Your computer might be subverting your writing.
It saves you time and makes writing easy, but it doesn't support the self-editing required for produce a good novel.
The screen is a linear window. You can only see a small chunk of your work at a time, and you must scroll up and down. It's hard to lay two pages beside each other (though you can do so with two windows). It's hard to get a 'feel' for the work as a whole. It's hard to catch errors, repetitions, developments started but not finished, bad ideas, and long, boring chunks of writing.
Soem of you may be able to re-write and self-edit brilliantly on creen. But I suspect that even you will find working on a paper manuscript enlightening. All writers can benefit from moving their world into the material world.
What's to be gained by working on paper? A higher-quality editing process, leading to a better-constructed, more tightly written, less self-indulgent story.
First things first.
Format your online work in the way you will submit it: double-spaced, preferably in Courier New, one-inch margins, with a running head and pages numbers top right, text left aligned, with no bold and all italics indicated by underlining. It's useful to work in the format your be using with your agent or editor, so you might as well get used to it now.
Once you have finished your story, print it off. Your first reaction might be: wow that's a lot of paper! It's good to meet your creation in physical form. This is what you have brought into being. This is what you must mould and shape. Printing it out makes your novel, in a strange way, more real. It becomes a thing, a job, something that will eventually be detached from you.
If you are looking at 1000 pieces of paper, you are facing your first problem: you'Ve written too much. The screen can hide the sheer length of your story, but paper tells you the truth. That huge stack is telling you to start trimming.
Start reading.
Reading your work on paper will bring to light many things you need to address. As you turn over the pages, you'll be experiencing your story much as your readers will. Things look differently on paper. Words have a different weight. The passages that you can scroll over on screen with a flick of a finger might now strike you as long. Very long. Too long. There seems to be a lot of physical distance between action A and action B, or not enough. Paper can reveal pacing problems the screen hides.
You might see that you've inadvertently created jarring juxtapositions. You describe a lovely crimson sunset and then a bloody fistfight with much the same imagery. They resonate together in their paper closeness in a way they didn't on the screen.
Or you might notice repetitions. You didn't notice them on-screen, but on paper you realise that that you've used "she blushed modestly" five times in fifty pages. It’s easy to repeat yourself when you lose the sense of the physical nature of a novel. On paper, these stand out as the blemishes they are. All those sentences you started with "But": there they are, like wads of bubblegum: But But But But But. Or "Suddenly she realised", "Suddenly she turned to him", "She stopped suddenly'" "Suddenly it stopped raining". Suddenly you decide not to use so many "suddenlys".
Inconsistencies jump out at you on paper. She's Lydia Hotchkess up to page 134, then Lydia Hotchkiss for the rest of the story. He turns left into the driveway the road one time, right another time. Where is that house, left or right? A character might appear as if from nowhere. Or disappear. (To cut him out altogether, or to write him back in? You can decide, now you've spotted it.) If the old lady was walking towards the library in town in chapter two, how did she get home fast enough to spot him sneaking through her back door in chapter three? It can be shocking how many of these slips you don't catch on screen. The screen is like a gentle stream: it's all the same, it flows, it's easy to scroll on and on and on, it lulls you into a state of not noticing, and that makes it hard for mistakes to shout at you.
Paper allows you to concentrate on the words. Each separate word. The look of them as they lie on the page. You can see that too many paragraphs are dauntingly long. Or you can see that each page is a shower of short paragraphs, single lines, stuttery, as if you can't sustain a narrative flow. The pages look jumpy. Your eye senses the jaggedness and doesn't like it. Now that you are seeing that your story looks wrong, you can start to fix it, clumping those short paragraphs together, cutting some, or cutting those massive paragraphs into livelier little ones. Whatever the physical problems of your story, paper will reveal them.
There might be pages of dialogue where you get lost, on the actual page, trying to remember who was saying what. Or now you can see the ugliness of having every piece of speech start "Henry said" and "Lydia said" You see that you don't need to label every piece of dialogue, especially a conversation between two people. On the other hand, maybe you have a long passage of dialogue that seemed clear on the screen but is confusing on paper. Now is your chance to help your readers out. Pick up that pen and make improvements.
You can spot unimportant passages more easily on paper. There's that passage that describes your characters getting down from the carriage and walking to the house. It seemed fine and necessary on the screen, but paper is a crueller medium. You see now that all you need is to have them rein up, and the next scene is him in his library. You don’t need the bit where he helps her down, hands the horse and buggy to his stable boy, stomps after her into the house, turns pointedly to the library and slams the door after him. It was, in fact, dull on the screen, but you don't see how dull it is until it's on paper. And red pens are very useful for crossing out whole passages.
In the same way, reading your story on paper can show you what's important. Perhaps you thought that a certain scene was not only adequate, it was more than sufficient and you are darn proud of it. On paper it looks, well, a little skimpy. It doesn't take up enough physical space for such an important moment. having seen this, you can fix it.
Paper can also reveal bigger structural or pacing problems. What felt like development on-screen can look suspiciously like plot-drift on paper. You can lose the sense of drive and thrust. On screen, it's effortless to spend a few minutes describing that party, her dress, the old lady's kitchen. Why not do a quick biographical sketch of old lady, how she grew up poor in this very house, how she dreamed of becoming an artist, perhaps in Paris, but her family lost all its money and now she's a teacher? Why not? There are no constraints on a PC. You can keep typing that info-dump for as long as you want. On paper, however, you become the weary reader and start to think: why is this here? What's the point of it? The screen can make it easy to forget that every scene – everything – has to be in the story for a reason.
You can drift far from your intended line of narrative when you are floating on a sea of effortless word-processing. The screen isn't going to tell you that you have wandered off down a lane to nowhere. Reading your work back to yourself on-screen might not tell you. On paper, you'll be experiencing your story as a reader, not a writer, and suddenly that wander away from what the story was supposed to be about is there in all its embarrassing glory.
Paper allows you to put segments of the novel side by side. Your work will have developments, turning points. Working with your printed version, you can sharpen these, structure them better, remove garbage.
Let's say your character is confronted with challenges and temptations throughout the story and you want to show why he makes the choices he does. Pull out all those 'he makes a choice' passages from your stack of paper. Physically put them side by side: on your kitchen table, on the floor, wherever you can line them up and see them in one glance. Yiu have challenge one, choice one, challenge two, choice two, and so on. Do they build up in seriously or tension? Are they consistent with each other? Do some repeat, with only a slight variation, one before? Is your character's personality consistent throughout? Is the length of time between one choice and the other too much, i.e. do you have too many pieces fo paper between choice one and choice two? Can something be cut?
It's when you can put related or linked scenes together that you can see where the chain of motive weakens, where something isn't consistent. Thanks to paper, you've seen this weakness and can correct it.
Reading your story on paper gives you the physical knowledge of what the eventual book will be like to read. As a reader, you experience a book in a certain way. Readers pick up details in ways the writer never imagined. If you don't spot a gaffe, they will. If you don't sense a longeur, they'll be yawning through it. If you haven't made an obvious connection, they'll wonder why. On paper, it will be you spotting the gaffe, you being bored by the longeur, you identifying the connections and adjusting to build them in.
Once you've gone through your printed-out manuscript in the standard submission format (double-spaced), print it out again, single-spaced. This gives you close to the page density of the final printed book, and other problems suddenly become visible. Two events or pieces of dialogue that were two pages apart might now be at the top and bottom of one page, and the closer juxtaposition might reveal a repetition or a clash or some other infelicity. Surprisingly, it reveals boring bits better than a double-spaced print-out. It gives you yet another chance to hone, shape, and improve.
Paper isn't the only solution to your writing problems. It's one powerful tool to jog you into changing your approach and your perception. It allows you, even forces you, to re-think of your story, because it takes you out of your comfort zone. Working on your paper version in another room, even another building, can get you into a new mind-set where you are less indulgent about your creation. A new setting makes the words feel news, and that can reveal a lot.
Copyright Caro Clarke - www.caroclarke.com