I started playing with the concept of Shrunken Manuscripts as a revision technique as laid out by Darcy Pattison but had to mod the process. You know me, I love modding. It’s my creative way of taking ownership of a process, making it work for me. And maybe, just maybe, giving something back to the community which shared the idea in the first place.
That’s the spirit of this post.
Darcy’s revision technique calls for taking all the breaks out of the chapters so there’s no white spaces. She uses single space and reduces the font size until the entire book is about 30 pages in length. She prints this manuscripts and makes annotations in the form of highlighters and sticky notes. She pinks her plot points and yellows her character development.
It’s highly useful for pacing a novel and seeing if your middle is sagging.
But alas, I’m without a printer. So I did what any Mac writer/tinkerer/econ conversatist (that’s a nice way of saying I’m too cheap to buy a printer and would cringe at using the ink and pager) would do. I made a pdf. And hey! it’s the green thing to do.
The results were interesting. And worth sharing.
Check out the screen grab.
I used the various highlighter colors in the Format Pallette to note the aspects of the manuscript I wanted to review. It’s best to use really bright colors. That’s a tip, folks, write it down. Then clicked on print. In the bottom left corner there’s a PDF button that allows me to save to PDF, saving the me and the planet.
I made several copies of the Shrunken Mss script plotting out Character Arcs, Plot Points, B story lines, Scenes that worked, and minor Character appearances.
What Darcy does is lay the manuscript out on the floor and steps back to look at it.
I placed three highlighted shrunken manuscripts side by side on my screen. I used the open PDF drawer to look at my manuscript pages as thumbnails and was able to cross analyze a number of different issues. The good scenes vs. the naughty scenes was particularly interesting. I easily could see where naughty stuff for the sake of being naughty yielded diminishing returns.
My thumbnail drawer allowed me to look at 26 pages at a time. I had the option to scale my thumbs into a larger size for closer analysis.
I tried it using Darcy’s method of deleting all the white space, but found myself struggling to figure out where I was in the MS. So I tried it again, leaving all the page breaks at the chapter ends intacted. It shortened my document creation time as well as giving me the much needed anchor.
One of the cons of the PDF method is that I had to scroll to see end chapters. But I didn’t feel that it detracted from the experience appreciably.
In one of my Shrunken Manuscripts I highlighted a minor characters appearances. I noted he disappeared after a certain page. So I went back in and highlighted in a separate color places where I could have him return. Print, Save As PDF. And now I was not only able to analyze the current draft but also plans for revision work as well.
On top of learning something about my manuscript, this was playtime. I had lots of fun with it. It invigorated the revision process and gave me a view of the book as a whole. Thanks Darcy!