Rule 17 Writing Question

[prisoner_24601]

Since I'm always curious about other people's creative process and how they write, I thought I'd ask the other fic writers on this community how much editing and trimming do you do to your work? Do you edit and trim at all? Write a first draft and then are finished? How much of your stuff ends up on the figurative cutting room floor? I'm wondering if other writers love to edit and pick at stuff the way I do or if they have an entirely different way of writing.

I know that for me, I'm a huge fan of Strunk & White's Rule 17 (Omit needless words) and that most of the time, I tend to do as much work editing, trimming and cutting my fics as I do on the actual first draft. And I've definitely had stories where my betas (or myself) have chopped huge parts out and trimmed the dialogue, etc... to pick up the pacing and the rhythm of the fic, and always my stories seem better for it.

So tell me your creative process because I'd love to know!

Comments

[nithu]

It's strange, I can remember quite clearly being taught about speech punctuation in junior school, I just can't remember the detail. My 'comma muscle memory' is getting better and I do understand why most are necessary (or not, or should be semi-colons), but I can never remember all the technical explanations. As far as grammar goes, my limit is remembering what verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns are.

It's not just grammar, when I learn something, I'm shockingly bad at remembering all the proper explanations of why something is done as it is, I just sort of remember the 'sense' of it. It was the same with programming.