prisoner_24601: Dragon Age (Default)
prisoner_24601 ([personal profile] prisoner_24601) wrote in [community profile] peopleofthedas2010-12-17 12:40 pm

Rule 17 Writing Question

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!
aroihkin: (DA - Zevran - S&S Possession)

Forgot this part:

[personal profile] aroihkin 2010-12-18 08:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Also, I cut stuff all the time. Sentences, paragraphs, pages, whole chapters... I can get pretty brutal with the knife sometimes. "Scarlet Switch" (the S&S story where Zevran doms Tannu for the first time) had about a page get ripped out of it around the part where Tannu gets the leather wrapped around his neck while he's kneeling on the floor. The complete rewrite of that part was thirty billion times better.

I don't tend to pare out individual words, and I write however I write. I'm 100% self-taught, so... yeah. \o.o/