Seeing Double

What happens when you write the same scene twice? An odd thing happened the other day. I was checking back through my manuscript for Blast, my second book in the Merry Hell Series, when I spotted something odd. I’d written the same scene twice in two different locations. Let me explain. I write in scenes, not chapters as such, that comes later. For Blast, a book that was going to be a little more complicated than the first novel, Havoc, I decided to change both how I was going to write the book, and also the word processor I would use to build the book. Utter madness, I hear you cry. Why would you mess with success? Well, I have and there’s no going back, so yah boo sucks to you… No, no, please come back; I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right, changing things such as how you actually put virtual pen to virtual page can cause chaos, but luckily not this time. For Blast, I switched to using Scrivener, (Please note, I’ve not been paid to endorse the company, software or their views blah, blah, blah). It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I like it. Anyway, as with any new method, things can go a little awry at times; as in this case. Scrivener allows you to chop and change segments of your work as simply as…well, chopping and changing. But therein lies the trap for the unwary. You can end up repeating yourself if you have a distracted mind like mine.

So you would say, dump that software in the bin and return to the bosom of Apple Pages and be done with it. (Again, no affiliation of persons living or dead blah, blah, blah). And you would be right to say that…Or would you? Funny thing with my writing. I pretty much instantly forget what I’ve written until I read it back. It’s great because I get to read the manuscript as a reader. There are times when I read back something and have zero recollection of writing a particular paragraph or sentence. It’s great. I feel like someone is reading something they wrote back to me. Now you can probably see where I’m going with this. Because I wrote the same scene twice and instantly forgot I’d done so; I got two totally different versions of the same scene. I got to cherry pick the best bits from both versions and combine them into one über version. Now I won’t kid you, it did take some unpicking which was a little time consuming but I have ended up with something that I am far happier with than the first two attempts. It seems that triple the work and using double the words has ended up producing a singularly better outcome - Did you see what I did there? So it would seem that seeing double is a good thing after all - Pass the scotch.

P.S. I really haven’t been paid by the makers of Scrivener or any other software that I bleat on about…Although if they’re feeling generous, I’ve always wanted a Lamborghini - Please! With sugar on top.