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.
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:
Zoetic Words 