Line editing. By the time you get to it, you’ve probably already read through your draft at least a million times, if not a billion. We all know that the millionth time you do anything, whether it’s drive to work or wash the dishes or kiss your spouse goodbye, you probably […]
101 TIWIK
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Okay, you’ve tortured your original draft through countless rewrites and endless revisions. You’ve finally produced a work of art, a complete story that you can be certain is solid from beginning to end. Finished, right? Hand it to the copy editor and it’s done? Wrong. There’s a very important step […]
Rewriting was about pounding and shaping the clay. Now you are making finer shaping motions with the tips of your fingers. Here are some of the strategies I have developed over the years to make revision less scary, more effective, and dare I say, more fun. Don’t Start Rewriting For years […]
Okay, you have the shape of your story down on the page, you know it’s time to revise, maybe you’ve even gotten some feedback already from peer readers. What next? Now it’s time to read through your draft and take notes, asking yourself questions about plot, character, setting and theme as […]
Hi there, welcome back to 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book! It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, but I’m back in the saddle now, and ready to move on to the revision stage of writing. Just a quick recap before I dive in: We’re […]
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 […]