One of my biggest issues with rewriting has been a tendency to want to change everything in order to solve the problems with the draft, rather than changing the specific thing that is wrong with it in the most simple, direct manner possible. I believe the colloquial term for this is “throwing […]
Yearly Archives: 2014
74 posts
By now you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about planning, but assessing a rewrite is a lot more effective if you have a plan. I say effective rather than “easy” because it’s still a lot of hard work. If you are working off a plan, once you have a […]
For some writers, a first draft is like a block clay, a pile of words ready to be punched into shape. For others, it is like a nearly finished sculpture, needing only a bit of fine-tuning and polishing. And then there are a spectrum of drafts in between these two […]
This is what I’m facing in Book II edits right now. So. Many. Stickies. The good news is most of it is small stuff, quick and easy to fix. This is actually the compiled feedback from three different readers and some of my own notes. Which brings me to the […]
Steve Almond says in his tiny and perfect book This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey (I SO highly recommend this book, buy it here): “Writing is decision making, nothing more, nothing less.” Rather than agonize over every decision to the point of freezing up your writing or being so cavalier about […]
Drafting. It’s the epitome of writing, the thing we all imagine when we picture writers working away at the typewriter. At its best, all of the writer’s knowledge comes together into an experience resembling a flow sport. At its worst, the words plop out one at a time, agonizingly slow, with […]