Write On! Roundup #1

Your writing and publishing questions, my humble replies

Hello everybody,

Welcome to our very first Write On! Roundup. This is your place to air your writing questions and receive my humble— and hopefully experienced — opinion in reply.

We’re just getting started, but I have a few requests in the hopper, so let’s dive in [to be safe, I’ve made these questions anonymous to get us going, but if you’d like me to acknowledge you, please say so when you send your questions in future!].

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1. Can you give an example of some of your original writing, and then parse how you rewrote it to show your creative editing rewrite process?

This is a great question, but I’ll defer to the master craftsman Janet Burroway for the answer. Her book Writing Fiction provides examples of the revision process that will be useful to fiction and nonfiction writers alike:

She also lists some critical questions to ask yourself as you revise:

• What is my story about?

• Are there irrelevant scenes/sections/details?

• Why should the reader turn the page?