July 9, 2019

​So, as posted on my social page, I’ve finished the very first raw edit of Girlie and now doing the second edit the good old way before I can claim to have a full first draft of the novel for my beta readers. Funny what the mind-eye sees when print is on paper as opposed to text on screen. Maybe it’s entrenched skill from 40 years English teaching, or 30 years writing editing, or maybe it is an essential part of the process - but it is definitely effective.

This part of the edit is around ‘best words’, sentence and paragraph structures, reducing overwriting and paring back in general. For those curious, it includes taking a piece like:
‘When the children finally made it home...’ and rewriting as ‘When the children arrived home...’ - arrived replacing three words. That’s a simple example of what this step in the process involves.
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This is a long, essential step in writing. It often results in less words, but tighter writing.