Editing Your Writing

Once you have your story written down in crude form, the next thing to do is to organise it so that the reader can follow it in a more or less logical fashion.

The best tool for this, and one which should always be utilised, is the creation of a single simple sentence that encapsulates your story. This story is about…….This sentence is your guiding light. Refer to it throughout the editing process. If you can’t tell whether a sentence or paragraph is important, refer to your guiding light description sentence.

There are always exceptions, but generally, put together all the sentences, paragraphs, etc. relating to a particular aspect of your story, together.

It’s like building a house. You don’t put parts of the roof with the floor, or parts of the wall with the foundations. Foundations go with foundations, walls with walls, and roofing components with roofing components. Do the same thing with your story.

You will get better at this the more often you do it, so don’t worry if it seems like a jumble now. Just put all pieces relating to each other together and organise each section, one behind the other in what seems to you to be a reasonable order. At this stage, all you’re looking for is flow…does each section of your story follow naturally from one to the other?

What we’re looking for when we look for flow is a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are not yet looking for a finely edited piece of work. More than the writing itself, we’re looking for the ideas to flow and follow naturally, and to start somewhere and end somewhere in a logical progression. This is the structure.

So what we now have is the following: A sentence which describes our story, and a collection of sentences, paragraphs, and/or sections which follow on from one another in a logical sequence and which relate to our headline sentence.

From here we look at how each section actually links to the next one.