Writing projects; the editing stage

Writing projects: the editing stage

My sister was working in the garden yesterday, giving the roses a first hair cut. Then in a month or so she’ll go round again and do some more tidying up. My approach to editing text is something similar. It’s not until you do the first prune that you begin to see the shape of the text then you can make those final tweaks.

As someone who writes to deadlines for clients, it’s become automatic to me to approach projects in a certain way.

But when I first started, I used to get hung up about starting them, powering through them and finishing them on time.

Obviously I’d learned so much from my writing tutors but I think each writer has to develop their own style. I know that one of my writing colleagues functions best when the clock is ticking – not hours but minutes away from the deadline.

That doesn’t work for me. I like to take a chunk of time and allocate it to as I call it, ‘break the back of the project’. I prefer to know that a large part of the project is done with and I have the luxury of some extra time, even if it’s only half an hour, to go back and do that final pruning.

One of the hardest things I had to teach myself as a professional writer was to be my own editor. The more text there is the greater the danger that you become bogged down in fancy phrases and too many favourite words.

That’s where you have to be ruthless in order to bring out the best of the text.