When you first write words on paper, you're going as fast as you can to ensure you get as much as possible from your brain on to the paper before the words go into that vast realm of netherland where they'll never be retrieved again, which is about five seconds after you start writing. Once you've filled the page with everything you can remember, you go back and review what you wrote.
Ugh!, you say. All right. At that point, you either scratch through the whole thing because it doesn't even come close to relaying what you had in mind, or you start tweaking it. You change the first two words; insert a word, or two or three, on the next line; cross out the third line entirely and write its replacement in the margin vertical to your paragraph; the fourth and fifth lines you reverse for more impact; and so it goes until you now have two paragraphs sitting on top of each other. True, that's not bad if you're like me and have a supply of colored pens or pencils nearby which you use for editing. (Trust me, it's a life saver.)
Some people hate editing. I, on the other hand, can't stop editing. Editing is in my blood. It's what I'm good at. But as they say, after a time, you no longer see the mistakes of your own writing because you start seeing and reading what you know is supposed to be there instead of reading what's printed on the page.
So, for me, I do the best I can. I write. I edit. I rewrite. I edit again. Write. And edit once more. And hope the final product is as great as I can get it.
I had another goal in mind when writing this particular post today. One agent's advice was to lose those words that end in -ly. I caught myself wanting to write -ly words almost six times during this post. You be the judge. Did I miss any?
Let me know. I'll revise it.
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