Ditching the junk

Lurking in your work are likely flashes of truth and beauty. Odds are good that they're buried under a load of junk. Your junk.

If you lack faith in your readers, you do a lot of explaining to them. This would make sense if you were teaching grade 9 English, but you're not.

If you lack faith in your ideas, you repeat them. Again and again. Over and over. See how annoying that is?

The antidotes for this faithlessness will be personal. Good editing requires detachment. There are a few tricks that can help (which I'll share next post). But there is one pre-requisite before any of these will work, and that's time.

You can't edit something you just wrote. You can and should proof-read it, but that's not editing. Your only hope of seeing your work as others see it is to put it in a drawer and forget about it.

For how long? Here's a rule of thumb: One month for short stories, 2 for one-act plays, 6 for longer plays, and a year for a novel.

A year.

Why?

In a year you will become a slightly different person. And you need those new eyes to show you what your old self couldn't see. Because your new self will see the junk covering up whatever your old self wanted to say.