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

[niniane]

Yeah. With TV, I can understand. You need 22 minutes. Advertisers need their time, it must fit in the slot, fine.

That same attitude for writing drives me crazy, though. Like...honestly, I'd pay the same for a novella as a novel (or maybe slightly less, whatever). And I'd prefer it to the awful filler that you can see some authors using.

I can see, though, why no one would want to risk having to publish multiple novels by an unknown author. (Which is kind of what publishing a 300K word fic would be, as you'd need at least 2 books to cover that many words). That said, well known authors can get away with it as they can sell series. Although even then, they need to keep their story arcs in a novel sized range...

Then again, from what I've been told, new authors are almost never published in anything other than the short story format. Which is kind of sad. *sigh* Makes me think that I ought to work on my 1.5-5K word fic...