Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Writing and editing crap

Since my last post I have edited 117 pages and taken out more than 24,000 words. I'm taking my time with this second draft, wanting to make it better. I told a family member the other day that writing is all about crap. Here's the exact words I used:

Writing is all a bunch of crap because you write a first draft, which turns out to be crap. Then you edit that crap into new crap, when you reread that crap you edit more new crap until it's less crappy... on and on it goes until you no longer feel the urge to hit that delete button.

If you're a Pantser like me, then you probably fight the urge to delete everything during the first read-through. My finger gets trigger happy, but I find it helps to keep all my deleted words in another document that way if I delete something important or end up cutting out the heart I still have it and can access it with ease.

What are some of your editing tricks or advice?

Until next time, I hope you find joy in your writing!