‘So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads’ – Dr Seuss
‘Rereading reveals rubbish and redundancy’ – Duane Alan Hahn
‘What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure’ – Samuel Johnson
Editing is one of the most difficult tasks a writer must do. Good writers will often spend more time rewriting than they do writing. Irish children’s author Sarah Webb has this to say:
‘I was asked recently how long it took me to write a book. A quarter of my time is spent writing, three- quarters rewriting is the honest answer. I do several rewrites before it goes to my editor and several more after that. Six/seven/eight rewrites in total or sometimes more, depending on the book.’
Practise writing short, concise sentences by limiting the number of words or characters you can use. A great way to do this is to use the Twitter model (currently 140 characters or less).
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WRITE
Pick one of the pieces you read in this collection (a poem, novel extract, drama, film, documentary, etc.) and write a short paragraph explaining how you would edit it to make it better/more enjoyable for a reader.
D
180 FIRE AND ICE 2
A ‘character’ in Twitter includes punctuation and spaces!
