What if we were able to developmentally edit our lives at the time of death?
David Bowie’s song, “Changes”, has a line that reads: “Time may change me/
But I can’t trace time.”
One of my big whys in life is why we can’t press the rewind button? If life is a story and we are masters of it, why can’t we trace back time? Maybe it is because our life is both equally literary (character-driven) and commercial fiction (plot-driven). It’s hard to be two things at once; figuring yourself out and living through experiences simultaneously. Perhaps this is why we love stories so much, they allow us to observe as an outsider.
And this is exactly why every novel needs a developmental edit. We need to have an outsider give us their perspective about their impressions, under-developed characters, theme inconsistencies, logic inconsistencies, etc.
Writing a novel is like a huge thought experiment, writers need others to brush up against the logic in the novel to verify its veracity.
If you’d like to know more about the developmental editor I use, please give me a shout.