And some writing days are about cutting words instead of adding them…

Part of the challenge here is to keep everyone focused on writing and meeting writing goals. I got a reminder this week that sometimes the words need to be down paper before you can figure out if you’ve written your book/manuscript correctly. See, my editor called and asked me to re-send a copy of my November release, HOT AS HELL (Brava), via email so it could go to the copyeditor. Rather than just hit send, I read through my precious one more time. After all, I’d written a single title and novella since I turned this one in.

[Can you see where this is going?]

In reading, I discovered I didn’t accomplished what I wanted to in the last third of the book. It was fine and probably the best last third of the book I could write months ago when I wrote it. But I could write a better last third of the book today. Having stepped away for a couple of months, I could see where I went off-track. I knew without my editor telling me that the book needed an overhaul if I wanted it to be the best it could be (and I did want that). So I re-wrote 110 pages from scratch. Started Sunday night and finished this morning. [An exhausting process I don’t recommend.] The net result is the book is two pages shorter, but it’s 100% better. Less is more in this case.

Some days taking deleting words (maybe even re-starting) is the answer. The trick is not to get caught up with revising and re-writing the same words over and over again. Keep perspective and your eye on the end goal. You want the words on paper and you want them to be the best words you can do, but sometimes you can’t see what works best until it’s all out there available for you to review and edit.

Write then revise. It’s a good mantra.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under HelenKay Dimon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.