Since I’ve been working through a new short story, I thought I’d take the draft 1-2 transition through another perspective technique recommended by Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit, number 6, The Font. I have a few misgivings about this, particularly because I spend so much of my time writing things both for work and as an aside to work that I generally see things that need a high level of polish in all the obvious fonts (not to mention a vast majority of ‘proper’ fonts look identical, and no, I’m not editing in comic sans or bauhaus, that’s just silly).
Given that I had so many uncertainties around simply changing the font I didn’t print the story again, instead I continued using the editor I’ve been using, Typora (I’ve been using Typora because for posting my short stories I need to have the written in markdown to display on the website correctly). The benefit of using this editor for this perspective method is that I can change the view which adjusts the font but also the background and text colour, I thought this might help aid the font change, the subtle change in white background was actually striking enough to make me feel like I was reading something new and given this was the last read-through before I handed it off to some beta readers I thought it might help solidify the story for me.
Unfortunately the long and the short of it is that the font, like the printout before it is largely (at least for me) not particularly useful. Again there are only so many fonts that are acceptable to do editing with in my opinion and the vast majority of them (or fonts with minor differences to them) are used in various editors that I’ve already use or use on a daily basis (either for doing technical documentation or general writing) so simply changing font didn’t break me out of the mentality of it being just something I wrote. I think Font and Printout might have more of an impact if they are used simultaneously but in my brief attempts I didn’t find them that big of a change, and certainly not enough of a change to give me any real perspective over the writing I had done.
Sorry for another woefully short report on these Experiment in Perspective, but I feel I don’t have much to report on all things considered. This might not be the case for everyone else, I’m sure plenty of people find a font change or a printout a big enough change to create some disconnection from their work, but alas, not myself.