Today I returned to my story, Melina Unbound. Made some progress with Melina’s voice. She still isn’t the bitter, angry young girl she’s supposed to be but it’s better. I find I have to keep going over her words (she has no dialogue but it’s first-person so all the words are hers) and find new ones that don’t just relate what’s happening but also tell about her and her emotions. The first thing was to use contractions. Then there had to be more than a description of the food but what she thinks of it as she describes it.
The first draft was third-person and I’m still finding her and replacing with I. I’m also trying to figure out where the section breaks should be. There are jumps in time that need to be set off by a break, and there are more significant breaks where something fundamental in the story has changed. Something like a combination of paragraph breaks, scene breaks, and then story shifts represented by what? An extra break that becomes scroll art in the final copy?
I can worry about that later. I just need to finish this revision.
Kevin J. Fellows 