(Photo by Nic’s events )

I have resisted editing any of my Nanowrimo works. I have only touched one of my drafts and that was only to remove all over-writing and find the story. I ended up with a draft a third of the size. Feeling dejected, I have touched that one since, either.

I have resisted editing because I don’t know what I’m doing. I never knew which sections were good to keep and added to the story, and which sections were bloat and waffle, and ruined the story.

I now feel competent enough to wade through over 250k words of my Nano drafts and find the true plot, dump the rest and wade through (again) to editing end.

For my latest story, After the Fire (working title), I’m going to be methodically working through each section of the story and making big structural edits. I’ll be documenting the entire process here, showing my writing, and discussing (probably with myself) about the things which work and don’t work. I’ll also be showing my rewritten sections, should anyone want to read them.

I’m not doing this, because I want to find readers (though that would be nice), I’m doing it because I know ruthlessly analysing my writing in public (public = zero website traffic), will force me to keep going, make better, audience/market related, decisions, and get over myself that my writing is too precious/crap for people to read yet.

There should be a dedicated ‘writers-anxiety’ term in psychiatry, btw.

So, join me, or don’t. I’ll be writing everything under the #editingATF hashtag so you can find all my notes there (twitter) and here.

The first thing I need to address is: what the hell have I written? (I’ve not written that blog post yet)

Mark 🙂