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by S. E. Ward The first rule of writing is, of course, write, write, write. Then write some more. Then get yourself checked for carpal tunnel syndrome, adjust your chair like your doctor told you, and get back to writing. The second rule is re-write. Only, not really. When I was making my first real push to sell a novel, I got a lot of feedback saying, "Good, but this needs to be re-written." Well, that was complete and utter bollocks. I'd re-written it thirty times! I'd re-written grammar, re-written typos, re-written and expanded on at least a dozen things that felt thinner than they should have been, but the fools (and obvious amateurs) reading my work still said I needed to re-write. Eventually, it dawned on me (cue bricks) that my readers didn't want me to re-write the fool thing. They wanted me to edit it. Edit: to revise or correct. From Latin, ex, meaning "out" or "from," and dare, meaning "to give." In other words, editing is the act of bringing something out. Then there's the Latin word edo, which means "to eat." Etymologically, they're unrelated. However, rather than bringing out the story, I prefer to think of editing as eating: swallowing not only your pride, which is the third rule of writing, but eating the mistakes that you made, leaving only the clean dinner plate of a finished story. (So I like cheesy metaphors. Shut up.) On some excellent advice from good friends and good professionals, I applied this epiphany to a 300,000 word doorstop. First, I cut it in two, which eventually expanded my trilogy to a pentalogy. Then I went through and, with regards to every scene, every paragraph, and every character, asked myself, "Does this help move the story along?" If the answer was no, or if there was any degree of rationalisation on the matter, I cut it. If it doesn't benefit the story in some concrete and irreplaceable way, it's not meant to be there. Some people prefer to edit in hard copy. I do mine on the computer, mostly because MS Word allows me to put legible comments in the margins (as opposed to illegible ones--my handwriting would do the AMA proud). If I'm stuck, I might work in hard copy, but that usually means I need to scrap the scene and re-do it from scratch. Just go with whatever you're most comfortable with. You'll always have moments of doubt as to whether something fits of not. In those cases, get someone else's opinion. If your reader says that the story is great, but one piece in the middle is slow, then that's where you need to concentrate your first efforts. "Slow" means you've still got food on your plate. Do you want to build elaborate mesas with your mashed potatoes, or do you want to finish your dinner so you can leave the table and get on with something else? Mashed potato mesas get old after a while. Now go and clean your plate.
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