Editing

The more I learn about craft, the easier it becomes to write the first draft. You tend to avoid certain bad habits that riddled your first works. So - what do I do with my old manuscripts? The stories are still great and I love the characters, but oh, my - the writing needs a lot of help. Time to rewrite, edit and polish. Yep, it's way easier to write fresh once you've learned the craft than it is to polish an existing first piece.

But - I'm hard-headed. I'm in the process of polishing/rewriting four early works. It's going fine, but it's so easy to miss things once you've written them down. Your eye just skips over those bad prose, cliche phrases and typos.

So - I'm now reading the work aloud, hoping this will help me catch those pesky items. I've probably read the work at least twenty times, because I want this work to be the best I can produce. That's part of my job as an author. Even then, my editor will catch all of the things I missed and for that, I'm eternally grateful.

Now - off to read some more.