Everybody Writes, 2nd Edition



9Draft 2: Cross Out the Wrong Words

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

—Mark Twain

Here's where we start to make TUFD less U.

Take TUFD from yesterday.

Read it through your head. Feel it in your hands.

Start to help it become a better version of itself.

Revisiting a first draft to rework and rewrite it doesn't sound like much fun, does it? It sounds like drudgery. Tedium. Like alphabetizing canned goods.

But it's not really, because there's a kind of freedom in it.

You've already done the hard part of setting down the words. Now comes the easier (and less anxiety-inducing) part of distilling the text's essence—or, crossing out the wrong words and the unnecessary words, and subbing in better ones.

Revising is my favorite part of writing—because it's when we start to have some fun. To me, the first draft feels more like pure ball-and-chain hard work. The editing is where we get to make some merry.

I'm not talking here about having someone else edit your work, by the way. That comes later.

First, you need to take a first pass at editing and shaping your own work.

There are two approaches to self-editing:

1. Developmental editing, which I call editing by chainsaw. It's where you look at the big picture.
2. Line editing, which I call editing by surgical tools. It's where you look at paragraph and sentence flow, word choice, usage, and so on.

I like to use both on the same piece: first, one … and then, the other. ...