“Overnight success is almost always a myth. Half of this industry is luck, and half is the refusal to quit,” Victoria Schwab.
I’m currently working on first edits of a WIP I finished writing last year. I’m also drafting a new book as I always want to be working on something new. While I’ve heard that you should read through the first draft of a WIP without revising, I can’t help but notice the little things that need to be fixed. Right now, I’m reading it on paper. I went to Office Max and had it printed and bound so it would feel like a manuscript.
Going through the draft on paper has helped me see mistakes that would normally be missed digitally. I highly recommend reading a draft of your work on paper. It helps immensely. The biggest things I’ve noticed so far in my writing is the amount of times I have the characters look at something. So, any phrase or sentence that has gaze, eyes, look or search, I’m trying to rewrite so it is not as repetitive. I will leave one of those words in if it works for the sentence, but the goal is to reduce the amount of times they are used.
Something else I noticed this last week when working on my writing is the rhythm of the sentences themselves. I found in my first drafts I underwrite, so the sentences sometimes feel monotone. The sentence lengths need variety, like in music. An exercise I recently tried was writing to my favorite band, Phish. I paid attention to the rhythm of the music and attempted to match the rhythm of the music to the sentence structure in my writing.
It was a very cool writing experience and I easily got into the creative flow. Doing this writing exercise helped me get super excited about the plot, characters and setting all over again. I noticed it did help vary the rhythm of my sentences. It was a different way to think about writing and it’s something I’ll probably do again.
Do you have a writing routine, or something you do while writing that is unique?
List of crutch words I’m deleting from my manuscript:
Gaze
Eyes
Look
Search
Just
Only
Fascinating
Snake
Felt like (trying to make this more active and descriptive)
Happy writing!