When I can’t understand something important, I search, I research and I write. I write and write everything I know, everything I feel until clarity comes. Sometimes I don’t completely understand until my story is told. Sometimes I don’t understand the details even then.
What is a draft if not telling yourself the story. Rewriting and editing are for clarifying it all first in the mind of the writer so that the reader may ask the right questions to find their own answers.
The best stories take reality, cut the BS, give a reader every viewpoint required for clarity and leave them to decide for themselves what to do with what they learn.
Build on the bare bones of your structure. Make your story whole. Tell it in all its complex twists and turns.
Edit anything which clouds your story. Cut the irrelevant, the redundant, any repetition. Polish your baby until the light at its heart shines clear. Clarity above all.
As a reader, I want to escape into a story and don’t want to return until I absolutely must. This kind of escapism is not unusual. Life is not ideal. We can’t always afford to take ourselves away from the life we have. Books and movies give us a more affordable way to live a different life, if only for a few hours. When we escape like this, the last thing we want is to be dropped out of our fantasy world and brought back to reality with a thump.
When editing, my job is to look for things which will drop a reader out of the story. Some of these can be:
These and others are dangerous to the career of the writer because once a reader is ‘dumped’ out of the story, they might:
How can you write ‘words like X-rays’? Readers like to live the emotion of the story. How do you show the emotion so the reader is pierced? Feel the emotion yourself and it will shine through in your writing.
Keep some kind of conflict in each scene, Put yourself in the part of the character, act out the part, sink deep into the role and draw that emotion onto the page and show, don’t tell. How you ask? It’s easy to tell. Just tell it like it is.
I was angry. Furious. How dare she call my beautiful little girl a fat pig? She’s a gorgeous six-year-old without body image problems. Did the woman, who does have an eating disorder herself, not care about the damage she might cause?
Yes, as a reader you may be enraged by the situation. However, did you feel the rage in your body? How might that feel? What do you think about something like this:
My hand fisted at my side, ready to punch the mouth that said such a cruel thing to my beautiful daughter. A red tide of rage rose across my chest, up my throat across my cheeks and wavered before my eyes. I ground my teeth in an effort to hold my tongue, to stop myself giving her a piece of my mind before I took time to think through my response.
‘May I please speak with you privately?’ The softest voice I could muster shook as I restrained myself from adding a curse word or five in front of the children.
Zoetic Words 