleted it yet - writers don't delete anything... you never know when they might come in useful... maybe not in this book, but perhaps in another.

Am I alone in this analogue version of getting a document sorted? What do others do?


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