LDWriter2 wrote:Not sure if this is kosher but if anyone wants to read something I have done. I have a story in three parts on my blog and started a new serial story today. Both are old stories that I freshly revised. Had to do a lot of work on them and even though, since they are revisions, they might not be my best writing, yet they would give you an idea of how I write.
They are listed on the blog thread.
One suggestion to add to your editing process, seek to remove works like "looked", "saw","turned around","felt","heard","thought", etc.
These words often show up in first drafts because we, as writers, are looking at our scene and describing what we see, but in the finished product we need to meld what we see with what our POV characters experience. Characters do not think "I am looking now","I am listening now","I am thinking now", they just experience the result of these reflexive actions. So if your character is looking at a spaceship, just describe the spaceship. The reader will intuitively understand that the character is looking at it. If your character has to turn her head to look at something else, again this is reflexive and the reader implicitly understands that this occurred, so it can be safely cut.
When you cut these words you get two main benefits, faster pacing and a closer connection between POV character and reader. But this doesn't happen by accident as it won't come out this way in the first draft, at least not consistently. I usually spend a complete editing pass just on this.
