Welcome to My Writing Toolkit, where I share an example of my efforts to strengthen and galvanize my writing, including real samples of my own rough drafts – both before and after!
These adventures, for the foreseeable future, are largely intended to improve the quality of my prose rather than focus on big-picture, structural issues. But why do this on a rough draft, when some of this may change or vanish altogether in future drafts? Why not just wait until later?
Three reasons!
In the process of writing a novel, there's a lot of excitement (and dread) around getting to the editing stage, but not every writer realizes there's potentially another stage along the way: rewriting.
While not every novel needs a full rewrite, many do, especially earlier on in a writer's career or when they're venturing down a new creative path.
So what exactly does this process involve, and how do you know whether to embark on rewriting a story?
G'day, chickadees! I'm so excited to welcome Abria Mattina to our cozy corner of the internet. Let's pull up a chair and see what she has to say about cutting the fluff from our writing, shall we?
Writing fluffy prose is a lot like wandering around an empty parking lot at 3 a.m. It’s pointless and often makes you feel stuck. It’s unnecessary padding; an authorial whim that adds words without adding value to the reader’s experience of the story. Fluff must die.