Writing Tip of the Week
Writing Tip of the Week
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Mark Your Calendars: Desert Foothills Book Festival Oct. 21st, 2023
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Son of Writing Crappy First Drafts
Last week I wrote, “Some so-called experts on writing advise writing a “crappy” first draft.?They actually encourage poor craftsmanship because you can “clean up the ‘mess’ in revisions.”
Writers hear that advice often. Translated, it means throw out everything you’ve ever learned about the craft of writing, your entire 12 – 16 years of education in the English language, your commitment to excellence, the drive to succeed, and what your mama told you and replace it all with crap.
As an often-quoted friend of mine used to say, why is that a good idea?
It’s my belief that a competent writer cannot write a sloppy draft unless he commits himself and directs his attention to said crap. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize you know too much to do that. You have to work at screwing it up. Why would someone bang out a bunch of crap when with the same effort he could produce quality work? I don’t get it.
How much “fix it in the rewrite” mentality a writer adopts is a personal matter. Personally, I rewrite only to editorial supervision and then only if I agree with the editor. My process is to write a good first draft. Before writing Chapter Two, I read over Chapter One and clean up any problems such as typos or factual errors and then I move on. I repeat that simple process chapter by chapter. When I write “And then she woke up; it had all been a dream,” I type The End and send the piece off to my editor so I can write “It was a dark and stormy night” and begin the next novel. There’s no mess to clean up because I don’t leave a mess in the first place.
You may not believe it, but neither do you.
领英推荐
My advice?
The next time you start writing – cut the crap.
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Quote of the Week: ?Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” Mark Twain
Recommended Reading: The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law
Shameless Self-Promotion:
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? Dan Baldwin 2023
"The author is a live human being. I do ?not include content generated by AI (Artificial Intelligence) software of any kind."??