The Magic Happens in Editing
8 tips to clean up your dirty first draft before you publish
There’s a coffee mug I bought last year inscribed with the words, “Write drunk; Edit sober.”
And that pretty much sums up the best advice out there when it comes to getting your pieces ready for publication. The quote “Write dunk; Edit sober,” is often attributed to Hemingway, but regardless of who actually said it first, the point is valid.
When you write a post for publication, your job is to forget every piece of advice you’ve ever learned about writing. That includes the grammar rules you memorized in middle school; the myriad posts you’ve read on how to blog; and every piece of unsolicited writing feedback you’ve endured.
To get the ideas from your head onto the page, you must clear your mind of the do’s, don’ts and how to’s and simply start writing.
Tell your know-it-all inner critic to shut up for a few minutes so you can get the draft finished.
Writing with abandon is step one: The Easy Step.
Step Two, the editing step, is when your real work begins.
Editing is the process of reviewing every word, questioning every comma, and brutally cutting all the superfluous phrases.
