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

[darkrose]

And I think you do it well. But I'm lazy. *g*

I've also learned that the more worldbuilding I have to do, the less actual writing I get done. For our vampire epic, I've done intensive research on Imperial Rome, the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, Tudor England, and the Jacobites; a good chunk of the UCD collection on Jewish history in the first century CE is in my apartment....and we've written maybe 5% of the overall arc.

[elysium_fic]

Yeah, that would be pretty daunting for me too, I imagine.

[darkrose]

And see, the problem is that we don't have to do all of that! But because we're both history geeks who enjoy worldbuilding, we get so focused on the research that the reason we're doing it gets lost. We did what was supposed to be a one-off, porny wingfic once. We ended up using the worldbuilding as entertainment during our cross-country trip, figuring out the global implications of 10% of humans being born with working wings--including the logistics of the Winter Olympics for wingfolk.

If DA were my universe, Origins still wouldn't be out, because I'd be trying desperately to plug all of the canon holes and running out of fingers. Since it's not mine, I can say, "Eh, since it's not mentioned in canon, I'm going to handwave that."