BROADCASTS.com

Style, for example, is not\u2014can never be\u2014extraneous Ornament\u2026. [I]f you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: \u2018Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it\u2014whole-heartedly\u2014and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.\u2019 (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in the 1916 book On the Art of Writing)\nWriting\xa0Needs Revision\nWhen I taught composition and creative writing to high school students, many of them felt that the first draft they spit out was enough. Boom. Done.\n\nThey did not want to go back and revise. But writing needs revision. So they learned in my class that writing is a process.\n\nNow, it\u2019s true that they had, at that point of arriving at a first draft, successfully worked their way through several stages of writing\u2014from pre-writing and development stages\xa0to the first draft.\n\nBut they weren\u2019t done yet.\n\nNo, they needed to go through editing, revision, proofreading and peer review stages\u2014which might lead to more revision and proofreading\u2014before ever submitting their project to me.\n\nThat\u2019s how it worked in Mrs. Kroeker\u2019s writing class.\n\nBecause that\u2019s how it works in the real world. I wanted to train them to take a second, third, and fourth look at their writing.\n\nI can\u2019t remember the last time something I wrote came out perfectly the first time. Probably never. I fiddle with emails and Facebook updates, so you\u2019d better believe I fiddle with my writing projects.\n\nI want them to be the best they can be for any editor or agent\u2014and eventually, of course, the reader. So I revise. I expand in some places\xa0and murder my darlings in other places.\n\nAnd at various stages, I get input from others, because an objective set of eyes is like gold to a writer. We get so close to our projects we stop thinking or seeing clearly. We miss glaring errors and tiny blips. We think it flows, but our first readers find it choppy or confusing.\nDon Your Editor Hat\nBefore I pull in others, I start with my own eyes. I can edit as I go a little bit, but toward the end, I actually don my editor hat\u2014I don\u2019t literally don a hat, but I could if I wanted to. I have a nice Maxwell Perkins-ish fedora on hand, should I need to fully focus on editing.\n\nWhen we wear this figurative\u2014or literal\u2014hat, we start reading more critically. We look for hot spots and trouble zones. We read to discover how well a section flows or how believable our characters are. We address the glaring errors and try to spot and fix the tiny blips.\nReform Your Work\nAlice LaPlante in her book The Making of a Story\xa0(affiliate link) quotes Raymond Carver:\nIt doesn\u2019t take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I\u2019ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts.\nLaPlante herself goes on to say, \u201cFirst drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it.\u201d\n\nDon\u2019t be afraid to go back into your work and reform it\u2014to\xa0revise it.\n\nThe word \u201crevision" comes from Latin, meaning to \u201csee again.\u201d When we stick the editor hat on, we\u2019re trying to maintain an objective eye and see our work afresh.\nTry This to See Again\nStep away from your project for a while\u2014as long as you can manage.\n\nCome back to it and read it aloud.\n\nFlag any spots where you stumble over a word or have to re-read a sentence. Maybe you stop or pause because you didn\u2019t include appropriate punctuation.\n\nIf you realize a scene doesn\u2019t seem clear or a character\u2019s dialogue feels unrealistic or a point in your essay is underdeveloped, look at it again. Can you expand your point with a story or statistic? Could you swap in a simpler word for the one that tripped your tongue?\nDoes It Sound Like Writing?\nIn the April 22, 1985 issue of Newsweek, Elmore Leonard said,