"Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from id." Vera Farmiga

Being in the final editing phase of my book, I'm realizing how much fun it is. It's fun to read the book allo the way through and make subtle edits along the way. How I write, I try and do so clean the first time, so I don't have many edits to go back through on the final edit. I typically edit as I go, counting as my first round pass. Then, I do one last round of edits.

Edits shouldn't be that thing that we as writers look at with disdane. It's something that we can get the overall picture of our writing, and see the story in its entirety. I look back, and go over certain sentences thinking 'wow, I wrote that?' and it is fun to see where my head was at the time of writing scenes.

For those of you who dispise editing, I suggest you try and edit as you write. You will write slower, but in the long run, for editing purposes, it makes your movement of the overall story that much quicker. As far as writing the story, it all depends if you write by the seat of your pants, or if you are a plotter. Personally, I'm between both.

I typically mull over a story for a month or two before I even do any writing. I get the overall story mapped out in my head, and then I write one sentence scenes, and build my book around them. So, for example, one of my scenes in my published novel was that my hero got poisoned, so I wrote "poisoning" for my one sentence scene. I knew in my mind where I wanted to go with it, and wrote the scene around the one word. I do this for the whole book. I write the one word, phrase, or sentence scene, and build around it. I have the ability to do this because I've spent a month or so mulling over the story in my mind and I know where I want to go. By doing this, I can write a book, including edits as I go, within a month, and depending on the time I have, maybe two.

I challenge you, as a writer, to try writing like this. It may or may not work for you, but if it does, it will change your writing. You always stay on point, and never drift off when writing your manuscript.

Happy writing!

Erin Pryor