Revision

Removing What’s Not Story

Content, Craft, Revision

I’ve just cut fifty pages from a polished, 400-page draft—that’s one-eighth of what I’d considered a completed book.  What was in those pages?  A few scenes that slowed down the plot, a lot of unnecessary dialogue, whole paragraphs of exposition, and hundreds of extraneous words extracted from too-long sentences.  Everything I cut was not my […]

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Sifting

Revision

My daughter, who is almost a year-and-a-half, has discovered the joys of sifting sand.  She shovels it into the colander and watches, fascinated, as it streams through, leaving behind the pebbles which she promptly puts in her mouth. After completing a draft, a writer’s task is to construct a new colander, a tool strong enough

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