3 Comments

lemming

editing can be a pain, but when it goes well, ends well... there are moments in reading even your own material that can be fundamentally amazing.

Alexy

I'm a professional editor. It's hard work, no way around it. Giving yourself some time, some distance, which it sounds like you've done, is a good start. I write scripts, which is pretty different from novels, but the main question i always keep in mind is, "does this thing (sentence, line of dialog, paragraph, whatever) advance the story?"

thoreaubred

"A first draft is a work of construction; the seventh one is the work of an artist." --Barbara Kingsolver. I don't know if you've read Prodigal Summer, but it's one of the most perfectly crafted novels I've ever read. The level of control and mastery of the craft that she shows in that novel, at least in my opinion, is astonishing. But to think that it might have taken her seven drafts to do it. I wonder what the first draft looked like.